Microsoft Surface Keynote expected at 'Future Decoded', likely a new Surface Book and potential windows ARM devices
Microsoft’s ‘Future Decoded’ conference is being held in London on the 31st of October and 1st of November with Panos Panay, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Devices, set to present a keynote talk at the event. While several Microsoft devices fall in Panay’s division, such as the Xbox or the HoloLens, these have already had recent announcements, so we expect this keynote to be focused around their surface devices.
The Surface Laptop recently got a slight refresh with new colors and a new 1 TB SSD option, but we haven’t seen anything for a while on a new Surface Book, other than a teaser in a promotional video. The original Surface Book started shipping in October 2015, and an updated ‘Performance Base’ model with a more powerful GPU arrived in November 2016, so we believe that the next version of the Surface Book will be announced at this London event.
The current Surface Books use up-spec versions of the ULV i5 and i7 (i5-6300U or i7-6600U), so as a premium device in late 2017, we wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft used a four-core Kaby Lake-R such as the i5-8350U or the i7-8650. If we speculate based on previous models, the Performance Base is likely to have an MX150 2 GB with a future version having a more powerful GPU such as the GT 1040 / MX160 when (or if) it becomes official.
The second (and maybe less likely) product line that could be revealed at the event is the previously discussed Windows ARM devices, which can run x86 Windows applications. There are no previous releases to set a president on timing, but it would make sense to reveal them now while the Snapdragon 835 is still the latest Qualcomm SoC — if the rumors about using the SD 835 are correct.
Either way, we’re excited to see what new mobile products Microsoft is bringing during the two-day ‘Future Decoded’ event in London.
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