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The Kind Cowl has a charging/storage spot for the Floor Slim Pen 2, identical to the Floor Professional X. The Floor Professional 8 and X now share the identical accent ecosystem.
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The Slim Pen 2 sliding out of its slot within the keyboard case.
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In profile. Notice the 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports, the headphone jack, and the continued existence of the Floor Join port.
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The Floor Professional 8 could have user-replaceable SSDs, although you will be restricted to brief M.2 2230 drives.
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Microsoft has formally introduced the Floor Professional 8, and the rumors have been just about on the cash. The brand new pill features a bigger display screen with a 120 Hz refresh charge, up to date inside {hardware}, user-replaceable SSDs, and a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports that change the USB-C and USB-A ports within the earlier mannequin. It is probably the most important (and in addition: solely) redesign that the pill has gotten for the reason that Surface Pro 3 back in 2014. The Floor Professional 8 is available for preorder today, and a model with a Core i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage will set you again $1,100 (plus the price of a $180 Floor Professional Signature Keyboard cowl and the $130 Floor Slim Pen 2, or $280 when you purchase each). The primary preorders will start transport on October 5, the day Home windows 11 launches.
The Floor Professional 8 adopts many of the design tweaks Microsoft first tried out within the Surface Pro X in 2019. Actually, the 2 tablets now share a number of the similar key bodily specs, together with the 13-inch 2880×1920 show measurement and determination and the very same top and width. Like most laptops launched in the previous couple of years, the display screen measurement enhance comes from shrinking the show bezels relatively than dramatically altering the dimensions of the machine. The Floor Professional 8’s display screen does assist as much as a 120 Hz refresh charge for smoother scrolling, however the pill will probably be configured to make use of the extra typical 60 Hz refresh charge out of the field.
The Floor Professional 8 is a couple of tenth of an inch (or 2mm) thicker than the Professional X to make room for added cooling, however the an identical top and width implies that the Floor Professional 8 and the Floor Professional X use the identical keyboard cowl, now renamed the Floor Professional Signature Keyboard. By the identical token, the keyboard covers that labored with all Floor variations from 2014’s Floor Professional 3 as much as the Floor Professional 7 will not be appropriate with the Floor Professional 8.
As a result of it makes use of the identical keyboard, the Floor Professional 8’s keyboard cowl can now be used to pair with and wirelessly cost the Floor Slim Pen or the brand new Floor Slim Pen 2, which helps the identical 4,096 stress ranges because the previous one however strikes the pen’s button from the slim facet to the flat facet and provides a haptic vibration motor to recreate the “feeling you get with pen on paper.” That haptic suggestions characteristic solely works on the Floor Professional 8 and Floor Laptop computer Studio, because it depends on their “customized Microsoft G6 processor” to work. Present Floor Pen fashions ought to proceed to work with the Floor Professional 8, simply because the Floor Slim Pen 2 will work with Floor gadgets going again to the Floor Professional 3.
Internally, Microsoft has refreshed the Floor Professional 8 with commonplace laptop computer {hardware} for 2021—Eleventh-generation Intel Core i5-1135G7 and i7-1185G7 processors with Intel Iris Xe GPUs and 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB of RAM. Both of those will present a stable increase to CPU and GPU efficiency in comparison with the Floor Professional 7’s Tenth-generation CPUs. However whereas Microsoft has included AMD Ryzen processors in a few of its different Floor gadgets, the Floor Professional 8 is barely accessible with Intel chips.
There will probably be variations of the Floor Professional 8 for companies that embody a Core i3 possibility and Core i5 and i7 processors with vPro assist, however most individuals will not be capable to purchase these variations—that is a change from the Floor Professional 7, which makes use of a Core i3 in its entry-level shopper configuration. The industrial model of the Floor will also be configured with Home windows 10 relatively than Home windows 11, suggesting that guide downgrades will probably be doable for individuals who actually need to do it.
The Floor Professional 8 additionally picks up another useful characteristic from the Floor Professional X (and the business-only Floor Professional 7+ from earlier this 12 months): user-replaceable SSDs, accessible by popping open a small entry door on the again of the pill. There are limits to this characteristic, although. The Floor SSD slots do use the usual M.2 interface, however they solely have room for a brief M.2 2230 drive (that’s, 30mm lengthy) relatively than the extra typical 2280 (80mm lengthy). Microsoft additionally recommends that you simply solely use Microsoft-branded SSDs, lest you threat lowered efficiency, although this does not appear to be a hard-and-fast requirement. So you will not be capable to pop any previous commonplace M.2 SSD into the Floor, however you at the very least have recourse when you purchase a model with 128GB or 256GB of storage and determine you need extra in a 12 months or two.
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