Behind the design: Meet Surface Book 3, Surface Go 2 & Surface Dock 2

[FrankBuchholz]

Today we’re very pleased to announce updates to two of the most popular Surface devices for mobility and horsepower– Surface Go 2 and Surface Book 3 – plus the much awaited Surface Dock 2 that transforms Surface into a desktop PC. 

Panos Panay, who typically brings his unique passion to the stage in New York or London for Surface product announcements, penned a blog post noting how the versatility of Surface devices has never been more essential. 

"Instead of planes, coffee shops and offices, we’re moving from home office to kitchen table to couch, but our need for devices that keep us productive and connected has never been greater," said Panay, Chief Product Officer, Windows and Devices in the post co-authored with Robin Seiler, Corporate Vice President, Hardware Engineering. 

Surface Go 2 for Business packs more power and performance into our smallest, most affordable 2-in-1 form factor and comes with a higher-resolution 10.5-inch PixelSense display. Surface Book 3 provides a perfect balance of computational power and versatility in our most powerful laptop yet. And Surface Dock 2, is fully modernized with multiple USB-C ports, frictionless updates, and improved enterprise management capabilities.

In fact, we give you an exclusive device tour including a closer look at the internals and engineering design today on Microsoft Mechanics. 

Surface Go 2

Weighing little more than a pound, Surface Go 2 brings laptop-to-tablet flexibility wherever you go. Now with an optional 8^th Gen Intel core m3 processor, it’s 64 percent more powerful than Surface Go¹, enabling you to run the essential business apps you rely on every day.

Using the same form as the original Surface Go, we slimmed down the bezels to make room for a larger 10.5-inch display that delivers 1920x1280 resolution and an ultra-sharp 220 pixels per inch. Even though it’s the same size Surface Go, it now includes a larger 27-watt battery and increases battery life to 10 hours under typical use². And its fanless design means the Surface Go 2 is an excellent choice for high dust or sterile working environments.

What really stands out about Surface Go 2 is the breadth of premium features typically found only in devices costing considerably more. Like the rest of the Surface family, it now includes dual far field studio mics that improve how you sound during remote meetings and can also help facilitate improved voice-to-text functionality.

For commercial IT admins, Surface Go 2 for Business comes with a number of enterprise-grade features for security, manageability and mobility. For example, Surface Go 2 comes with:

• Silicon level security with a TPM 2.0 chip as well as an available on-board NFC chip.
• Built-in management capabilities that enable Surface Go 2 to be personalized with required apps and policies using the Windows Autopilot deployment service.
• Kiosk mode to restrict access to only the apps and tools employees need
• New e-SIM support and GPS on Surface Go LTE models connecting to 4G LTE Advanced across the most common frequency bands.
• And LTE services that can be provisioned and managed centrally from the cloud using Microsoft Endpoint Manager.

Surface Book 3

With its unique detachable form factor, Surface Book 3 for business brings the power and versatility to run the most demanding workloads from anywhere.

Whether you’re an engineer running computer-aided design, a data scientist crunching prediction models, or a game developer creating highly realistic action scenes, Surface Book 3 for Business provides the power and portability to get the job done.

In its most powerful configuration -- 10th gen Intel Core i7, NVIDIA® Quadro RTX™ 3000 GPU, and 32 GB of RAM -- you can create 3D designs, produce graphical content with real-time ray tracing and advanced shading and even run GPU-intensive machine learning and AI workloads.

Across the 13.5-inch and 15-inch Surface Book 3 family, you’ll find Intel core i7 processors and an optional core i5 processor on 13-inch models.

The top of Surface Book 3 is a detachable, full-fledged Windows PC in a tablet form factor with integrated Intel Iris™ Plus Graphics. Except for the 13-inch, core i5 model, every Surface Book 3 device includes both the integrated Intel GPU and a discrete NVIDIA GeForce 1660/1660 Ti or Quadro RTX 3000 GPU built into the keyboard base. The optional NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000 is exclusive to the 15-inch model and is a first for Surface. It features 6GB of graphics memory and 240 Tensor Cores to support demanding 3D and AI workloads.

While GeForce is ideal for consumers, gamers and creative professionals, Quadro RTX 3000 lets commercial uses run professional grade apps certified by more than 100 ISVs. Since Quadro RTX 3000 contains a superset of all GeForce functionality, you can still run all the same gaming titles that made GeForce the most popular GPU for gamers.

