Microsoft finally held its special event earlier today, and while long time Surface lead Panos Panay was no longer there to show it off, the Redmond giant still managed to debut its brand new Surface Laptop Studio 2, their latest and most powerful laptop yet.
The Surface Laptop Studio 2 features the same adjustable display as before, which lets you use it both as a regular laptop and when needed you can pull it forward closer to you, or just completely fold it flat to make it become a tablet of sorts. This display is a 14.4-inch, PixelSense Flow display pushing a 2400 x 1600p resolution in Microsoft’s usual 3:2 aspect ratio, with a peak brightness of 650nits, a refresh rate of up to 120Hz, a contrast ratio of 1500:1 and full coverage of the sRGB colour gamut. The colour-calibrated display is also touchscreen capable, and you can also use Microsoft’s optional stylus on the screen, which has a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass 5 over it too.
Under the hood, Microsoft has significantly powered up the Surface Laptop Studio 2 compared to its predecessor. It not only has a 13th Gen Intel Core i7-13800H processor with up to 64GB of LPDDR5x RAM and up to 2TB of PCIe Gen 4 SSD storage, but also gets an Intel Gen3 Movidius 3700VC VPU AI Accelerator. The latter is essentially an NPU AI coprocessor that will take over AI-related workloads. For graphics, the Surface Laptop Studio 2 comes with up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 laptop GPU, or for those who need a more workstation-focused device can also be kitted out with an NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada Generation GPU.
As for its battery life, for those running with no discrete graphics the Surface Laptop Studio 2 will be able to last up to 19 hours, while those with NVIDIA graphics will last up to 18 hours of typical usage. For I/O meanwhile you’ll find two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, a Surface Connect port for charging, a microSD card reader, a USB-A 3.1 port and a 3.5mm headphone jack, with support for WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 wireless connectivity too.
Other features of note include a hardware TPM 2.0 chip for enterprise-grade security, Windows Hello face sign in via the FHD Surface Studio webcam, a quad-speaker setup with Dolby Atmos and a touchpad with Surface Precision Haptic support all housed in an aluminium chassis that weighs as little as 1.89kg.
There’s no word just yet on local pricing and availability, but in the US at least we do know that it will be fully available from 3 October onwards with a starting price of USD1,999 (~RM9,371.31).
