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.
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.
The longest-lived Studio desktop was the Surface Studio 2, which was released in 2018 and wasn’t replaced until a revised Surface Studio 2+ was announced in late 2022. It used an even higher-quality display panel, but it still used previous-generation internal components. This might not have been so egregious if Microsoft had updated it more consistently, but this model went untouched for so long that Microsoft had to lower Windows 11’s system requirements specifically to cover the Studio 2 so that the company wouldn’t be ending support for a PC that it was still actively selling.
The Studio 2+ was the desktop’s last hurrah, and despite jumping two GPU generations and four CPU generations, it still didn’t use the latest components available at the time. Again, more consistent updates like the ones Microsoft provides for the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop could have made this less of a problem, but the Studio 2+ once again sat untouched for two years after being updated.
The Studio desktop’s unique screen and hinge endeared it to some artists, and for those users, there’s no immediately obvious replacement for this machine. But the all-in-one’s high price and its specs always made it a hard sell for anyone else. A lack of wide appeal usually leads to mediocre sales, and mediocre sales usually lead to discontinued products. So it goes.
Yes, both devices launch with Microsoft’s new Copilot key.
Microsoft
The Surface Pro 10. Looks familiar.
Microsoft
An NFC reader supports physical security keys.
Microsoft
The 13.5- and 15-inch Surface Laptop 6.
Microsoft
The 15-inch Laptop 6 can be configured with a security card reader, another business thing.
Microsoft
Microsoft is debuting major updates to two of its Surface PCs today: both the Surface Pro 10 and the 13.5- and 15-inch Surface Laptop 6 are major internal upgrades to Microsoft’s mainstream Surface devices. Both were last updated nearly a year and a half ago, and they’re both getting new Intel chips with significantly faster integrated GPUs, upgraded webcams, the Copilot key, and better battery life (according to Microsoft’s spec sheets).
The catch is that both of these Surfaces are being sold exclusively to businesses and commercial customers; as of this writing, regular people will not be able to buy one directly from Microsoft, and they won’t show up in most retail stores.
These aren’t the first Surface products released exclusively for businesses. Microsoft introduced a new business-exclusive Surface Go 3 tablet last fall, and a Surface Pro 7+ variant for businesses in early 2021. It is, however, the first time Microsoft has introduced new versions of its flagship tablet and laptop without also making them available to consumers. You can find some of these business-only PCs for sale at some third-party retailers, but usually with extended shipping times and higher prices than consumer systems.
Though this seems like a step back from the consumer PC market, Microsoft is still reportedly planning new consumer Surfaces. The Verge reports that Microsoft is planning a new Surface with Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon X chip, to debut in May. It’s that device, rather than today’s traditional Intel-based Surface Pro 10, that will apparently take over as the flagship consumer Surface PC.
“We absolutely remain committed to consumer devices,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. “Building great devices that people love to use aligns closely with our company mission to empower individuals as well as organizations. We are excited to be bringing devices to market that deliver great AI experiences to our customers. This commercial announcement is only the first part of this effort.”
This would be a big departure for Microsoft, which for a few years now has offered the Intel-based Surface tablets as its primary convertible tablets and the Arm-based Surface Pro X and Surface Pro 9 with 5G as separate niche variants. Older Qualcomm chips’ mediocre performance and lingering software and hardware compatibility issues with the Arm version of Windows have held those devices back, though Snapdragon X at least promises to solve the performance issues. If Microsoft plans to go all-in on Arm for its flagship consumer Surface device, it at least makes a little sense to retain the Intel-based Surface for businesses that will be more sensitive to those performance and compatibility problems.
What’s new in the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6?
As for the hardware itself, for people who might be getting them at work or people who go out of their way to find one: The biggest upgrade is that both Surface devices have been updated with Intel Core Ultra CPUs based on the Meteor Lake architecture. While the processor performance improvements in these chips are a bit underwhelming, their Arc-integrated GPUs are significantly faster than the old Iris Xe GPUs. And the chips also include a neural processing unit (NPU) that can accelerate some AI and machine-learning workloads; Microsoft currently uses them mostly for fancy webcam effects, but more software will likely take advantage of them as they become more widely available.
Those new chips (and small battery capacity increases) have also bumped all of Microsoft’s battery life estimates up a bit. The Surface Pro 10 is said to be good for 19 hours of “typical device usage,” up from 15.5 hours from the Intel version of the Surface Pro 9. The 13.5 and 15-inch Surface Laptop 6 gets 18.5 and 19 hours of battery life, respectively, up from 18 and 17 hours for the Surface Laptop 5.
The downside is that the Surface Laptops are a bit heavier than the Laptop 5: 3.06 pounds and 3.7 pounds, compared to 2.86 and 3.44 pounds for the 13.5- and 15-inch models.
Both models also get new webcam hardware to go with those NPU-accelerated video effects. The Surface Pro goes from a 1080p webcam to a 1440p webcam, and the Surface Laptop goes from 720p to 1080p. The Surface Pro 10’s camera also features an “ultrawide field of view.” Both cameras support Windows Hello biometric logins using a scan of your face, and the Surface Pro 10 also has an NFC reader for use with hardware security keys. As business machines, both devices also have dedicated hardware TPM modules to support drive encryption and other features, instead of the firmware TPMs that the Surface Pro 9 and Surface Laptop 5 used. Neither supports Microsoft’s Pluton technology.
Enlarge/ A new Type Cover with a brighter backlight and bolder legends was made for users with low vision or those who want to reduce eyestrain.
Microsoft
Neither device gets a big screen update, though there are small improvements. Microsoft says the Surface Pro 10’s 13-inch, 2880×1920 touchscreen is 33 percent brighter than before, with a maximum brightness of 600 nits. The screen has a slightly better contrast ratio than before and an anti-reflective coating; it also still supports a 120 Hz refresh rate. The Surface Laptop 6 doesn’t get a brightness bump but does have better contrast and an anti-reflective coating. Both devices are still using regular IPS LCD panels rather than OLED or something fancier.
And finally, some odds and ends. The 15-inch Surface Laptop 6 picks up a second Thunderbolt port and optional support for a smart card reader. The Surface Pro now has a “bold keyset” keyboard option, with an easier-to-read font and brighter backlight for users with low vision. These keyboards should also work with some older Surface devices, if you can find them.
The systems will be available to pre-order “in select markets” on March 21, and they’ll begin shipping on April 9. Microsoft didn’t share any specifics about pricing, though as business machines, we’d generally expect them to cost a little more than equivalent consumer PCs.
