Panos Panay is going to show me something awesome.
We’re in Building 87, where about 250 of Microsoft’s industrial designers, user interface experts, and hardware engineers work together to build the future. Everything Xbox, HoloLens, and Surface is created here. I’m here for an exclusive look at the new Surface Hub 2 lineup, and Panay, Chief Product Officer, wants to show me something larger than life: an 85-inch version of the company’s new whiteboarding and workspace wunderkind.
Is it awesome? Indeed, this is the whiteboard all others bow down to. That flimsy piece of plastic in your office? It secretly dreams about being this. The Surface Hub 2S does more than any whiteboard in human history.
“We now have a wall that’s not a wall that became mobile that you can move from room to room and create on. This is an innovation that nobody has or can do,” Panay told Digital Trends. “It’s our history of Surface, the tech we put together, and our understanding of the customer.”
But at the end of the day, even this epic tool for your teams is useless without the right software, Panos acknowledges. And that’s part of the promise of the Hub 2 – both the 85-inch version (price TBD) and the 45-inch, $9,000 model — which is much different from 2015’s Hub. Instead of mounting on a wall, it sits at eye level on an easel designed by Steelcase. It’s light — 40 percent lighter than the first-gen Surface Hub at just 61.6 pounds, Microsoft says. A battery lives about halfway between the floor and the base of the screen, and a power cord curls neatly around it. Unplug the screen, and you can wheel it to any corner of your office, meaning collaboration is no longer relegated to your conference room.
Powering the Hub S2 is a custom version of Windows 10 and Microsoft Teams, which has a “Brady Bunch”-esque view for meetings, a whiteboard app for collaboration, the power of Cortana, the Microsoft Knowledge Graph, and more. Down the road, Microsoft envisions meetings that work seamlessly, automatic transcription, and software that detects confidential information and blurs it out of meetings. Like Windows 10 Insider Upgrades, incremental improvements to the Hub 2S and upgrades to Microsoft’s collaboration software will continue steadily. This hardware product will evolve. The Hub 2 is a work in progress – just like your office, right?
“The workplace is always going to be changing. I think that is, in essence, the modern workplace,” Panay explained. “What this product starts to do is, it gives people what they need today, to collaborate.”
Panay stresses that the product is an evolution, the workplace a journey, and Microsoft aims to help get people where they’re going.
“The beauty of this product – the combination of hardware and software – we’re not only going meet you where you are, we’re going to help you get where you’re going, and our products are going to be there when you get there,” he told Digital Trends.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Google DeepMind's AI world model Genie 4 can now build interactive worlds that you can explore and reshape as they run. It also generates ambient sounds, music, and dialogue that respond to your actions.
The new world model builds on Genie 3 with improved realism, more natural human movement, and better simulations of real-world physics. It could eventually help with everything from game development to training robots.
Apple has an incredible talent for making me admire its products while simultaneously questioning what on earth it's thinking with the pricing. This isn't even something as bizarre as a monitor stand, but the audacity for starting a new laptop lineup from $2,000 doesn't surprise me.
The newly announced 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 is just the latest to showcase this. The funny thing is, I already know that it's going to be a reliable workstation. You get a powerful new 2nm M6 processor, a gorgeous Liquid Retina XDR display, and up to 24 hours of battery life. We were impressed by the M5 MacBook Air, so the high-end M6 powered MacBook Pro definitely won't let us down.