Like the Surface Studio desktop, the Laptop Studio’s odd and innovative exterior was rendered less exciting by a high price and relatively underpowered interior. Before discounts, the Laptop Studio 2 starts at around $2,400 for a basic configuration with a 13th-generation Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage—integrated graphics and a fully loaded version with 64GB of RAM, a 2TB SSD, and a GeForce RTX 4060 GPU would normally run you over $4,300.
Though experimental Surface designs like the Book and Studio rarely delivered great value for the money, they were at least unique attempts at new kinds of PCs with extra features for designers, artists, and anyone else who could benefit from a big stylus-compatible touchscreen. Microsoft’s most influential PC design remains the Surface Pro itself, one of the few tablet PC design templates to outlast the Windows 8 era. It makes sense for Microsoft (or any PC company) to play it safe with established designs, but it does make the PC industry just a little less interesting.
For most users, Windows 10 will stop receiving security updates and other official support from Microsoft on October 14, 2025, about five months from today. Until recently, Microsoft had also said that users running the Microsoft Office apps on Windows 10 would also lose support on that date, whether they were using the continually updated Microsoft 365 versions of those apps or the buy-once-own-forever versions included in Office 2021 or Office 2024.
The policy is a change from a few months ago, when Microsoft insisted that Office apps running on Windows 10 would become officially unsupported on October 14. The perpetually licensed versions of Office will be supported in accordance with Microsoft’s “Fixed Lifecycle Policy,” which guarantees support and security updates for a fixed number of years after a software product’s initial release. For Office 2021, this means Windows 10 users will get support through October of 2026; for Office 2024, this should extend to October of 2029.
While the Surface Pro and Laptop get price hikes that aren’t technically price hikes, some Surface accessories have had their prices directly increased. The Surface USB-C Travel Hub is now $120 instead of $100; the Surface Arc Mouse is now $90 instead of $80, and a handful of replacement parts are more expensive now than they were,according to recent Internet Wayback Machine snapshots. Generally, Surface Pen accessories and Surface Pro keyboard covers are the same price as they were before.
If you’re quick, you can still find the 256GB Surface devices in stock at third-party retailers. For example, Best Buy will sell you a Surface Laptop 7 with a 256GB SSD for $799, $100 less than the price of the 13-inch Surface Laptop that Microsoft just announced. We’d expect these retail listings to vanish over the next few days or weeks, and we wouldn’t expect them to come back in stock once they’re gone.
Increased import tariffs imposed by the Trump administration could explain at least some of these price increases. Though PCs and smartphones are currently exempted from the worst of them (at least for now), global supply chains and shipping costs are complex enough that they could still be increasing Microsoft’s costs indirectly. For the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, the decision to discontinue the old 256GB models also seems driven by a desire to make the new 12-inch Pro and 13-inch Laptop look like better deals than they did earlier this week. Raising the base price does help clarify the lineup; it just does so at the expense of the consumer.
The laptop has two USB-C ports on the right side, seen here, and a USB-A port and headphone jack on the left. Surface Connect is gone. For those reasons, it seems like most individual buyers would still be better off going for the 13.8-inch Surface Laptop, with the new one only really making sense for companies buying these in bulk if the 13.8-inch Surface goes up in price or if the 13-inch Surface happens to be discounted and the 13.8-inch version isn’t. The 13.8-inch Laptop is also obviously still the one you want if you want more than 16GB of RAM or 512GB of storage, or if you need more CPU and GPU speed.
The new 13-inch Laptop has most of the same basic ports as the 13.8-inch version, just arranged slightly differently. You still get a pair of USB-C ports (both supporting 10 Gbps USB 3.2 speeds, rather than USB 4), one USB-A port, and a headphone jack, but the USB-A port and headphone jack are now on the left side of the laptop. As with the 12-inch Surface Pro tablet, the Surface Connect port has been removed, so this is compatible with all existing USB-C accessories but none of the ones that use Microsoft’s proprietary connector.
An awkward refresh
Both of the new Surface devices being announced today. Credit: Microsoft
The new Surface Laptop doesn’t seem to regress on any major functional fronts—unlike the 12-inch Surface Pro, which throws out an 11-year-old keyboard fix that made the Surface Pro’s keyboard cover much more stable and laptop-like—but it’s still an odd refresh. But inflation, supply chain snarls, and the Trump administration’s rapidly changing tariff plans have made pricing and availability harder to predict than they were a few years ago.
Though PCs and smartphones are (currently) exempted from most tariffs, Microsoft did recently raise the prices of its years-old Xbox Series S and X consoles; it’s possible these new Surface devices were originally designed to be budget models but that world events kept them from being as cheap as they otherwise might have been.
