Microsoft Surface Keynote Set For Late October Highlighting Potential Surface Book 2
Fortunately, Microsoft has revealed that it will hold a keynote on October 31st at its “Future Decoded” event in London. As you might expect for a major announcement relating to Surface, division chief Panos Panay will be the chief presenter. Sources for The Verge indicate that at least once new product will be announced at the event, and there’s a strong chance that the successor to the aforementioned Surface Book will make an appearance.
The current Surface Book is powered by Skylake processors, while the rest of the Surface mobile family is using Kaby Lake. Intel just recently introduced new quad-core, 8-thread 8th generation (Kaby Lake Refresh) Core i5 and Core i7 processors, so there’s a chance that Microsoft could adopt these chips to power the second-generation Surface Book.
And given that the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 10-Series GPUs have been out for over a year now, we would hope that Microsoft could shoehorn in at least a GeForce GTX 1050/1050 Ti or GTX 1060 GPU inside the Performance Base. The current Performance Base makes use of a GeForce GTX 965M with 2GB of GDDR5 memory.
Microsoft’s Surface family took a big hit to its reputation last month when Consumer Reports dropped its recommendations of the Surface Pro and Surface Book. The publication cited worse-than-average reliability of the devices as a reason for the demotion.
"We are proud of our products and the amazing things our customers are doing with them,” said Panay in a public statement following the Consumer Reports’ decision. “We stand firmly behind the quality and reliability of the Surface family of devices, and I can confidently tell you there has never been a better time to buy a Surface."
There’s also a chance that Microsoft could unveil a portfolio of Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered notebooks and convertibles from its OEM partners that will run an ARM-compliant version of Windows 10. “We are on track to see Windows 10 Snapdragon devices become available this year as previously shared,” said a Microsoft representative in a statement. “Microsoft and Qualcomm continue to work closely with our OEM partners ASUS, HP and Lenovo in bringing Always Connected devices featuring always-on LTE connectivity and great battery life to market.”
