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Nydia Cavazos's avatar
Nydia Cavazos
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Oct 29, 2016
Solved

Welcome to the Surface Hub Community!

Hello and welcome to the Devices Community!  We are so glad you are here and excited to have this forum to collaborate and discuss all things Surface. You will find spaces for each one of our product...
  • Daniel Hudson's avatar
    Daniel Hudson
    Aug 26, 2020

    Tami_Moore While Cezar as a Microsoft representative has to be mindful of his responses, thankfully I don't.

     

    First and foremost, if you expected Surface Hub to just be a big Windows PC, you clearly haven't done your research on the product. There is plenty of information out there and on Microsoft Docs that clearly outlines the differences and limitations of the product. It's geared towards meeting room environments, and there are strict security implementations on the product as a result, such as no win32 support, UWP store installs only, and limited functionality for the key things usually undertaken in meetings (VC, Whiteboarding, and screen-sharing).

     

    This is what allows it to be a communal device where multiple people can use it as a shared device, while ensuring it is left in a ready state for next use. 

     

    If you honestly dropped $30k on the device without knowing the specifications in advance, that is frankly poor management! I have to justify every penny spent at my workplace and be very, very careful to deliver on those promises. I need to know, in advance, what I am delivering. Any quick search would have shown that running such applications like Unity, Photoshop, Illustrator etc. wasn't going to be possible.

     

    Now, onto some better news. As Cezar has said, you can put Surface Hub into replacement PC mode and connect up a PC. This will let you use all the functionality of the hardware (touchscreen, pens, speakers, cameras etc.) while leveraging a standard Windows 10 environment.

     

    Microsoft have also already indicated that they are planning to release a Surface Hub 2S that will run Windows 10 Enterprise, so at that point you can run win32 apps. Many industries require this (medical for one, education as another) so this will be possible soon, but will require you to purchase a new Surface Hub.

     

    Frankly, if all you wanted was a giant touchscreen connected to a standard PC, you should have bought a giant touchscreen and connected it to a Windows 10 PC. Surface Hub is a very targetted device for a very specific scenario.

     

    You can't hate on a product that doesn't fulfil your purposes when you clearly don't understand the product before putting the money down for it. The fault for that lies with you, not Microsoft.

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