A follow up to Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio could finally pack the power customers and fans have been begging the company to deliver for years.
Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio was notably missing from the company’s 10-year Surface Anniversary updated product list last year as it focused more on its flagship Surface Pro line and more standard laptop fare.
However, according to Zac Bowden over at Windows Central, the next Surface Laptop Studio is not only on the product list for upgrades this year, but the upgrades will be the most modern inclusions Microsoft will deliver in half a decade.
Sources familiar with the devices engineering have told Zac that customers can expect a Surface Laptop Studio 2 to be amongst the upgraded Surface devices as they wrap up work on it internally as project Esra.
While a “new” Surface Laptop Studio is up on the horizon, Bowden also explains that the laptop will most likely resemble its predecessor from 2021. Sources familiar with project Esra, say “not to expect any major design updates to the external chassis, and there’s unlikely to be a new larger model to accompany the 14.4-inch variant.”
Despite the lack of an external glam-up, the Surface Laptop Studio 2 could pack a significant performance-punch update according to Geekbench testing recently spotted by Twitter user Gustave Monce. Based on the Geekbench data, the Esra, or the Surface Laptop Studio 2, will come with Intel Core i7-13800H core processor paired with an NVIDIA RTX 4060 GPU, and up to 64GB of memory.
Nice laptop 👀https://t.co/vb4YsOvVCQ
— Gustave Monce (@gus33000) February 23, 2023
As noted by Bowden, the final production unit may or may not ship with the Geekbench marked specs as Microsoft is simply testing configurations at the moment. While most tested devices tend to make it to the shelves, there is a possibility Microsoft gets gun-shy and delivers a device with slightly less impressive specs such as the other tested configuration of an i7 with 16GB of RAM and a discrete Intel Iris Xe GPU.
Microsoft has tended to play it safe with its processors and GPUs ever since it got burned by Intel delivering a generation of chips that led to issues with Windows Sleep Mode, resulting in hot bags and bricked devices for customers back in the day.
Often times, Microsoft will place a last gen CPU and seemingly underpowered GPU in its latest flagships as a way to both avoid similar past mistakes, and as a way for the company to make sure it has the latest driver sets and BIOS updates in place.
In addition to possibly delivering a device with the latest specs, the Geekbench testing scores also show a significant boost in performance between the Surface Laptop Studio and the Studio 2 with a single-core score of 2564 and multi-core score of 12643 versus the previous scores of 1985 and 6788.
2023 could be one of the most significant upgrade years for the Surface product line as many look forward to port and design changes to the Surface Laptop, improved Windows on ARM performance for the Surface Pro line, and this new performance boost to the Surface Laptop Studio.