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November 14
Surface Studio

I'm prewriting several posts just before the start of November, for purposes of NaNoWriMo. Fortunately, a fair amount of interesting tech news has just come out.

Microsoft has made some announcements of late. The show on October 26th talked about a few different things. The general overview is this:

  • Overview
  • Paint, 3d creation in "Windows Creators Update"
  • Surface Book
  • Surface Studio

First up is Windows and Paint: It looks like the next update of Windows is going to have a "creator" theme, referring to it as the Creators Update. It'll be interesting to see if this is how Microsoft conducts each of these updates going forward. Show off a new first party UWP app and then make that new app the entire update, and perhaps even show off new or new partner hardware pursuant to that particular goal.

The new Surface Book is the Surface Book that makes me want a Surface Book. It has a faster graphics processor and better battery life, plus the display is at least as good as it always has been, and it folds more closed, making it more traditionally "laptop" while still having the really unique hinge mechanism and the ability to remove the display.

The real star of the show was almost certainly the Surface Studio. It's already generated some fairly interesting (and admittedly quite intense) discussion in my circles online. The jury appears to be out on it.

Personally, I'm in love with the thing, and this hardware near perfectly fits what I think my actual computing needs are these days, in terms of horsepower and capabilities, in a form factor that's better than what I could have asked for if I'd written it down somewhere.

The Surface Studio is both simple and complicated to explain. At its core, it's a reclining all-in-one computer with a 28-inch display that has a very high resolution. It's got a quad-core laptop CPU, a beefy graphics card, and some ram and storage. The port selection is useful, although perhaps it's just a little bit bare.

Microsoft describes it as a "Powerful workstation designed for the creative process". That's not too far from what they deliver, in terms of computing, and although as people who watch the computing space will say over and over again, all-in-ones are unpopular, I think what's really meant by that is that all-in-ones sell poorly outside of home and in certain creative and educational environments, in part because many environments prioritize providing computing in a certain way. (Basically, the larger the environment, the more likely the computers themselves will be generic slim desktop or minitower systems, probably with slots, that can be bought en masse and then if necessary configured for each user.)

So, I think that Microsoft's target market is basically the content creation professionals Apple is said to be throwing under the bus with the Mac. This is basically going to be the same appeal as the UNIX workstations and servers of yore. As of today, Microsoft's Surface lineup includes the Pro4, the Book (2?), and the Studio, but Windows itself runs on a big variety of computers, from $99 tablets and ARM based cell phones all the way up to much more powerful computers with more expansion than the Surface Studio or Apple's iMac and Mac Pro.

Basically: Anybody in one of Apple's introduction videos for the Power Macintosh G4 or G5, whose media was print, web, photography, video, as well as science, technical design, and heavy compute users such as people running searches and transforms on genomes. Compare that to the group talked about in the introduction of the Mac Pro, all content creators, but almost entire media people. Basically, the new Mac Pro is targeted directly at 3d and 4k video professionals.

I suspect that in addition to these particular content creation professionals, there will be a fairly heavy contingent of the people I've been talking about in certain contexts for a while: Windows users who are tired of the PC OEMs, who don't necessarily want to build their own systems, who want Apple's hardware quality and support. Basically, I think there's a relatively strong contingent of people who have been clamoring for a Microsoft iMac for a while. Some of them may have preferred a tower, but I think the Surface Studio (and to a lesser extent, the refreshed Surface Book) will give them what they want.

The trouble is, at $3000 for a base model with an i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM, 1TB of storage and a 2GB GPU, it's a steep buy if you aren't really using the display and the pen actively, especially given that none of the models gets you a pure solid state storage configuration.

The system is more or less well equipped, except for a few kind of odd omissions, such as Thunderbolt 3, for the addition of even more graphics horsepower or faster storage, any kind of USB 3.1 or Type C connectors, and if they're selling it as a workstation, an option to switch over to the Xeon Mobile CPUs and ECC memory may have been nice. The graphics are also of the older Maxwell generation, rather than the newest Pascal generation.

If Microsoft has their target market picked correctly and their marketing messaging is working, I don't really think that the people they're trying to get onto this system will care. I hate to say it, but one of the things said most often of Mac people is that they are people who just want to do work. Most content creation software actually works well on ultrabook class hardware, much of it is about as fast as you'd ever expect that kind of application to be. The Surface Studio can outperform that class of hardware in spades, and it still has several key pieces of hardware.

Firstly, nVidia graphics, even the outgoing generation, is critical to getting Adobe Creative Cloud users onto the new system. One of the biggest points of contention with Mac OS X of late has definitely been the fact that Apple's rigid insistence on using AMD graphics cards in its systems, along with Adobe's rigid insistence on not porting anything to OpenCL means that Mac users on modern hardware get almost no hardware acceleration when it comes to doing certain tasks in real-time or rendering things, particularly in Premiere and After Effects. The short version is that the combined horsepower of two FirePro cards means nothing more to most of Adobe's software than the HD4000 graphics on the old MacBook Pro. (Or, if you prefer, a Dell OptiPlex 7010 or 9010 from several years ago.)

Apple's own Final Cut Pro relies heavily on background rendering as well as OpenCL, so it runs very well on Apple's hardware, while Premiere runs about as well as it did on a midrange business PC from four years ago. It's not particularly inspiring, especially if you rely on Adobe's creative software in your day-to-day.

