MICROSOFT SURFACE STUDIO
Price: $2,499 (£TBC), 1TB; $4,199 (£TBC), 2TB
Microsoft’s Surface Studio charges aggressively into territory once held by Apple, combining an elegant design, a massive, lovely display, and an eye-popping price tag. Our colleagues at PCWorld had a chance to try the company’s first-ever desktop after it was announced.
Although the specs fall slightly short of state-of-the-art, everything felt extremely fast and responsive. The base offering includes a sixth-generation (Skylake) Core i5, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 965M 2GB GPU, a 1TB hybrid drive, and 8GB of memory. At the highest end, the model includes a sixthgeneration Core i7, 32GB of memory, and a GTX980M GPU, along with 2TB of storage.
What we like most about the Surface Studio is how it pivots, literally, from a single-purpose workstation into an easel for artistic creation or sharing. A pair of hinges gracefully lifts the massive 28in, 4500x3000 PixelSense display from a nearly vertical position to about 20 degrees off the horizontal. The display itself offers Adobe sRGB and DCI-P3 colour settings, individually colour-calibrated. If there’s any drawback, it’s that the monitor itself lacks any other positioning feature. There’s no way of raising it higher, save for propping it up with a book or stand.
Though it’s designed for creativity, we found one pleasing productivity aspect: when in monitor mode, the display was large enough and detailed enough to allow for four snapped windows in each corner. True, you can do this with any display attached to a Windows 10 machine. But the Studio display’s vast real estate actually makes this practical, with little in the way of visual compromise.
The Surface Studio ships with a standard Surface Pen, plus an updated Microsoft Sculpt mouse and keyboard, wrapped in Surface grey. We’re lukewarm on the peripherals (though you could certainly replace them with your own hardware). The mouse felt flattish, versus the smooth curve we prefer. We were also hoping for a keyboard a bit more like the Surface Book’s, rather than the chiclet feel of the Surface tablet’s detachable keyboard. They both felt like flimsy cup holders on a car.