Microsoft’s Surface line has been one of the company’s biggest successes in recent years, carving out a niche in the PC hardware market with far greater success than any of its previous efforts. At this week’s Ignite conference, attendees were given a glimpse into the building where all the magic happens.
Delivering a keynote at the conference, Director of Program Management Tim Golik offered up some fascinating insight into how the Surface team works in Building 87 on Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington campus. The talk covered its focus on innovation, as well as its preferred techniques for design and prototyping.
Golik played up the “unique” aspects of the Surface line, from its bespoke 3:2 displays to its system-wide compatibility with the Surface Pen peripheral. “We’re pushing these things,” he explained, referring to the way that the Pen has been implemented across Windows 10, after being something of a passion project for the Surface group in the very beginning.
As well as an exploration of the ethos behind the design of Surface products, the talk honed in on the culture that was established among the team. Golik characterizes the group as being comprised of small teams of designers, engineers, and user researchers, who combine their skills to try and come up with something genuinely new and useful.
“Everything we do, it starts with something physical,” Golik said. “We have a lab on campus, it’s called Building 87. It’s an amazing space, to be an engineer. This is where a lot of it starts.” These comments introduced a video about the facility, which made it look like a hub of activity and collaborative work.
The presentation concluded with a look at the latest addition to the Surface line, the Surface Pro LTE. This device was announced in May, per a report from MS Power User, but since then Microsoft has remained fairly quiet on the system. Now, the Ignite conference has offered up confirmation that the LTE model will be available beginning December 1.
As for what is next for the Surface line, Panos Panay is scheduled to make an address at the Future Decoded event in London next month.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).
Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?
According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.