News Microsoft announces Surface Studio AIO.

Microsoft has released a new product for the surface line, the Surface Studio. let's get the main specifications out of the way first.
• 28" Pixel Sense Display 4500x3000 (13.5 million pixels) with 10-Point Multi-Touch
• Core i5/i7
• GTX 965M or 980M
• 8GB/16GB/32GB
• Rapid Hyper Drive 1TB or 2TB
• 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0, and Xbox Wireless (For Xbox One Controllers)
• Full Aluminum Construction
• IO includes: 4 USB 3.0 ports, 1 Gigabit ethernet, SD card slot, 1 mini display port, and a cowardly 3.5mm headphone jack.

Preorders starts at $3000 for the base i5/GTX 965M model.

This product is meant for artist of all sorts and hass some nice features for them. The hinge looks really nice and is quite flexible. From the demos, it seems it can hold an arm for when you using it as a canvas.

What I'm really interested in is the Surface Dial. It's basically a knob you place on the screen and it brings up menus in supported apps. For example, it can bring up a color pallete in drawing app for easy choosing of colors. It can be used to zoom in and out as well.

So why am I posting this here? Well the managed to fit in quite a bit of hardware into an AIO. They fit all of the hardware into the base of the system. Not only that, they added support for the surface pen (which I love) as well as for new accessories that I am interested in. Leave your thoughts below!

Source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-studio

 

[confusis]

I hope you don't mind @MJVR1, but I took the liberty of converting your post above to a news article here: https://smallformfactor.net/news/microsoft-announces-surface-studio-aio

 

[Phuncz]

I like many aspects of the Surface Studio, but I'm also curious about a few. Something like this was missing in the design market since the Wacom Cintiq is the only competing product that I know of. Now for a more interesting $ 999 and $ 1,499 option for the regular mortals.

 

[K888D]

I love the idea of this, but I paid £1200 for a laptop with a 965m about a year ago, so $3000 seems a bit steep?

 

[confusis]

I think the 28" 4500*3000px touchscreen display and the flexible form factor may be a major factor in that price increase.

 

[BirdofPrey]

AIOs often run pretty steep on price.
I also notice, so far Microsoft has been putting out premium products.
Sure there's other touchscreen AIOs but not this good looking and thin and not with a pen digitizer as well.

 

[Phuncz]

AIOs often run pretty steep on price.
I also notice, so far Microsoft has been putting out premium products.

It is also the strategy for Google (more recently) and Apple (for dozens of years), the two other major ecosystem players in the game. There is much more margin and almost no competition in the upscale market. It took other mainstream-priced brands years to come close to an ultrabook that was of decent enough quality to justify the price or a smartphone that lived up to the "new standard".

So instead of going up from low-end or mainstream devices to rule the world, they're going down from high-end to mainstream. Makes sense, Apple has been very successful with that strategy.