Hands-on with Microsoft's new Surface Pro 8 and Surface Laptop Studio

Speaker 1: So with windows 11 coming, you Speaker 2: Know, we're gonna see new surface devices. The surface pro eight is one of them, but even more interesting, at least design wise is this new guy, the surface laptop studio, Speaker 1: The surface pro is what you might call a mature product line. It's been around for a while. They've iron out. Most of the kinks, it's reliable. People like it. Now we're up to the surface pro eight. And if you looked at it, you'd be hard pressed to really see a difference between this and the surface pro seven, until you start [00:00:30] to look a little deeper. The first thing that jumped out to me was that this now uses the slimmer Microsoft stylist that came with the surface pro X originally. And that's a different variant of the surface. Well, now that has come to the surface proline and the nice thing is it fits into a little pocket, right at the top of the keyboard, cover it snaps in there, ally it charges while it's in there. And then you just close up the, uh, the keyboard cover over the screen and you're good to go. Speaker 1: Your stylist is protected. You're not gonna lose it while you're walking around. Now the downside [00:01:00] to all this is that with the, a new keyboard cover that has room for the slim stylists, that means that your old surface pro keyboards are not gonna fit this new model. They move where the connection points are. I feel like almost every generation of surface somehow makes it so that you have to buy a new keyboard cover. Along with the surface pro itself. Also really interesting about the new stylist implementation is that the surface pen gives you a little, but a haptic feedback. Now, I mostly noticed it when I was selecting different types of brushes in drawing programs. And you get a little, a little tap while [00:01:30] you're making your selection, even though it looks very familiar, the display is actually slightly bigger. Now it's gone all the way up to 13 inches and it is a 28 80 by 1920 display. Speaker 1: So slightly the higher risk display a little bit higher than the previous version. More interesting perhaps is this is a one 20 Hertz capable screen. Now it's not gonna run at one 20 all the time to default to 60, uh, running at one 20 is gonna knock out your battery pretty quick, but you have that option to go up to that. If you have a need for it inside, it's [00:02:00] got 11 gen Intel processes. That's pretty much what we do. It's back core I five and core I seven. And it's also part of Intel's Evo platform, which is, um, a set of basically rules and guidelines for really slim, but fairly powerful laptops with good battery life. Now you've got a couple of Thunderbolt for ports on here, and you can use those for a variety of things. You can connect a bunch of 4k through them. Speaker 1: You can use 'em to hook up an external GPU box. If you have one of those you can of course charge through it, just like you [00:02:30] were charged through a USBC port. Although there still is the proprietary surface power connection. On the other side, with the little sort of ally attached thing that never seems to quite fit right or stay in. I do appreciate that the surface per eight has a full D camera, which is something most laptops don't have MacBooks. Don't have it basically very few laptops do. And since we're all working from home now and doing a lot of video meetings, you want that higher resolution camera using a seven 20 camera and then using a machine with [00:03:00] a 10 80 camera. Let me tell you, it's a big difference you can tell right away, much more interesting is the surface laptop studio. Speaker 1: This is a new product from Microsoft. It reminds me of both the surface laptop, which is a very nice slim laptop they make. And the surface studio, which is their big all in one desktop. That's best known for having a giant screen that pivots down almost like a drafting table. So as you can imagine, the surface laptop studio combines elements of both of [00:03:30] those. It looks like a standard 14 inch laptop, but that screen doesn't detach, but instead it pivots and pulls down over the keyboard, kind of like the display on that surface studio desktop. So you can make one stop just over the keyboard, kind of a kiosk mode. There's a couple of magnets that actually snap it into place there. So you're always putting it, uh, in exactly the right spot, you know, and that's great for doing a video meeting where you don't wanna be distracted by your keyboard or just watching a movie or are playing [00:04:00] a game and just getting your controller and sitting right in front of the screen. Speaker 1: Then you can take the screen and continue to fold it down. So it's on top of the keyboard itself and you end up with a thick, chunky tablet, uh, kind of like one of those, uh, 360 degree hinge, two in ones. Although the hinge here works in a different way and it's a little heavy for a tablet you'd carry around, but it also supports that Microsoft surface, slim pen too, the same thing you're gonna find in the surface pro eight and here, it also has a [00:04:30] magnetic little Heidi home. It sits in it's right under the front lip, which I think is really clever. And it's actually a fairly strong magnet. So I feel like it's just not gonna go flying off. Even if it gets bumped around in your bag, the reason they can put it, there is because the laptop sort of sits on a little pedestal. Speaker 1: Uh, instead of just being one solid piece on the bottom half, it rises up, you got the top keyboard deck and below that there's almost pillar that comes in from the signs. And that's where a lot of [00:05:00] the fans are the fan vents and the cooling vents, uh, because this thing generates a lot of heat and you have to do some creative inventive stuff with the cooling it makes for a design. That's a little bit unusual. I'm not really sure if I love it or not yet, but at least it's trying something different to try to dissipate some of this heat. And it gives you a place to take your stylist and just snap in there. The screen is 14.4 inches. It's 2,400 by 1600. And again, it can do, uh, 120 Hertz refresh [00:05:30] rate, uh, which is becoming more and more common now on higher end devices. Speaker 1: But again, you gotta watch out for the battery hit from stuff like that. The real secret about the surface laptop studio is that it's basically replacing a different surface product. And that is the surface book. The surface book was kind of a very high end two in one, you had your standard windows tablet screen, and it snapped onto a really thick, chunky keyboard base. And when you snapped it on in the base, you had not only an extra battery, which would improve your battery [00:06:00] life, but you also had to discrete GPU and you could actually get some fairly high ended video graphics cards in there. So it was actually a good system for gaming and graphic design and photo and video work. And then when you didn't need that extra power, you could just pop the screen off and just use it as a standard, uh, windows to tablet. Speaker 1: So what they're doing in this case is they're taking that concept. They're taking the two parts, the, the screen and the keyboard, and they're permanently attaching them. So it doesn't detach anymore. Instead it has this center hinge where it folds down over the screen. [00:06:30] It is a different look, a different feel, a different vibe here in the surface laptop studio, everything's always together. You always have the graphics card, it's different graphics. Now you can get an Invidia RTX 30, 50 ti, which is okay. Uh, there's also gonna be a professional version that has some AMD graphics in it. I always like seeing laptops with new and inventive designs. Everyone just does the clam shell, or if they do a hybrid of some kind, it's just the, uh, either pull apart kind or the 360 kind. Those are [00:07:00] the designs that have lasted over the years when other experiments have kind of gone by the wayside. Speaker 1: But we have seen designs like this one before. I think some of them even date back as far as the launch of windows eight, where everybody was trying to figure out what the perfect windows tablet, laptop hybrid would look like. And I really like a lot of those invention designs, even though a lot of them were not really all that practical. Uh, we've seen this kind of lift up the, uh, screen T shape, uh, hinge on a bunch of [00:07:30] systems. I just never really become mainstream, but now that Microsoft is adopting it, maybe we'll see even more people try it. Uh, I don't know if it's what I do use all day every day, all the time, but I like that kiosk mode. And that's often my favorite part of a hybrid where you just get to deal with the screen, uh, the touch screen, and you don't have to worry about the keyboard or touch pad or anything else. So all of these new systems, including, uh, some minor updates to the Microsoft surface [00:08:00] prox and the surface go three. In addition to these guys, they're all gonna come with windows 11 on them, making them some of the very first systems with that new OS, which is going to be hitting October 5th,