Surface Pro 4 uses a Y-series part in the cheapest model, and it would stand to make big gains from a Kaby Lake upgrade.
Kaby Lake, which started shipping last autumn, is not a huge advance over Skylake, but it's a more power-efficient design that offers meaningful improvements in battery life, improved encoding and decoding support for 4K video, and, for the low-power Y-series parts, meaningful improvements in performance. The Pro 4 and Book were early adopters of Intel's Skylake processors, but Skylake is now a generation old. The march of technologyĮighteen months is a long time to wait for systems to be refreshed. Microsoft didn't offer numbers, but we'd imagine that the majority of Surface sales are of the portables. With its high price-it starts at a dollar shy of three thousand bucks-and niche utility-it's compelling if you're in the market for a Wacom digitizer, but otherwise something of a curate's egg-Surface Studio is not designed to be a big seller with mainstream appeal. These portable systems were joined late last year by the Surface Studio, a fascinating but flawed desktop system.
Surface Book has been slightly updated-a variant with a better GPU was added in November 2016. The Surface Pro 4 available today, about 18 months later, is unchanged. These systems were launched in November 2015.
The Surface range has two main products: the Surface Pro 4, a tablet-style two-in-one, and the Surface Book, a laptop with a detachable screen. The company's 10Q filing used rather clearer language: Microsoft simply didn't sell as many Surface systems. In its analyst call, Microsoft ascribed the drop in Surface revenue to "product end-of-lifecycle dynamics," whatever that means. The company has been winding down its phone operation, writing off the entire value of the phone business it bought from Nokia and laying off thousands of former Nokia employees in the process.īut the story with Surface is more unsettling.
The phone revenue is no big surprise: Microsoft has all but abandoned the market, and the last phones to sport a Microsoft logo-the Lumia 950 and 950 XL-are no longer sold. But there were a couple of significant black marks: Phone revenue has dropped to effectively zero, and Surface revenue was down sharply year on year, with a 26-percent drop in revenue. Microsoft's third-quarter financial results were published yesterday, and they had many high points: cloud revenue is growing well (though we have some misgivings about how the numbers are reported), Windows outperformed the PC market, and Office 365 passed 100 million corporate seats.
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