The Surface Laptop Studio is Microsoft’s most powerful laptop ever

Today, at its long-awaited Surface event, Microsoft took the wraps off its first new form factor in years: The Surface Laptop Studio. As the name suggests, the Surface Laptop Studio is a blend of the Surface Laptop family with the Surface Studio, Microsoft’s all-in-one desktop. It combines the powerful specs and some design elements of the Surface Studio with the portability of a laptop, making the Laptop Studio the most powerful Surface laptop yet.

Of course, the biggest thing you’ll notice right away is the design. The Surface Studio Laptop looks like a normal laptop at first, but the display has a second hinge on the back, which allows it to be used in different stances. You can use it in laptop mode, where it just looks like a laptop; stage mode, where the screen covers the keyboard and leaves the touchpad visible, meant for watching movies; and studio mode, where the screen lies nearly flat over the keyboard deck for writing, drawing, and other creative workflows. The new design also makes space for storing the new Surface Slim Pen 2 underneath the keyboard deck, where it sticks and charges magnetically.

The Surface Studio Laptop has a 14.4-inch PixelSense Flow display with a 120Hz refresh rate. It’s still somewhat uncommon for non-gaming laptops to push past 60Hz, so this is one of the biggest news with the Laptop Studio. If you’ve used a 120Hz phone, you’re already familiar with how much smoother animations and transitions are with the high refresh rate, and that’s what this display brings to the Surface lineup. On top of that, the display supports Dolby Vision and has a sharp 2400 x 1600 resolution, keeping the typical 3:2 aspect ratio of Surface devices. The audio experience is also bound to be great thanks to the Quad Omnisonic speakers built into the Surface Laptop Studio.

Outside of the design, the Surface Laptop Studio also packs a punch in terms of performance. Microsoft is using Intel Core H35-series processors, a range that Intel debuted earlier this year. These are 35W processors, while most other Surface laptops have used 15W CPUs. These are quad-core processors with Intel Iris Xe graphics, and the Core i7-11370H model can go up to 4.8GHz of clock speed.

But if you need extra graphics power, you can also get the Surface Laptop Studio with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU, which makes this laptop powerful enough for just about anything. Whether that’s video rendering, gaming, or any productivity task, the Surface Laptop Studio can handle it. For commercial customers, you can get up an NVIDIA RTX A2000 GPU instead. Rounding out the specs, you can get the Surface Laptop Studio with up to 2TB of storage (which is removable), and 32GB of RAM.

There’s still more to it, as Microsoft has finally adopted Thunderbolt for some of its Surface devices, including the Laptop Studio. This laptop comes with two Thunderbolt 4 ports, so you can use the wide range of Thunderbolt docks on the market. If you’re more used to the Surface Connect ecosystem, you still get the Surface Connect port, too. And of course, there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack if you need it.

The Surface Laptop Studio is available for pre-order today, and it starts at a price of $1,599. That model includes an Intel Core i5 processor without dedicated graphics, so you may want to upgrade from there. The general launch will be on October 5th in the United States and Canada, with the product coming to more markets in early 2022.

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