Surface Book 3 has the longest battery life of any Surface device. The battery behind the display combined with the one in its base, power the device for up to 17.5 hours of typical use with the 15” model³. For this generation, we’ve also refined the detach mechanism, which now releases twice as fast compared with previous generations. The 13.5-inch model comes with a color-calibrated 3000 x 2000 pixel display while the 15-inch model has a 3240 x 2160 resolution. At the top of the display, you’ll see the 5 megapixel front camera array with integrated IR sensor for Windows Hello. It also supports 1080p HD video.

It also incorporates our dual array Studio microphone solution with beam forming for authentic voice capture. And for the first time, its stereo speakers incorporate Dolby Atmos, to deliver rich, spatial sound and a better headphone experience.

Inside, the Surface Book 3 comes with NVME solid state drive options ranging from 256 GB up to 2 TB⁴. It includes a TPM 2.0 chip for enterprise-grade security and supports Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 wireless connectivity.

And for IT, Surface Book 3 can be personalized with required apps and policies using the Windows Autopilot deployment service. Plus, hardware capabilities can be managed centrally from Microsoft Endpoint Manager with the new Device Firmware Configuration Interface. For example, you can disable USB or camera devices and more to suit your needs.

Surface Dock 2

Lastly, whether you’re on site or working from home, the long-awaited new Surface Dock 2 provides all the ports you need to turn your Surface device into a desktop PC. Designed to rest firmly on your desk, the new Surface Dock shares the same overall design as the previous Surface Dock.

On the front, you’ll see two USB-C 3.2 ports capable of charging at 15 watts each. This is perfect for quickly charging phones and tablets or attaching your favorite peripherals. Moving to the back, you’ll see two USB-A ports, a 3.5mm headphone and microphone jack, Gigabit Ethernet, and power. The two USB-C 3.2 ports in the back drive external displays – you can use them to drive two 4K displays at 60hz or 5K at 30hz. Of course, you can easily adapt these to DisplayPort, HDMI, or other display standards for legacy display support. And, all USB ports are capable of Gigabit per second speeds.

Beyond the updated ports and performance of the new Surface Dock, we’ve added improved management support, facilitating firmware updates using Windows Update or downloadable MSI driver package for offline and automated installation.

Enterprise organizations using Surface Enterprise Management Mode can take advantage of new features to centrally manage Surface Dock 2 with certificate-based and port access controls. For example, the same Surface Dock can support different functions, depending on which device connects to it. With certificate-based controls, you can individually disable USB data, audio, or Ethernet on the Dock from Surface devices without required certificates. And if a managed device with the required certificate connects to the Surface Dock, it will unlock additional functionality. And, as with SEMM for other Surface devices, these settings can be managed locally or by Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager at scale.

We hope you enjoyed our overviews of Surface Go 2, Surface Book 3 and the Surface Dock 2. Don’t forget to watch more Microsoft Mechanics for the detailed tours, and of course, check out Surface.com for availability.

References

1. Geekbench multi-core score comparison of Surface Go 2 8th Gen Intel® Core™ m3 Processor (Microsoft Windows Version 1909) versus Surface Go (Microsoft Windows Version 1909); February 2020.

2. Surface Go 2 battery life: Up to 10 hours of battery life (up to 9 hours on LTE models) based on typical Surface device usage. Testing conducted by Microsoft in February 2020 using preproduction software and preproduction configurations of Surface Go 2. Testing consisted of full battery discharge with a mixture of active use and modern standby. The active use portion consists of (1) a web browsing test accessing 8 popular websites over multiple open tabs, (2) a productivity test utilizing Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook, and (3) a portion of time with the device in use with idle applications. All settings were default except screen brightness was set to 150nits with Auto-Brightness disabled. Wi-Fi was connected to a network. Battery life varies significantly with settings, usage and other factors.
3. Surface Book 3 for Business 15” connected to keyboard base: Up to 17.5 hours of battery life based on typical Surface device usage. Testing conducted by Microsoft in April 2020 using preproduction software and preproduction configurations of Surface Book 3 15” Intel® Core™ i7, 256GB, 16 GB RAM. Testing consisted of full battery discharge with a mixture of active use and modern standby. The active use portion consists of (1) a web browsing test accessing 8 popular websites over multiple open tabs, (2) a productivity test utilizing Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook, and (3) a portion of time with the device in use with idle applications. All settings were default except screen brightness was set to 150nits with Auto-Brightness disabled. Wi-Fi was connected to a network. Battery life varies significantly with settings, usage and other factors.
4. U.S availability for Surface Book 3 15": 2TB. Outside the US: 1TB. System software and updates use significant storage space. Available storage is subject to change based on system software and updates and apps usage. 1GB = 1 billion bytes. 1TB = 1,000GB. See Surface Storage for more details.