It's said that Premiere Pro and the other Creative Cloud applications have improved in their support for OpenCL, but I haven't been able to verify. There's also the trouble that Creative Cloud itself really doesn't get extensively tested every version like it did before, because there isn't necessarily a good way to define what a version of the software is, and there's not necessarily a very good way to get onto a baseline version of the software that has been reviewed. If somebody wanted to put in the effort though, I'm sure it would be appreciated. The other problem is that long-running computer models, such as the Mac Pro and iMac against which the Surface Studio will be competing, haven't themselves been reviewed in a while. It's a shame, because Mac OS X has been updated (three or four times) and most, if not all, reasonably mainstream professional content creation software has been updated. The environment is different and some of that might be material to people comparing the Studio against competitors from Apple.

The second key piece of hardware in the Surface Studio is the quad-core CPU. It doesn't really preempt a Skylake based iMac, but it should do well compared to most other Skylake laptops. It's got the highest end laptop chip Intel currently makes. The one most PC OEMs skip over when building big notebooks, in favor of either one of the mobile Xeon chips, for workstations computers, or a desktop-class i7 for gaming systems.

The Surface Studio also supports up to 32 gigs of RAM. That's not exactly impressive in comparison to the 64 gigs offered by the Mac Pro and the Skylake iMac, but it will be appropriate for somebody coming from a laptop or an older system. I'm thinking about people using Sandy and Ivy Bridge systems just nearing the end of their first corporate or institutional lives.

The third and perhaps most crucial unique piece of hardware is a few things. The Surface Studio has a 4500 by 3000-pixel display. Microsoft puts a lot of names on it, but it covers the DCI-P3 color spectrum, which is rapidly becoming important for people doing creative content creation and work with media. The display reclines from an upright position to a relatively flat position, said specifically to evoke a drafting table. The 3:2 aspect ratio is said, especially at that size, to be more immersive, and Microsoft spent a fair amount of time talking up the display's ability to show proof perfect 8.5 by 11-inch pages.

To go with the display, Microsoft has the same new Surface Pen (with interchangeable nibs) that came out last year. Adding to this is a new component, the Surface Dial, which works with the surface Studio, Book, and Pro4, as both a control knob and button, in the style of the PowerMate, which was an accessory built a few years ago to help scrolling through video timelines, that was capable of other things. As a PowerMate, it's compatible with any Windows computer that has Bluetooth. The Dial adds an interesting new component for modern Surfaces: you can place it on the screen to make radial menus (such as those in the old Windows 8.1 version of OneNote) appear, and it can be used to navigate them with a non-dominant hand while the dominant hand is used to manipulate things. The specific use cases they outline for this involve photography and illustration. It's used to change colors and brushes on the fly, without having to use the pen, a mouse, or your fingers to navigate a menu structure or toolbars. It is also shown in 3D, and I can see the use for it in video, color grading, effects processing, audio, but not necessarily in, say, page layout or web design.

The Surface Studio's closest competitor is the Wacom Cintiq 27QHD Touch, which for the money has fewer pixels than the Surface Studio, does not get you the Dial specifically, and still requires that you buy a whole computer. The 27QHD is $

Microsoft bundles the pen, and a matching wireless keyboard and mouse with the system, and also points out the specific power cord they include, which is designed to stay plugged in while the system is being shuffled around a table.

I think there is legitimate criticism of this particular system. The first is definitely the price. The pricing will probably make it unattractive to most people looking for a normal all-in-one desktop. The second is that the guts, while good could hypothetically have been better. Microsoft elected to use a mobile processor instead of a desktop one, and a mobile graphics processor instead of a desktop one. Add to that, there is a newer generation of nVidia graphics chip available. We don't have an official word from Microsoft as to why they made that choice. The only thing I can perhaps think is that the Maxwell based GeFORCE 980M is better at CUDA processing for creative and scientific applications than the newer 1080M, which is known to be a far better chip for gaming and VR.

The other one, to repeat a point I made above, is definitely that the machine would have benefitted in both the short and long terms from one or more USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type C or ThunderBolt 3 ports. Faster networking, faster access to big storage arrays, and future upgrades to the GPU (or a second GPU) for improved (or just more) GPGPU compute capacity. Otherwise, I actually think that the port selection is "fine" – I'm not particularly inspired by it, especially because we now have solid state media that can far exceed the speed of 6 gigabit SATA, let alone 5 gigabit USB. Creative professionals are probably some of the people fast storage impacts most.

The other big question, more from the perspective of technical users than

Otherwise, though, I think that the system will do well enough. In a lot of cases, we're talking about people who use a computer and monitor until it wears out, something appreciably better is available, or until the display can no longer be calibrated properly, which back in the days of CRTs and CCFL backlighting, was about every three or four years.

I think that despite the weird timing (deploy Skylake and Maxwell on a new system even though newer generations are available or should be available soon) I think that it's a good system that will meet the needs of its target market. I think that the choice of a mobile CPU, although one of the biggest places where there's room for improvement, is as good a proof as any that CPUs themselves have become less important over the years.

I want a Surface Studio badly I don't think I'm strictly the target market and I think that there are better systems for my needs (or perhaps, cheaper systems that are good enough) but it's just such a beautiful computer that I can't help but imagine one on my desk. I don't actually think it will help encourage me to work on my Lightroom library any more, but I think it would be that much more beautiful when I do open those files.

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