Microsoft Announces the Surface Go Convertible at $399

[btarunr]

Today, Microsoft announces Surface Go: the most portable and affordable Surface product yet. Many of us play different roles throughout the day, moving from work or school to home and everywhere in between. Our team designs every Surface to adapt to that dynamic lifestyle, to strike a balance between performance and versatility, form and function. Our products don't do just one thing because people don't do just one thing.

We pioneered categories like the 2:1 to provide the mobility of a tablet with the performance of a laptop, inspiring new ways of creating. As you pursue your passions, connect with friends and family, and work with your team, the products you're able to take on the go with you are the ones that can keep up with the huge range of things you want to accomplish.



That's the idea behind the design of Surface Go - our smallest, lightest, and most affordable Surface yet. When we designed this device, we had to ask ourselves what people want and need from a 10" Surface. The answers seem obvious - lightweight, productive, and accessible to more people. I'm pumped to introduce you to Surface Go, because it's all those things, and so much more.

Our smallest, lightest, and most affordable Surface yet
The power and connectivity in a device this small gives you the style and productivity Surface is known for in a more convenient package. At just 1.15 pounds and 8.3 mm thin, Surface Go packs portable performance into a 10" device. Starting at $399 MSRP, it represents a new entry point for the Surface family, while keeping the premium qualities that have come to define it.

Surface Go offers a stunning, custom-built high-resolution PixelSense Display that supports Surface Pen with 4096 levels of pressure sensitivity, low pen parallax, low latency, and precision for accurate note taking, drawing and computer-aided design. The custom calibrated 3:2 display is soft on your eyes while you're working and vibrantly high-contrast when you want to watch videos, create art, or edit photos.

In portrait mode, the screen was designed to render the page to the scale of most school textbooks, and in landscape mode, it can render pages side by side as if you were holding a paperback book in hand. At the approximate size of a composition notebook, writing on the screen feels natural and intuitive.

Since my two youngest daughters have started using Surface Go, I see them watching movies, reading, and drawing on it every day. It's the perfect device for them. And for me, whether I'm at home, in the office, or on a plane, putting my Surface Pen on the screen and letting my thoughts flow is a necessary step in my creative process. It's how I work. It's so easy to carry Surface Go with me so I can capture those moments, instantly.

Comforts of a laptop, convenience of a 10" tablet
Surface Go is small and mighty, giving you the performance you need to be productive. A device powered by the 7th Generation Intel Pentium Gold Processor 4415Y, in a fanless design, offering up to nine hours of battery. Our team worked closely with Intel to optimize power, performance, and battery for the most critical tasks people perform every day.

Being able to run Office apps on this device with its portability is one of the things that was critical to the experience we had in mind when we designed Surface Go - the productivity of having the apps you use for work and school with the flexibility to relax and read or watch a show on Netflix or Hulu.

Our new Surface Go Signature Type Cover is custom-made for Surface Go integrating design features that give the user the best typing experience possible, with ergonomic key pitch and exceptional key travel. It also has high precision tuning and Windows Precision Trackpad that supports five-point multi-finger gestures, and you can connect the new Surface Mobile Mouse to work the way that you want.

A built-in kickstand with full friction hinge that extends to 165 degrees helps you stay in your flow from tablet to studio mode, and a Windows Hello camera allows for familiar, quick, and secure sign-in using face recognition.

Surface Go also has the ports you need, including Surface Connect for charging and docking; USB-C 3.1 for data, video, and charging; a headphone jack; and a MicroSD card reader for storage expansion. All designed to help you be more productive whether you're studying in a library, working on a plane, or sharing your content in a boardroom on a 4K monitor.

Where do you want to Go?
Surface Go with Wi-Fi will be available for pre-order tomorrow, July 10 in select countries*, with products beginning to hit shelves on August 2. We're also happy to share that an LTE model will be arriving later this year.

For a family at home or on the move, an expert on the front line of a business interacting with customers, or a school that wants to provide its students with the most versatile tools for learning, this device offers a premium experience with incredible value.

Wherever the day takes you, and whatever unique tasks await you along the way, Surface Go moves with you.

