Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio 2 is an iterative upgrade, but that feels surprisingly OK after some hands-on time with the device.
The Surface Laptop Studio 2 isn’t going to blow you away. Or, at the very least, it’s not the surprise device that it was when the original Surface Laptop Studio launched nearly two years ago.
Normally, I like to see some innovation. What’s the device going to do that the previous model can’t? There’s the extra performance, but the Surface Laptop Studio is already supremely powerful. The Surface Laptop Studio 2 justifies its existence in all of the small ways.
It’s half about software. The big news coming out of Microsoft’s September 2023 event was Windows Copilot — so much so that the two Surface announcements felt like a footnote stuffed into the last 10 minutes of the presentation. The Surface Laptop Studio 2 seems like the debut device for this new way to interact with your PC.
Everyone will get access to Copilot through the next Windows 11 update that arrives on September 26. However, not all PCs have an NPU, or Neural Processing Unit, which the Surface Laptop Studio 2 has. It seems Microsoft pulled some strings with Intel to get this dedicated chip in the Surface Laptop Studio 2. Intel’s other 13th-gen processors don’t support dedicated NPUs, but it looks like Intel made an exception for this device.
Up until this point, all of your AI interactions have been in the cloud; the PCs of yesterday didn’t have enough power to run those AI models locally at any reasonable speeds.
