Microsoft had its hardware event in New York today and refreshed pretty much the whole Surface line in one go: Surface Pro 6, Surface Laptop 2, and Surface Studio 2. New processors, new colors, a fresh coat of "2x faster than the last one" marketing math on the Pro. And they still didn't put a single USB-C port on any of them.
I want to be clear that I like the Surface Pro as a category of object. I've owned two. But I bought a new pair of headphones last month that charge over USB-C, my phone charges over USB-C, and the little battery pack I keep in my bag charges over USB-C, and if I buy a Surface Pro 6 today I get to keep exactly one of my three chargers relevant. The Pro 6 ships with the same Surface Connect port, one full-size USB-A, and a Mini DisplayPort, same as the 2017 model. Same chassis too, basically down to the millimeter; they just swapped the guts and, on the higher storage configs, gave you a matte black option instead of only silver. Black looks great in the promo photos, I'll give them that.
Here's what actually shipped, price-wise, since Microsoft's own page buries this under three tabs of configurator nonsense: Surface Pro 6 starts at $899 for the base i5/128GB/8GB config, no keyboard included (that's still another $130-ish for the Type Cover, which is its own annoyance I've complained about here before). Surface Laptop 2 starts at $999 and also now comes in black, alongside the platinum, burgundy, and cobalt blue from last year. Both moved to 8th-gen quad-core Intel chips, which is a real, meaningful bump from the dual-core parts in the outgoing models — that part I'm not mad about at all. Surface Studio 2 is the one that's genuinely new hardware, not just a refresh: better display, GTX 1060 or 1070 depending on config, and it starts at $3,499, which is Studio money, i.e. a lot of money.
But the USB-C thing keeps nagging at me and I don't think I'm being precious about it. This isn't 2016 anymore where USB-C accessories were a novelty tax. The 12.9" iPad Pro that came out a few weeks back has USB-C. My work laptop has USB-C. Half the portable monitors and docks being sold this fall assume you have it. Shipping a brand new, freshly-updated flagship laptop in October of 2018 with zero USB-C ports isn't a minor oversight, it's a decision, and I'd love to hear Panos Panay explain it out loud instead of just quietly not mentioning it onstage (which, from what I've read of the keynote coverage, is exactly what happened — nobody up there said the words "USB-C" once).
My dongle drawer is already a small disaster. I've got a USB-C to USB-A adapter, a USB-A to Lightning cable, a Mini DisplayPort to HDMI thing I bought for a conference room three jobs ago, and I genuinely could not tell you which one still works without testing it. Adding a device to my life that can't just plug into the same cable as everything else is exactly the kind of friction that makes me reach for my regular laptop instead, even when the Surface would otherwise be the better fit for taking notes on a plane.
None of this is going to stop the Pro 6 from selling fine. It's a good screen, a good pen, a genuinely nice piece of industrial design, and Microsoft knows its audience buys it for exactly those reasons and shrugs off the port situation. Reviewers are going to say the same thing they said about the Pro 5 (the "2017" one, which they didn't even number, which is its own weird decision): great hardware, wish it had caught up. I just think it's worth saying plainly that "caught up" here means one port, on a company that ships its own USB-C-equipped phones under the same roof. Someone at that meeting had a slide showing exactly what everyone else's laptops have, and they made the Pro 6 anyway.
I'll probably still end up recommending it to my mother-in-law who wants something light for email and Netflix, because for that job it's honestly great. But I'm not upgrading mine off the 2017 model for this. Wake me up when the ports match the rest of my bag.