Surface Go will be available for pre-order beginning on July 10 in the following markets, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Poland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain.

In the coming weeks, Surface Go will be available for pre-order in Japan, Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, and in China with more markets to follow.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Totally]

LoL, why is Microsoft doing hardware better than Apple? When they started their shift, I waited with popcorn and bated breath for what I imagined to be the inevitable flood of questionable design practices and flood of horror stories. So far the worst I've heard is their usual boring failure from unpopularity, the occasional but definite to occur bug, or words of the snob that will sooner go to the grave before admitting that something with a Microsoft logo can ever be good or good as xyz. While Apple remains my go to for spectacular design flaws, other cock-ups, and jackassery.

 

[PowerPC]

LoL, why is Microsoft doing hardware than Apple? When they started their shift, I waited with popcorn and bated breath for what I imagined to be the inevitable flood of questionable design practices and flood of horror stories. So far the worst I've heard is their usual boring failure from unpopularity, the occasional but definite to occur bug, or words of the snob that will sooner go to the grave before admitting that something with a Microsoft logo can ever be good or good as xyz. While Apple remains my go to for spectacular design flaws, other cock-ups, and jackassery.

Doing hardware than Apple is all the rage these days.

 

[AltCapwn]

Seriously, seems very very promising.

 

[Totally]

Doing hardware than Apple is all the rage these days.

meh, fixed.

 

[IceShroom]

Ryzen 3 2200U or Core M3 7 would have been a better choise than Pantium.

 

[R0H1T]

LoL, why is Microsoft doing hardware better than Apple? When they started their shift, I waited with popcorn and bated breath for what I imagined to be the inevitable flood of questionable design practices and flood of horror stories. So far the worst I've heard is their usual boring failure from unpopularity, the occasional but definite to occur bug, or words of the snob that will sooner go to the grave before admitting that something with a Microsoft logo can ever be good or good as xyz. While Apple remains my go to for spectacular design flaws, other cock-ups, and jackassery.

This isn't really anything better than the best Apple has to offer, albeit at inflated prices.

 

[Sp33d Junki3]

Ryzen 3 2200U or Core M3 7 would have been a better choise than Pantium.

neither of them would have been better. Ryzen 3 2200U is 4x higher TDP. M3 is slower base clocks and both costs are significantly higher.
Which would end up making Surface Go cost much higher.

 

[R0H1T]

neither of them would have been better. Ryzen 3 2200U is 4x higher TDP. M3 is slower base clocks and both costs are significantly higher.
Which would end up making Surface Go cost much higher.

6x4=24W wrt TDP. You sure you got the right numbers, not to mention 2200u should outperform the Pentium by a good margin especially in graphics
Source for the much higher price OEM have to pay for 2200u

 

[IceShroom]

neither of them would have been better. Ryzen 3 2200U is 4x higher TDP. M3 is slower base clocks and both costs are significantly higher.
Which would end up making Surface Go cost much higher.

Ryzen 3 2200U is a 15W part ,so it only 2.5x high with better performance, And Core M3 7 is 1W less TDP and its on Core architecture not Atom based.

 

[PowerPC]

The main market for this are students for note taking and such, maybe some web browsing, portability. For this it's actually enough and a good price. It doesn't need good specs. It can have a trackpad or a mouse that even the iPad Pro doesn't offer. That's a much better selling point for this than a faster CPU. Oh, and a real operating system with Win10 - you only get iOS with iPads. Apple should lose many customers to Microsoft after this.

 

[Frick]

Ryzen 3 2200U is a 15W part ,so it only 2.5x high with better performance, And Core M3 7 is 1W less TDP and its on Core architecture not Atom based.

"Only 2.5x high".

Anyway, nice! Looking forward to a review so much.

 

[R0H1T]

"Only 2.5x high".

Anyway, nice! Looking forward to a review so much.

It's all relative, like I said preciously the GPU performs much better & even the CPU is miles better at 15W TDP.

The only reason to go as low as 6W IMO is passive cooling, otherwise these things will throttle fairly quickly!

