Microsoft launches new Surface PCs that will bring ‘next era of computing’

The Suface

(microsoft)

Microsoft has announced a new range of Surface computers that it claims will take Windows into the “next era of computing”.

The first is Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 5, which has been upgraded with new Thunderbolt 4 ports and the new Intel Evo platform, which guarantees fast-charging in under four hours and nine hours or more battery life, as well as a 12^th generation chip.

Microsoft claims this makes the new laptop 50 per cent more powerful than its predecessor, in either its 13.5-inch or 15-inch screen options.

Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 (Microsoft)

Next, Microsoft launched the Surface Pro 9, its laptop-tablet hybrid that works with the Surface Pen. The new device has a 120Hz refresh rate on its 13-inch screen and users can choose between Intel’s 12^th generation processor or Microsoft’s own SQ 3 chip for those that want 5G connectivity.

The most powerful computer Microsoft is launching in this spate is the Surface Studio 2+, with an Intel Core H-35 processor that Microsoft says will provide 50 per cent greater CPU performance than its predecessor, and double the graphics performance with the Nvidia Ge Force RTX 3060 graphics card. Much like the other devices, this has also been updated with USB-C with Thunderbolt 4 connectivity.

Microsoft Surface Studio 2+ (Microsoft)

There are also a smattering of peripherals in the launch: a new Microsoft Presenter remote that works with Microsoft’s own Teams platform to mute and unmute people, move slides along, quickly joining meetings, and a screen pointer; and Microsoft Audio Dock, which can pass through HDMI, two USB-C connections and a USB-A port to its built-in speakers.

Microsoft has not yet announced prices or availability for the new devices.

On the software side, Microsoft is upgrading its Designer app – a new graphic design app as a part of Microsoft 365 – with Dalle-2, the AI image generator that can generate pictures based on text input, trained of millions of images scraped from the web.

Microsoft says will be “blurring the lines between the platform, the device, and the cloud”, and will be bringing the technology into Bing and Edge soon – although gave no specific timescale for when that would be.

“It’s important, with early technologies like Dalle-2, to acknowledge that this is new, and we expect it to continue to evolve and improve”, Liat Ben-Zur, Microsoft’s vice president of search and devices, wrote announcing the new feature, and in order to do that OpenAI, which developed Dalle-2, will be removing “the most explicit sexual and violent content from the dataset used to train the model”, and Microsoft is also using “integrated techniques that further help to prevent misuse including additional query blocking on sensitive topics”.