14 DAY TRIAL // We’ve known for a while that Microsoft was planning to launch a new more affordable Surface laptop, and now it looks like we’re just a few days away from the moment an announcement is made.
First and foremost, why does Microsoft actually need a cheaper Surface device?
Microsoft’s Surface lineup has always been considered a premium series, with the company itself once saying that its purpose was to pioneer new products, leaving its partners and the rest of the industry to build devices with various configurations available at different price levels.
So theoretically, Microsoft just wanted to offer the best of the best, giving hardware makers the chance to launch similar products available at a lower price.
The company, however, knows how important it is to remain relevant in all markets, so in addition to the premium models, it also launched the Surface Go, a smaller and cheaper device whose purpose was to go after customers in the education market.
Needless to say, the Surface Go hasn’t necessarily been the most successful model ever released by the software giant, but it was used as a product that paved the way for a long-term approach. And this long-term approach includes a new Surface laptop too.
Codenamed Surface Sparti, this new model could actually launch as Surface Laptop Go, according to a new report from German site WinFuture. Worth knowing, however, is that this Surface Laptop Go moniker isn’t official just now, though it should be rather sooner than later, as Microsoft is expected to officially announce the new device as part of a digital event on October 1. At the same time, there is a chance that the company actually gives up on an event and just releases the device on its key markets, including the United States, with a press announcement published on its website.
The Surface Laptop Go is likely to come with a series of hardware surprises that aren’t necessarily something that Microsoft is a big fan of. However, these changes are absolutely needed in order to keep the price at a lower level.
According to the cited source, the new laptop could be powered by the 10th-gen Core i5-1035G1, and it’s believed that Microsoft would even release a version aimed at the education with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of flash memory. That’s right, no SSD but flash memory, and it’s believed that all versions of this mysterious Surface model could adopt the same approach.
In other words, all configurations could use flash memory, simply because it’s cheaper than an SSD, though, on the top version, you could get some 256GB of storage.
The new Surface laptop might even lack Windows Hello face recognition, but because biometric authentication is a big part of Microsoft’s passwordless future, the company will instead go for a fingerprint sensor. The new reader will be integrated into the power button, the report adds.
The base version of this new Surface could run Windows 10 in S Mode, but of course, users will be allowed to upgrade to the full version of Windows 10 is needed. At the same time, the more expensive configurations will run Windows 10 Pro out of the box.
Needless to say, Microsoft has remained completely tight-lipped on everything until now, though it goes without saying that such a device pretty much makes sense in the long-term, especially in the education market where the competition is getting fiercer. If the new laptop is announced on October 1, expect the first customers in the U.S. to get their hands on it by the end of the month.