 

[Frick]

It's all relative, like I said preciously the GPU performs much better & even the CPU is miles better at 15W TDP.
View attachment 103725View attachment 103724The only reason to go as low as 6W IMO is passive cooling, otherwise these things will throttle fairly quickly!

Yes but "only 2.5x the TDP" is ... a strange thing to say. It's a passively cooled tablet, not even a very slim ultrabook. Like in phones, those extra watts makes a big difference. People forget that 5W in electronics actually quite a lot to cool.

 

[R0H1T]

Yes but "only 2.5x the TDP" is ... a strange thing to say. It's a passively cooled tablet, not even a very slim ultrabook. Like in phones, those extra watts makes a big difference. People forget that 5W in electronics actually quite a lot to cool.

Yeah sure but the experience, with active cooling, is also much better. IIRC don't some of the (Android) tablets have active cooling, shield as well? As an aside, having used high end phones & mid range tablets for an extended period of time, I'd definitely avoid these passively cooled devices as much as I possibly can.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

All this talk of putting ryzen in, IMO ryzen would be a much better use case for the pro model, the larger body and active cooling would allow it to perform.

A platform like the surface go requires sub 5 watt real world power draw, and AMD just doesnt have anything like that yet.

Yeah sure but the experience, with active cooling, is also much better. IIRC don't some of the (Android) tablets have active cooling, shield as well? As an aside, having used high end phones & mid range tablets for an extended period of time, I'd definitely avoid these passively cooled devices as much as I possibly can.

The only SHIELD with active cooling was the OG shield, and that wasnt a tablet, it was a controller with a screen attatched, more comparable to a mobile console.

No other android OEM made a tablet with active cooling IIRC.

Not that many android tablets are even made anymore. Nvidia has long stopped, LG has given up, ece.

 

[IceShroom]

Yes but "only 2.5x the TDP" is ... a strange thing to say. It's a passively cooled tablet, not even a very slim ultrabook. Like in phones, those extra watts makes a big difference. People forget that 5W in electronics actually quite a lot to cool.

Microsoft Surface Go a hybrid device like Surface Pro which has 15W processor. It should have option of 15W CPUs. As not beign a tablet it should have active cooling.

 

[Frick]

Microsoft Surface Go a hybrid device like Surface Pro which has 15W processor. It should have option of 15W CPUs. As not beign a tablet it should have active cooling.

It is a tablet though, and 5mm thinner than the Pro. In a cramped device that is a lot.

 

[Easy Rhino]

All Surface products to date are poor performers and build quality leaves something to be desired. Not to mention it is running windows...

 

[IceShroom]

It is a tablet though, and 5mm thinner than the Pro. In a cramped device that is a lot.

Its still a hybrid.

 

[windwhirl]

All Surface products to date are poor performers and build quality leaves something to be desired. Not to mention it is running windows...

Maybe. I'll bet that any hardware problem means going straight to some Microsoft Support place... And leaving the device there for a few days at best. For me it's always been a big disappointment the fact that Surface devices can not be upgraded, and that they are nearly impossible to repair by yourself.

 

[Nkd]

6x4=24W wrt TDP. You sure you got the right numbers, not to mention 2200u should outperform the Pentium by a good margin especially in graphics
Source for the much higher price OEM have to pay for 2200u

This is a budget product. It will do fine for everything from spreadsheets to regular work. This isn't designed to be performance power house. Yet it will still be able to do anything more than apple has to offer though. So still a better deal over productivity wise.

 

[robot zombie]

LoL, why is Microsoft doing hardware better than Apple? When they started their shift, I waited with popcorn and bated breath for what I imagined to be the inevitable flood of questionable design practices and flood of horror stories. So far the worst I've heard is their usual boring failure from unpopularity, the occasional but definite to occur bug, or words of the snob that will sooner go to the grave before admitting that something with a Microsoft logo can ever be good or good as xyz. While Apple remains my go to for spectacular design flaws, other cock-ups, and jackassery.

