Days after unveiling a Microsoft laptop with a weird choice of palm rest material and a new version of the Windows 10 operating system aimed at the education market, Microsoft announced that it’ll host a second event this month, dedicated to different hardware. At the time, we thought the May 23rd event would bring us news of the Surface Pro 5 laptop, an update we’ve been waiting for a while now. But it turns out that’s not happening this month.
In an interview with CNET, Microsoft’s vice president for Surface Computing Panos Panay suggested that you may have to wait a lot longer than just a few days to see an upgrade.
“If people don’t want to buy our Pro 4 at this time, that’s OK,” Panay said when asked whether people should buy the Pro 4 or wait for a successor. “What I’m super, super sure of is that the people using a Pro 4 have a product that’s going to be competitive for five years.”
That doesn’t sound too reassuring. Will there be any upgrades, CNET asked?
“When it’s meaningful, and the change is right, we’ll put it on market,” the extremely enthusiastic Surface creator said. “Meaningful change isn’t necessarily a hardware change, which is what a lot of people look for. They’re like, ‘Where’s the latest processor?’ That’s not what I mean. I’m looking for an experiential change that makes a huge difference in product line.”
“You’ll see that same meaningful impact when Pro 5, or Pro Next hits the market,” he said, adding “there’s no such thing as a Pro 5.”
This comment seems to indicate that Microsoft might not be looking to make a Surface Pro 5 device anytime soon. Or if it is working on one, it might not call it the “Surface Pro 5.”
So what is Microsoft announcing in a couple of weeks? The company will talk about what’s next, and it involves hardware. Is it AR/VR or mixed reality? Is it the strange Surface Phone that doesn’t look like a phone? Is it something completely different, like Cortana-based Amazon Echo rivals? We don’t have very long to wait before we find out.
