After dancing around the issue for several years, Microsoft has finally built a true laptop. The aptly-named Surface Laptop borrows heavily from the Surface Pro and Surface Book’s design elements, with a focus on the beautiful PixelSense display and fuzzy alcantara fabric surrounding the keyboard. It certainly looks the part, but there’s a lot more to high-end laptops than aesthetics.
It’s also the first system to run Windows 10 S, a special version of the operating system that cuts out x86 app compatibility, leaving only software downloaded from the Universal Windows Platform to run. To a lot of users, that sounds like a downgrade from the regular version of Windows 10, because it is. It’s intended for administrators handling dozens or hundreds of systems, because it prevents the end user from installing any malware or custom software. It’s a direct attack on a piece of the market entirely owned by Chrome OS, except Microsoft forgot to drop the price.
The Surface Laptop starts at $1,000, well above the $150+ Chromebook starting price, and the $300+ point where Windows 10 with Bing laptops are available. It includes more premium components, and a high-resolution PixelSense touch display, but not all of the parts are up to snuff with its competitors in the $1,000+ price range.
So why would someone want to pay more, for less? We’ll talk about our time with Windows 10 S and the Surface Laptop, and maybe even glean some insight from our conversation last week with Panos Panay, and our very recent trip to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, all on this week’s episode of Close to the Metal.
Close to the Metal is a podcast from Digital Trends that takes a deep dive into computing and PC gaming topics. Each show, we’ll focus in on one topic, and leave no stone unturned as we show off the latest in hardware and software. Whether it’s the latest GPU, supercomputers, or which 2-in-1 you should buy, we break down the complicated jargon and talk about how user experience is affected in the real world. Please subscribe, share, and send your questions to [email protected]. We broadcast the show live on YouTube every Tuesday at 1pm EST/10am PST.
After five years with Apple silicon, from the original M1 MacBook Air to the M5 MacBook Air released earlier this year, I've watched these chips mature not just on the spec sheet, but in real-world workflows and overall efficiency.
The new M6 chip might sound like a routine generational upgrade, but it's the company's first chip built on a 2nm manufacturing process, which brings meaningful improvements over previous Apple chips.
Gemini Notebook’s mobile app now has a built-in recorder for capturing lectures and meetings as sources. You can record directly where you’ll use the material, skipping the separate recording app and the file upload afterward.
Google announced the feature on X, highlighting classroom lectures and team meetings as potential uses. It also works for capturing your own thoughts, so you can talk through an idea and bring that explanation into your notebook while it’s still fresh.
In 1950, Alan Turing asked whether machines can think. Rather than argue over definitions, he turned the question into a party game, where an interrogator trades typed messages with hidden players and tries to work out who is who. Since then, chatbots have gotten so good that they have already fooled humans in modern versions of the test.
So, four researchers from Paris Cité University asked the obvious follow-up question in a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports: can AI at least catch its own kind?