• New $3,000 + Surface Studio in the real world

    Posted on December 1, 2016 at 12:42 CST by • Comment in the Forums

    If you’re thinking about buying one of the just-shipped $3,000+ Surface Studios, it’d be worth your while to see what “real” people are saying about it.

    I don’t own one. I can think of better ways to spend several thousand dollars – and Microsoft isn’t likely to send one to me for evaluation.

    Engadget’s hands-on “Mini” review is out, and their take is decidedly lukewarm:

    Innovative, but not for everyone…

    If you’re curious about the innards, iFixIt has detailed teardowns of the Surface Studio and its circuitous sidekick the Surface Dial.

    You can run into a Microsoft Store and take a look yourself, but before you do, you should see what new owners are saying.

    My first exposure to the Surface Studio came on this week’s live recording of Windows Weekly. Leo Laporte received his new Studio on Monday, and the way he’s working with it is telling. Some of the foibles got cut in the mix, but the machine has many good features – gorgeous screen, interesting peripheral – and several significant problems – it’s slow (with a mobile GPU) and the drive’s a hybrid. If you look at the way Leo uses it and compare it to the way you work, you might not be impressed. “It’s like a giant iPad.” Think hard about where you’d put your keyboard.

    Then I bumped into this comment on the Microsoft Answers forum. Poster Damon S says:

    Dissapointing performance and hard drive for $4100… I love the idea of the machine but do i now want to go find a way to replace the HD with an SSD and then spend a day reinstalling windows and all the other drivers needed and spend another $500 on a $4k plus computer is daunting.

    Photographer Scott Bourne on Photofocus says the reflections on the screen are so bad “it’s a simple deal breaker for me. As much as I like EVERYTHING else about this machine (okay well maybe not the price) I can’t see myself using one until / unless Microsoft offers one with a matte display.”

    The Surface Studio ships with a tech support phone number, which appears to be unique for Studio support – see Brad Sams post on Thurrott.com – although some wags posit that the number’s answered by Microsoft’s usual support center.

    Watch out for Acer- and Dell- manufactured Studio wannabes in the near future.

    Microsoft News
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