The design looks pretty similar to the existing 13-inch Surface Pro overall but with some significant tweaks. The 12-inch Surface still supports the Slim Pen and other Surface styluses, but there’s now a magnet on the back of the tablet that the pen can be stuck to for storage, rather than a divot on the keyboard. The tablet still has a pair of USB-C ports, each of which supports 10 Gbps USB 3.2 speeds rather than full USB 4. But the Surface Connect port is gone, and because it’s physically smaller, the new Surface Pro isn’t compatible with any of the keyboard accessories made for past Surface Pro or Surface Go tablets.
But the biggest downgrade is a fundamental change to the tablet’s design. The 12-inch Surface Pro’s keyboard case (still a separate purchase, frustratingly) lies flat against whatever you have the tablet sitting on, whether that’s a desk, a table, or your lap. If the surface your Surface is resting on is level and stable, that’s mostly fine. If the surface is soft or uneven, like a lap or a couch, this introduces extra instability and floppiness, and your keyboard will wobble around more as you type on it.
Both of the new Surface devices being announced today. Note that the Surface Pro’s keyboard sits flat against the table, rather than folding up against the bottom of the screen. Credit: Microsoft
This is the same approach used as the first two generations of Surface Pro (and the ill-starred Surface RT), and it was also a perennial complaint about those designs from reviewers and users. In 2014, the Surface Pro 3 tweaked the keyboard design so that the top of it would fold flat against the bottom of the device’s screen, giving the keyboard some rigidity and stability that persisted no matter what it was resting on. All subsequent Surface keyboards, including those for the tiny 10.5-inch Surface Go, used the same design, until this one.
The iPad keyboard case I use—a Logitech Combo Touch Keyboard Folio with a built-in trackpad and kickstand—also uses the flop-against-the-table design, which hasn’t been the end of the world. But solving this problem was a major turning point in the evolution of the Surface Pro, and it’s frustrating to see that signature improvement undone here.
Agents using debugging tools drastically outperformed those that didn’t, but their success rate still wasn’t high enough. Credit: Microsoft Research
This approach is much more successful than relying on the models as they’re usually used, but when your best case is a 48.4 percent success rate, you’re not ready for primetime. The limitations are likely because the models don’t fully understand how to best use the tools, and because their current training data is not tailored to this use case.
“We believe this is due to the scarcity of data representing sequential decision-making behavior (e.g., debugging traces) in the current LLM training corpus,” the blog post says. “However, the significant performance improvement… validates that this is a promising research direction.”
This initial report is just the start of the efforts, the post claims. The next step is to “fine-tune an info-seeking model specialized in gathering the necessary information to resolve bugs.” If the model is large, the best move to save inference costs may be to “build a smaller info-seeking model that can provide relevant information to the larger one.”
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen outcomes that suggest some of the ambitious ideas about AI agents directly replacing developers are pretty far from reality. There have been numerous studies already showing that even though an AI tool can sometimes create an application that seems acceptable to the user for a narrow task, the models tend to produce code laden with bugs and security vulnerabilities, and they aren’t generally capable of fixing those problems.
This is an early step on the path to AI coding agents, but most researchers agree it remains likely that the best outcome is an agent that saves a human developer a substantial amount of time, not one that can do everything they can do.
Security and privacy advocates are girding themselves for another uphill battle against Recall, the AI tool rolling out in Windows 11 that will screenshot, index, and store everything a user does every three seconds.
When Recall was first introduced in May 2024, security practitioners roundly castigated it for creating a gold mine for malicious insiders, criminals, or nation-state spies if they managed to gain even brief administrative access to a Windows device. Privacy advocates warned that Recall was ripe for abuse in intimate partner violence settings. They also noted that there was nothing stopping Recall from preserving sensitive disappearing content sent through privacy-protecting messengers such as Signal.
Enshittification at a new scale
Following months of backlash, Microsoft later suspended Recall. On Thursday, the company said it was reintroducing Recall. It currently is available only to insiders with access to the Windows 11 Build 26100.3902 preview version. Over time, the feature will be rolled out more broadly. Microsoft officials wrote:
Recall (preview)saves you time by offering an entirely new way to search for things you’ve seen or done on your PC securely. With the AI capabilities of Copilot+ PCs, it’s now possible to quickly find and get back to any app, website, image, or document just by describing its content. To use Recall, you will need to opt-in to saving snapshots, which are images of your activity, and enroll in Windows Hello to confirm your presence so only you can access your snapshots. You are always in control of what snapshots are saved and can pause saving snapshots at any time. As you use your Copilot+ PC throughout the day working on documents or presentations, taking video calls, and context switching across activities, Recall will take regular snapshots and help you find things faster and easier. When you need to find or get back to something you’ve done previously, open Recall and authenticate with Windows Hello. When you’ve found what you were looking for, you can reopen the application, website, or document, or use Click to Do to act on any image or text in the snapshot you found.
