- Alright, this week on Ask Dan with Windows,
we're gonna talk a lot about Surface,
specifically will Microsoft ever
make a Surface gaming laptop?
What's the status of Andromeda at Build,
and does the surface team have
any other surprises up it's sleeve?
Stay tuned.
(upbeat music)
What do you think are the chances that Microsoft
makes a gaming focused Surface?
Okay, so I like this question a lot,
'cause it's something that I had been wondering myself.
Short answer, I think there's actually
a good chance they'll do this,
and I say that for a couple of reasons.
For one, Microsoft is very big on gaming,
they even discussed this recently
on their latest earnings call.
Where they said one of the biggest
areas of investment is, well, gaming.
Xbox is doing very well, so why not?
After all, when it comes to PC's,
the gaming ones are the ones that are doing the most growth.
So there's a lot of opportunity there.
Having said that I do wanna point out,
I'm not hearing anything specific about gaming,
although there's a little bit of rumors around Andromeda,
but that won't be a gaming level
laptop for what are obvious reasons.
But regarding this topic, I wanna ask you a question.
What would a gaming focused Surface even look like?
For instance, the Surface Book Two, 15-inch,
for a lot of reasons is sort of gaming focused,
or at least has gaming abilities, it has that GTX1060,
plenty of ram, really nice display,
and very good battery life,
but it's not perfect of course.
So what would a Surface that's focused
on gaming actually look like?
I'm not really too sure.
We could throw in a GTX1070, and a 1080, why not?
Throw in some DDR4 ram, really crank it up.
Maybe a new six core processor from Intel at 45 watts,
to really give you that CPU boost, but in terms of design,
I'm not really sure what else would be different.
I know one thing's for sure,
it probably wouldn't attach as a tablet.
The Surface Book two, as cool as it is,
does make a lot of compromises for having that design.
I'd presume a gaming focused Surface would not do that,
so that'd be kind of interesting.
You'd look at basically a large Surface laptop,
with a lot more horsepower underneath.
I don't think Microsoft's gonna have anything
come out in the market anytime soon,
but that Surface team does work on a lot of form factors
in different devices and I wouldn't be surprised
if they batted this idea around.
Don't forget, the Surface hardware team
is now involved with the Xbox console design as well,
so those teams do interact with each other.
Whether or not we'll see anything remains to be seen.
But leave me a comment below what you would like to see
from the Surface team if they were to tackle this project.
Do you think we will get to see an Andromeda device
of some sort at Microsoft Build,
or is it more likely they'll just outline what devs
should know about the new form factor?
So this is a really good question.
We are just a few days out from Microsoft Build,
and Zack Bode and I've been going
back and forth about this topic.
Unfortunately if they are gonna reveal this at Build,
we don't know about it, I wish I could tell you differently,
but that's the case right now, we're not hearing anything.
We did hear rumors early on that they may do
some sort of dev play app build regarding Andromeda,
but there's a few ways I could see Microsoft spinning this.
They could just talk about Andromeda OS,
that is Windows Core OS,
and what it's functionality will be,
the sort of next generation level of Windows
and what devs should know about it.
And they could do that without necessarily showing
the hardware known as Andromeda until the fall.
And that would be kind of interesting as well,
they can just talk about new form factors,
sort of tease it,
we'd all know what they were talking about,
but give developers the information they need
to start getting ready for this.
Don't forget, while devs don't have
to rewrite their UWP for Andromeda,
they will have more options for that
dual screen option and a few other gestures as well.
So I'd like to see Microsoft talk about that,
after all, build is about developers,
and they're gonna be the ones that are gonna be key
to making Andromeda successful.
Regarding hardware itself, I'd love to see them get on stage
and do a one more thing, and reveal the hardware,
but I really don't see that happening just yet.
But who knows?
It could actually happen.
While I do hope they tease something about Andromeda,
we do have to keep in mind that build, traditionally,
at least for the last few years,
has not been about revealing new consumer products,
they wanna stick to the dev plan.
Still, I do hope they do talk about Windows Core OS,
fingers crossed that they do.
Should we expect more surprising devices
from Microsoft besides Andromeda?
So this is a great question because
I think it addresses one of the
fundamental concerns about the Surface team,
which is creating new hardware to showcase Windows 10.
Now the laptop itself has been kind of finished for a while,
although we are seeing some creative uses
and new technologies around it,
for instance the X1 Yoga I have
in front of me is really unique,
and then you have desktop PC's,
which well are powerful, form factors kind of done,
and sales are not gonna go through the roof anytime soon.
What Microsoft needs to do to survive
is put Windows on other devices
and specifically things that haven't been created yet.
Windows Core OS will be fundamental to this transition,
as it'll allow that OS to live on smaller, lighter devices.
I wrote an article in January,
talking about how the future laptops
may involve dual screen devices,
that is a screen that you look at,
and also the screen where the keyboard is,
and a lot of people have dismissed that
saying there's no way you can replace a full keyboard,
but I say what and see.
I think you're gonna start to see
a push for this in 2019, 2020.
And we may even see something later in 2018,
not necessarily from Microsoft,
but perhaps other companies will take up the task.
In conclusion though, yeah,
the Surface team is all about surprising us,
and I'm sure they're working on a ton of projects.
I would love to see a wearable come from them
at some time in the future.
And who knows what other devices we'll see.
I don't know, why don't you guys tell me in comments
what you think they should be working on?
So that does it for this episode,
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Thanks for watching, take care everybody.