Apple's problem isn't just their design flaws, those in themselves can be compensated for... ...it's the fact they won't fix your $1000+ pile of shit when it inevitably breaks just out of their criminally short and exclusive warranties - they'll probably blame you, they don't want other people to fix shit they themselves do not offer a solution for or even cover under warranty, and they make it so that when they do break, they're almost impossible to fix, assuming you manage to take a new apple product apart without breaking anything, what with riveted in keyboards with critical failure points, soldered on parts, glued-together devices... even Apple cannot fix their own shit. Something as simple as replacing a screen on a new iphone is almost impossible and often requires specialized equipment, now. And if you wanna upgrade, buy a new product, cuz everything really is soldered on now. Want 16gb of ram? Shoulda paid a few hundred more for that model! And forget about data recovery with soldered on SSD's... ...if the logic board fails, you're just done.

It's crazy... ...to them changing broken parts in an iphone makes it counterfeit. And by doing that repair you are making a fake apple and passing it off. Non oem screens are contraband - they get seized by customs as fakes. Fixing an Apple makes it a PC to them. And a schematic is an intellectual property. Trade secrets lol. They want 3rd party repair to be literally illegal. And yet they themselves will not offer actual repairs for most of their design flaws.

But other companies man... ...I don't know about that. They all try to copy Apple these days... ...the problem is they don't copy the things that make Apple good. They always mimic the stuff that makes Apple shitty... ...like making phones so thin and frail that the PCB's get damaged with regular use, or cutting down on water resistance, or eliminating the SD slot, or making the battery non-removable. Every time Apple comes out with something dumb and terrible, other companies follow. They see what apple is making off of their crap products and assuming that people want that. That and because apple gets away with it, they want a peice of that.

I swear, if Apple had it their way, nobody would own their products... ...they'd only be renting them. I think what they really want is for their customers to shell out thousands of dollars for a new product every year instead of every several years. And people actually try to rationalize the way they do business!

All in all, crap like this is bad for tech as a whole. It's setting a really crappy precedent. As long as consumers allow them to get away with completely ripping them off, they'll keep doing it and everyone else will follow.

Apple used to be good. The ecosystem was actually really good and flexible and that's what you paid for. Everything just worked together with no fuss and everything ran smooth/virus free. But every year they come up with new ways to make doing the simplest things... ...things any pc can do, a total convoluted mess. They take away the features that made them a joy to use. It's basically become a game of "what can we get away with before we get sued this year?" for them.

*sighhh* And now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

 

[Valantar]

Ryzen 3 2200U is a 15W part ,so it only 2.5x high with better performance, And Core M3 7 is 1W less TDP and its on Core architecture not Atom based.

The core m3-7y30 has a listed tray price of $281 - 74% higher than the $161 of the 4415Y. While MS is likely to get some serious rebates on chips compared to tray list prices, there's no way they'd get the m3 into a $399 tablet.

As for the 4415Y, it's a Kaby Lake part, not Atom based at all. That's Pentium Silver you're thinking of, not Gold. The m3 would no doubt be faster (1GHz higher turbo, twice the cache), but also significantly more expensive. I'd rather take the cheaper tablet, thank you. Besides, MS already uses the m3 in the entry-level Surface Pro, and it would be an odd choice to put the same CPU in a tablet at half the price of that with the same parts. If anything, that would force the price for the entry-level Surface Pro down by at least $200, which is definitely not what MS wants (as that would tank sales once they launch an upgraded model at what would then be an effective $200 price increase).

 

[R0H1T]

This is a budget product. It will do fine for everything from spreadsheets to regular work. This isn't designed to be performance power house. Yet it will still be able to do anything more than apple has to offer though. So still a better deal over productivity wise.

Hence the need for active cooling! Anyone who's worked with Windows knows that without a certain level of CPU horsepower, Windows will bring the system to it's knees if you're not careful with the kind of work you do on Atom level devices. I know it's KBL based but still passively cooled & 2c4t Pentium. I've got little problem with the concept, but a full fledged Windows isn't your Android or iOS that works nonchalantly on el cheapo devices, especially in laptop mode for extended periods of time. I'd definitely loved to be proven wrong, waiting for reviews now.