Microsoft is hoping that the concessions requiring opt-in and the ability to pause Recall will help quell the collective revolt that broke out last year. It likely won’t for various reasons.
The current generative Quake II demo represents a slight advancement from Microsoft’s previous generative AI gaming model (confusingly titled “WHAM” with only one “M”) we covered in February. That earlier model, while showing progress in generating interactive gameplay footage, operated at 300×180 resolution at 10 frames per second—far below practical modern gaming standards. The new WHAMM demonstration doubles the resolution to 640×360. However, both remain well below what gamers expect from a functional video game in almost every conceivable way. It truly is an AI tech demo.
A Microsoft diagram of the WHAM system. Credit: Microsoft
For example, the technology faces substantial challenges beyond just performance metrics. Microsoft acknowledges several limitations, including poor enemy interactions, a short context length of just 0.9 seconds (meaning the system forgets objects outside its view), and unreliable numerical tracking for game elements like health values.
Which brings us to another point: A significant gap persists between the technology’s marketing portrayal and its practical applications. While industry veterans like Carmack and Sweeney view AI as another tool in the development arsenal, demonstrations like the Quake II instance may create inflated expectations about AI’s current capabilities for complete game generation.
The most realistic near-term application of generative AI technology remains as coding assistants and perhaps rapid prototyping tools for developers, rather than a drop-in replacement for traditional game development pipelines. The technology’s current limitations suggest that human developers will remain essential for creating compelling, polished game experiences for now. But given the general pace of progress, that might be small comfort for those who worry about losing jobs to AI in the near-term.
Ultimately, Sweeney says not to worry: “There’s always a fear that automation will lead companies to make the same old products while employing fewer people to do it,” Sweeney wrote in a follow-up post on X. “But competition will ultimately lead to companies producing the best work they’re capable of given the new tools, and that tends to mean more jobs.”
And Carmack closed with this: “Will there be more or less game developer jobs? That is an open question. It could go the way of farming, where labor-saving technology allow a tiny fraction of the previous workforce to satisfy everyone, or it could be like social media, where creative entrepreneurship has flourished at many different scales. Regardless, “don’t use power tools because they take people’s jobs” is not a winning strategy.”
On this day in 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded a company called Micro-Soft in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The two men had worked together before, as members of the Lakeside Programming group in the early 70s and as co-founders of a road traffic analysis company called Traf-O-Data. But Micro-Soft, later renamed to drop the hyphen and relocated to its current headquarters in Redmond, Washington, would be the company that would transform personal computing over the next five decades.
I’m not here to do a history of Microsoft, because Wikipedia already exists and because the company has already put together a gauzy 50th-anniversary retrospective site with some retro-themed wallpapers. But the anniversary did make me try to remember which Microsoft product I consciously used for the first time, the one that made me aware of the company and the work it was doing.
To get the answer, just put a decimal point in the number “50”—my first Microsoft product was MS-DOS 5.0.
Riding with DOS in the Windows era
I remember this version of MS-DOS so vividly because it was the version that we ran on our first computer. I couldn’t actually tell you what computer it was, though, not because I don’t remember it but because it was a generic yellowed hand-me-down that was prodigiously out of date, given to us by well-meaning people from our church who didn’t know enough to know how obsolete the system was.
It was a clone of the original IBM PC 5150, initially released in 1981; I believe we took ownership of it sometime in 1995 or 1996. It had an Intel 8088, two 5.25-inch floppy drives, and 500-something KB of RAM (also, if memory serves, a sac of spider eggs). But it had no hard drive inside, meaning that anything I wanted to run on or save from this computer needed to use a pile of moldering black plastic diskettes, more than a few of which were already going bad.
A new study from Columbia Journalism Review’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism finds serious accuracy issues with generative AI models used for news searches. The research tested eight AI-driven search tools equipped with live search functionality and discovered that the AI models incorrectly answered more than 60 percent of queries about news sources.
Researchers Klaudia Jaźwińska and Aisvarya Chandrasekar noted in their report that roughly 1 in 4 Americans now use AI models as alternatives to traditional search engines. This raises serious concerns about reliability, given the substantial error rate uncovered in the study.
Error rates varied notably among the tested platforms. Perplexity provided incorrect information in 37 percent of the queries tested, whereas ChatGPT Search incorrectly identified 67 percent (134 out of 200) of articles queried. Grok 3 demonstrated the highest error rate, at 94 percent.
A graph from CJR shows “confidently wrong” search results. Credit: CJR
For the tests, researchers fed direct excerpts from actual news articles to the AI models, then asked each model to identify the article’s headline, original publisher, publication date, and URL. They ran 1,600 queries across the eight different generative search tools.
