Hands-on with the Surface Studio, Microsoft’s first desktop computer

NEW YORK—Microsoft has built a really strange computer.

As a piece of design, there’s a lot to like about the Surface Studio. There’s no avoiding the fact that its screen, a custom-built, 28-inch 4500×3000 unit that’s barely more than a centimeter thick—is strikingly gorgeous. It’s large, it’s bright, its colors are glorious (it supports the DCI-P3 color space with 30 bits per pixel, which gives it much more punch and depth, especially for reds), and its thickness, or rather, lack thereof, is remarkable. There’s no taper or anything like that; the display is a uniform 12.5mm/0.5″ thick, and it looks incredible. It makes the LCDs that sit on my desktop at home look as dated as my LCDs make a CRT screen look.

There’s engineering smarts in there, too. That beautiful screen is heavy. It weighs about 6.1kg/13.5lbs, and if you pick it up on its own you notice it. But Surface Studio’s party trick—folding the screen from its regular upright position down to a 20 degree angle for “studio mode” where it becomes a computerized drafting table that you can write and draw on—is effortless. The weight of the screen is near perfectly balanced by the springs within the hinge, allowing you to move it between the two positions with a single finger. Microsoft calls it the “Zero Gravity” hinge (because it’s as if the screen had no weight) and it really works.

And as is Microsoft’s habit, there’s human interaction novelty, too, with the Surface Dial. This is a Bluetooth spinner and clicker with haptic feedback. Spinning the wheel can invoke either system functionality (such as changing the volume) or application features (such as the amount of red, green, or blue used by the current paintbrush in a painting app); there’s an API to allow third-party software to provide Dial-specific capabilities. Its unusual feature is that it can be used off the screen, or, when in studio mode, on the screen. When used on the screen, the Surface Studio knows exactly where the dial is and can draw radial menus or other controls around the device.

This calls to mind the Surface Studio’s namesake: the original Surface tables that ran Windows Vista. Those tables could detect and identify certain objects when placed on their surface and could accordingly draw interfaces or other information around those objects. The objects were then tracked as they were moved around the screen, providing a kind of blending between a physical artifact and the digital world.

Where this comes to its own is when being used with pen input; you can twiddle some property of the pen with your off hand while drawing with your dominant hand, to allow, say, changing the color of a stroke as you draw it. This kind of two-handed pen input is a rarity, and it shows that Microsoft is continuing to think about how people use and interact with computers and trying to push new styles of interactivity.

But here’s the thing, and here’s why the Surface Studio is really strange. The Surface Studio looks very good. The computer tucked away in its base isn’t as powerful as I would like—I’d like a stronger GPU than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M—but can still handle reasonable gaming, albeit not at the full native screen resolution. It’s a very desirable machine, smartly designed and nicely put together. It’s just that it flies in the face of what an all-in-one system really is.

While all-in-ones have long been part of the computing landscape, it was arguably Apple’s original CRT iMacs that truly made them into desirable, and even iconic, systems. And those iMacs were computers for everyone. They still offered an esoteric, technology-led view of the world, thanks to their embrace of USB connectivity and removal of the floppy drive, but they did so while retaining strong affordability and wide audience appeal. Most all-in-one systems seem to follow a similar path. While some of them can be quite expensive, especially when fully configured, they still retain that sense of being general-purpose jacks of all trades.