Microsoft Surface Studio 3: Late rumour claims Surface Studio 2 Plus launch with outrageous European pricing and last-generation hardware

Microsoft is on the verge of announcing new products, with rumours suggesting that the Surface Laptop 5, Surface Pro 9, Project Volterra and the Surface Studio 3 are all in play. Scheduled for later today and watchable on Microsoft's website, the event should be the company's largest in a few years. However, Roland Quandt claims to have obtained some fairly disheartening specifications for Microsoft's next Surface Studio.

Purportedly, Microsoft will launch the machine as the Surface Studio 2+ or Surface Studio 2 Plus, not the Surface Studio 3. As its name suggests, the machine may be more of an update on the Surface Studio 2 rather than a next-generation model. Incidentally, a recent FCC listing suggested as much, with the regulator seemingly showing what the Surface Studio 2+ looks like. In short, the Surface Studio 2+ is the spitting image of its predecessor.

According to Quandt, the Surface Studio 2+ relies on the Intel Core i7-11700, a Rocket Lake processor based on Intel's infamous 14 nm process. Equipped with 8 cores and 16 threads, the Core i7-11700 has a 4.9 GHz boost clock speed, 16 MB of L3 cache and a 65 W TDP. Additionally, it remains to be seen whether the Surface Studio 2+ will feature discrete graphics. If Microsoft has decided against a discrete GPU, then the Core i7-11700 will only provide the lowly Intel UHD Graphics 750 with 32 Execution Units (EUs).

Worse still, the Surface Studio 2+ is rumoured to cost over €6,000 with 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD. Unfortunately, the Surface Studio 2+ appears to be a theme of this year's Microsoft event. For some reason, Microsoft seems to have equipped all Surface Laptop 5 series models with the same 15 W Alder Lake-U series processors as the Surface Pro 9, with no AMD APUs offered this time around. You can read more details about the Surface Laptop 5 and Surface Pro 9 in our corresponding article.

Update

Quandt has since clarified that the Surface Studio 2 Plus utilises an 11th Gen Core i7 H35 series processor, likely the Core i7-11370H. In other words, the Surface Studio 2 Plus may rely on the same processor as the Surface Laptop Studio. Again, it is unclear whether the Surface Studio 2 Plus will offer discrete graphics, although its similarities with the Surface Laptop Studio suggest that this is the case.

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