We break down Microsoft's new Surface laptop, headphones (The 3:59, Ep. 468)

Welcome to 3:59, I'm Roger Cheng. I'm Joan E Solsman. Microsoft unveiled a slew of new products yesterday. We got the Surface Pro 6, a new Surface laptop, and an update to that ginormous Surface Studio. But the biggest surprise was a new pair of Surface headphones. [LAUGH] It's funny that Microsoft which has slowly been shifting away from consumers and towards big business. They still keep experimenting with these new products. Jo, what's your biggest takeaway from this event? I think it's interesting it would be very easy to make a criticism that It's sort of a throwing stuff against the wall sort of thing, you know? Coming out like, hey there's headphones here! Right. But the thing about the Surface products is they really do feel pretty Fully Baked,>> Yeah When they come out so the headphones seem like they are, they have a carnoy got an exclusive and got to hear about how they've been working on it for three years Right But aside from the headphones surprise, Your Know, the laptop and the tablet they really are just kind our superficial upgrades to Right a lot of internal spec upgrades right Yeah that's not a full redesign On those two, people have to wait until next year if they're looking for something that really changes. I do want to talk about the headphone more, because they've got the knobs? The dials? Dials. The dials on each side of the head. One for volume, one for noise cancellation. Which I actually find kind of brilliant. I think so too. And dials are a big part of Surface Studio. Yes, exactly, they've got some experience with that. And so I've got a pair of those noise canceling headphones. I just got them sadly, but I would at least try these. It's just interesting that Microsoft put up this new product And I'm already kind of interested in it. One of the downsides of the headphones it seems is that the battery life via wireless is not great. Yeah, yeah. It's like 15 hours, which doesn't hold up very well. I mean I know with my wireless Noise cancelling headphones, I could go days. Yeah, same here with my Bose headsets. But that's kind of sad. I guess it's got the touch controls though, it's got these little gimics that are like, well that's kinda cool. I'm gonna drain your battery. Yeah, yeah, and I guess it works, sadly it works with just Cortana. Well I mean what do you expect? I don't know, they've got a whole deal with Amazon, I was hoping at least some Alexa. Help, but I don't know, we'll see. [LAUGH] All right, lastly I wanna talk a little bit about, or tease my explainer on Gigabit LTE, it is a form of pre-5G network technology that's been. The carriers have been steadily upgrading. It's been around for awhile, but it's got new relevance cuz of the iPhone 10s. And 10S Max now supported. Unfortunately, the iPhone 10R does not yet, or won't support it. Right. But as the name suggests, it gives you theoretically a peak speed of one gigabit per second of the LTE speeds, and that is pretty much as fast as your fastest home connection. While, so- So it's a noticeable difference. Yeah, it's a noticeable difference. I mean you're never gonna get that theoretical peak. But if trials or tests have shown that you can get speeds of like 100 megabits per second, which is a significant bump from what we're getting now. I think T-Mobile has the highest average speed right now [UNKNOWN] signal. And that's around 20. Yeah So Significantly higher Yeah That means more, I Don't Know Less buffering Less Buffering Quicker Downloads Being able to download videos in minutes instead of hours, but yes for all the details on Gig Bit LTE Check it out, the explainer is on CNET today. So for our full coverage follow us on CNET. I'm Roger Chang. I'm Joan E Solsman. Thanks for listening. [MUSIC]