Microsoft has finally revealed the next product in the Surface Pro tablet lineup, skipping the Broadwell processor generation and jumping straight to the latest Intel Skylake processors. The design is very similar to previous Surface Pro tablets but the upgrades and changes made for the Surface Pro 4 are impressive.
The kickstand design that has made the Surface recognizable remains the same but there is a solid collection of new features including a fingerprint reader and Microsoft Hello support for security and login. The new Pro 4 model is only 8.4mm thick (coming in just about 1mm thinner than the Pro 3) and is also lighter at 1.73 lbs.
The screen size is 12.3-inches with a 2736 x 1824 3:2 resolution for a pixel density of 267 PPI. It has a 10-point touch interface with drastically improved latency, palm detection and pressure sensitivity for the included Surface Pen. Even better, that improved Surface Pen will have a full year of battery life along with magnetic attachment to the tablet rather than relying on a elastic loop!
The Surface keyboard sees improvements as well including better spacing on the keys, quieter and more reliable typing and it also becomes the thinnest type cover MS has yet to build for the Surface line. A 5-point touch glass trackpad is now part of the deal, 40% larger than the one found on the Pro 3 – a welcome modification for anyone that has used the type cover in the past.
In terms of computing horsepower, the Surface Pro 4 will be available with a Core m3, Core i5 or even a Core i7 processor. It will ship with 4GB, 8GB or 16GB of system memory and internal storage capacities as high as 1TB. Microsoft hasn't posted any more details about the clock speeds of these CPUs but if you look at the awesome hype video MS made for the Pro 4 launch, you'll notice an interesting thing in the exploded view: an Intel processor with three dies on a single package.
What you are seeing is the Skylake CPU, chipset and an eDRAM package. This tells us that at least one of the available options for the Surface Pro 4 will ship with Iris graphics and 64MB or 128MB of L4 cache / eDRAM – a first for this form factor! This should help improve performance for graphics as well as other specific CPU compute workloads.
Other highlights for the Surface Pro 4 include front facing stereo speakers, 8MP rear-facing camera and a fancy-ass Windows 10 logo.
Pricing will START at $899 but will spike to as high as $2699 if you max out the processor and storage options.
We are working on getting a unit in for testing as the devices are going up for presale today and should arrive by October 26th.
I may end up picking this up,
I may end up picking this up, or the surface book, and sell my desktop to partially fund it. I’m about to be a college student and am torn between selling my PC and buying a high end laptop, or selling my PC, building a new, much better one, and just buying a cheap laptop for school stuff. Obviously I can’t bring a desktop to lecture halls, lol.
Who would pay $899 for an
Who would pay $899 for an ipad pro with 16Gb of storage when this exists?
probably exactly why this was
probably exactly why this was created.
apple isn’t going to get away selling high priced “i” device toys anymore. At least not to the logical person.
No one with “i” products is
No one with “i” products is logical…(trolling)
I’ve always been gobsmacked
I’ve always been gobsmacked by how much the surface line weighs. It doesn’t really hit you until you pick one up.
Surface+typecover= more than 3 iPad mini’s or 2 iPad airs or a Macbook. The typecover alone weighs more than an iPad mini. Same goes for Samsung’s line of Tabs.
It’s a cool feat of engineering, but calling it a tablet is misleading I think.