So today's the day Microsoft actually started shipping the Surface Laptop 2 and the Surface Pro 6, the two things they announced at that event on October 2nd. I've been half-watching this since the announcement because my current laptop (a 2015-era Dell that wheezes when I open more than six Chrome tabs) is on its last legs, and I wanted to see what the actual reviews said once people had the hardware in hand instead of just spec sheets and marketing photos.
Base Surface Laptop 2 is $999, same as last year's model, and now comes in a matte black finish alongside the platinum, cobalt blue and burgundy options from before. Surface Pro 6 starts at $899 and also picked up the black colorway. Both got bumped to 8th-gen quad-core Intel chips, which on paper sounds like the biggest change since the original Laptop shipped in 2017 running Windows 10 S out of the box (remember that whole thing? nobody wanted a laptop locked to the Windows Store, and Microsoft quietly let you switch out of S mode within days of launch).
Here's my actual complaint, and it's not a small one: neither machine has a USB-C port. Not one. It's October of 2018. My phone charges over USB-C. My little travel speaker charges over USB-C. Half the accessories I own now assume USB-C is just what ports look like. And Microsoft's answer is still the proprietary Surface Connect port plus a single full-size USB-A and a Mini DisplayPort. I get that Surface Connect does the magnetic-charging thing and that's genuinely convenient, I'm not knocking that part. But leaving out USB-C entirely, on a laptop marketed as a premium flagship, feels like a decision made by a committee that hasn't had to travel with a bag of dongles. Apple's been shipping USB-C on MacBooks since early 2015. This isn't a bleeding-edge ask anymore.
Anyway. I didn't buy one, not yet. I'm the kind of person who reads eleven reviews before spending a thousand dollars on anything, and most of what I've seen so far says the trackpad and keyboard are still excellent (that Alcantara fabric deck on the Laptop is weirdly nice to rest your wrists on, if you haven't touched one) and battery life is decent but nothing spectacular. A few outlets are already grumbling about thermal throttling under sustained load, which tracks with cramming a quad-core chip into a fanless-ish chassis that wasn't really redesigned from the outside. That's the tradeoff you get when the case stays the same but the guts get faster.
I'll say this though: I like that Microsoft didn't touch the price. A lot of companies use a spec bump as an excuse to charge you more for the privilege of getting what should've shipped last year anyway. Keeping Surface Laptop 2 at $999 for the base config, when the base config now has double the cores of the original, is the kind of thing that actually makes we want to root for this product line, even with my dongle complaint sitting right there unresolved.
Also worth mentioning, mostly because it's eating my week: Adobe MAX is happening right now down in LA, running the 15th through the 17th, and there's a demo floating around of something called Project Gemini that's basically Photoshop running on an iPad with an Apple Pencil. I haven't seen it live, just clips people are posting, but it looks like real layered PSD editing and not some stripped-down mobile toy. If that's actually what it looks like, that's a much bigger deal long-term than a laptop refresh, honestly. A proper Photoshop on a tablet has been the "any day now" rumor for as long as I can remember writing about this stuff, going back to when the iPad Pro first showed up with a stylus and everyone assumed Adobe would ship something within the year. Took a while.
I might just wait for whatever Apple does at the end of the month before I decide on a new machine. Feels silly to buy today and then watch a new iPad Pro or a Mac mini refresh land two weeks later and second-guess myself the whole time. I've done that before. It's a bad habit.