After Apple recently and Google in a few weeks, it’s Microsoft’s turn to celebrate the start of the school year with new product announcements. The Windows publisher has announced that it will hold an entirely virtual conference on October 12 at 4 p.m. French time.
Surface announcements
According to the company, this will be an opportunity to “talk product“, which suggests that we should know more about the new line of Surface computers from Redmond. The invitation card where is written “save the date” in handwriting leaves little doubt that we should see the latest machines signed Microsoft, which is traditionally accompanied by a stylus. This event will be held just before Microsoft Ignite, the annual conference of the company reserved for developers.
Incidentally, the announcement of the conference fell just hours after new rumors about these famous Microsoft Surfaces emerged on the web. The German site WinFuture, always well informed on these subjects, spoiled the surprise a little by revealing part of the technical sheet of the new machines.
A Surface Pro 9 with ARM processors
The Surface Pro 9, Microsoft’s star convertible which quite logically replaces the Surface Pro 8 of 2021, will a priori be equipped with an Intel Alder Lake i5 (1235U) or i7 (1255U) processor, depending on the configuration chosen. What a small jump in performance compared to the 11th generation processors present on the Surface last year. Tests of these processors show improved performance of 22% for the i5 and 12% for the i7 (in monocore). On the memory and storage side, the best equipped models could arrive with 1 TB of SSD storage and 16 GB of RAM. No change on the screen, however, the Pro 9 should keep the 13.5-inch panel of previous models.
More interestingly, this machine could also be available in an ARM version, with a 5G mobile processor made in Microsoft, the SQ3. This line of processors, comparable to that of the M1/M2 chips in Apple’s new Macs, was previously reserved for the Surface Pro X. The arrival of an ARM processor (inspired by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3) on the Surface Pro could therefore mark the end of Pro X. Incidentally, this also shows that Microsoft is taking the future of Windows on ARM seriously.
Prices above 1000 €
The other machine that we should see at the conference on October 12 is obviously the Surface Laptop 5. Microsoft’s “classic” laptop will also come equipped with twelfth generation i5 or i7 processors with 1 TB of SSD storage. No mention of a version with AMD processors has yet emerged on the web, but it would be surprising if Microsoft snubbed Intel’s rival this year.
The first price of the Surface Pro 9 should be around 1300 € according to WinFuture, while that of the Surface Laptop would oscillate between 1200 and 1500 €. Of course, this information should be taken with a grain of salt, none of these devices being officially commercially available, or even officially announced. That said, there is not very long to wait before knowing if the rumors were right.