The study highlighted a common trend among these AI models: rather than declining to respond when they lacked reliable information, the models frequently provided confabulations—plausible-sounding incorrect or speculative answers. The researchers emphasized that this behavior was consistent across all tested models, not limited to just one tool.
Surprisingly, premium paid versions of these AI search tools fared even worse in certain respects. Perplexity Pro ($20/month) and Grok 3’s premium service ($40/month) confidently delivered incorrect responses more often than their free counterparts. Though these premium models correctly answered a higher number of prompts, their reluctance to decline uncertain responses drove higher overall error rates.
Issues with citations and publisher control
The CJR researchers also uncovered evidence suggesting some AI tools ignored Robot Exclusion Protocol settings, which publishers use to prevent unauthorized access. For example, Perplexity’s free version correctly identified all 10 excerpts from paywalled National Geographic content, despite National Geographic explicitly disallowing Perplexity’s web crawlers.
The ultimate handheld system seller. Credit: Microsoft / Bizarre Creations
Microsoft has made a lot of hay over the way recent Xbox consoles can play games dating all the way back to the original Xbox. If Microsoft wants to set its first gaming handheld apart, it should make those old console games officially available on a Windows-based system for the first time.
The ability to download previous console games dating back to the Xbox 360 era (or beyond) would be an instant “system seller” feature for any portable Xbox. While this wouldn’t be a trivial technical lift on Microsoft’s part, the same emulation layer that powers Xbox console backward compatibility could surely be ported to Windows with a little bit of work. That process might be easier with a specific branded portable, too, since Microsoft would be working with full knowledge of what hardware was being used.
If Microsoft can give us a way to play Geometry Wars 2 on the go without having to deal with finicky third-party emulators, we’ll be eternally grateful.
Multiple hardware tiers
One size does not fit all when it comes to consoles or to handhelds.
Credit: Sam Machkovech
One size does not fit all when it comes to consoles or to handhelds. Credit: Sam Machkovech
On the console side, Microsoft’s split simultaneous release of the Xbox Series S and X showed an understanding that not everyone wants to pay more money for the most powerful possible gaming hardware. Microsoft should extend this philosophy to gaming handhelds by releasing different tiers of portable Xbox hardware for price-conscious consumers.
Raw hardware power is the most obvious differentiator that could set a more expensive tier of Xbox portables apart from any cheaper options. But Microsoft could also offer portable options that reduce the overall bulk (a la the Nintendo Switch Lite) or offer relative improvements in screen size and quality (a la the Steam Deck OLED and Switch OLED).
“Made for Xbox”
It worked for Valve, it can work for Microsoft.
Credit: Valve
It worked for Valve, it can work for Microsoft. Credit: Valve
One of the best things about console gaming is that you can be confident any game you buy for a console will “just work” with your hardware. In the world of PC gaming handhelds, Valve has tried to replicate this with the “Deck Verified” program to highlight Steam games that are guaranteed to work in a portable setting.
Microsoft is well-positioned to work with game publishers to launch a similar program for its own Xbox-branded portable. There’s real value in offering gamers assurances that “Made for Xbox” PC games will “just work” on their Xbox-branded handheld.
This kind of verification system could also help simplify and clarify hardware requirements across different tiers of portable hardware power; any handheld marketed as “level 2” could play any games marketed as level 2 or below, for instance.
A broad overview of the four stages. Credit: Microsoft
The campaign targeted “nearly” 1 million devices belonging both to individuals and a wide range of organizations and industries. The indiscriminate approach indicates the campaign was opportunistic, meaning it attempted to ensnare anyone, rather than targeting certain individuals, organizations, or industries. GitHub was the platform primarily used to host the malicious payload stages, but Discord and Dropbox were also used.
The malware located resources on the infected computer and sent them to the attacker’s c2 server. The exfiltrated data included the following browser files, which can store login cookies, passwords, browsing histories, and other sensitive data.
AppDataLocalGoogleChromeUser DataDefaultLogin Data
AppDataLocalMicrosoftEdgeUser DataDefaultLogin Data
Files stored on Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud service were also targeted. The malware also checked for the presence of cryptocurrency wallets including Ledger Live, Trezor Suite, KeepKey, BCVault, OneKey, and BitBox, “indicating potential financial data theft,” Microsoft said.
Microsoft said it suspects the sites hosting the malicious ads were streaming platforms providing unauthorized content. Two of the domains are movies7[.]net and 0123movie[.]art.
Microsoft Defender now detects the files used in the attack, and it’s likely other malware defense apps do the same. Anyone who thinks they may have been targeted can check indicators of compromise at the end of the Microsoft post. The post includes steps users can take to prevent falling prey to similar malvertising campaigns.
