4343expected to cost £2,500+ offering
a 1TB hybrid solid state/hard disk drive,
8GB of RAM and a 2GB i5 processor.
You can have 32GB of RAM, a 2TB drive
and an i7 CPU if you want them, but
don’t expect much change out of £4,000.
As for the Surface Dial, that’s perhaps
the most interesting new feature of all.
The scroll wheel can be user-assigned
to whatever software parameters you wish,
whether that’s adjusting colour levels in
an image or simply scrolling through menu
options. It costs an extra $100 (£80 approx),
but offers a new level of hands-on control
that will appeal to certain types of users,
such as music and video producers.
Dial offers haptic feedback, and, if held
against the Touch’s screen, also brings
up default options (such as a colour wheel)
at the press of a button.
Tellingly, US buyers are being offered
$650 off the price of a Surface Touch if
they trade in their old Mac laptop, which
seems to confirm that Microsoft has its eyes
firmly on Apple’s core user base of creative
professionals. As we said at the start,
the old rivalry doesn’t look like cooling
any time soon...insult to injury. We’ve heard many long-
term Mac users – mostly music and design
professionals, who’ve been Apple’s core
market forever – say they’re now considering
buying Windows machines for the first time in
decades. But Apple’s clearly hoping brand
loyalty will keep its customers faithful.TOUCH DIALLING
Meanwhile over at Microsoft, all eyes are
on the new Surface Touch desktop, and
the accompanying Surface Dial.
The former is Microsoft’s first all-in-one
computer and is aimed at creative pros, with
a 28-inch touchscreen display that can be
tilted to just about any angle – even right
back to 20°, at which point you’ve essentially
got a high-tech drawing board. It’s a rival to
Apple’s 27-inch iMac, with the ‘basic’ modelto them, the existing function keys can be
made to appear on the strip by pressing
the Function key.
Other innovative features on the new
MacBook Pro include a power button
that doubles as a TouchID sensor,
and a much larger trackpad. So far, so good
- but there’s a rather large ‘but’ coming.
True to its ongoing obsession with making
everything slimmer and lighter, Apple has
served up a new MacBook Pro that’s almost
devoid of ports. There’s no MagSafe power
port, no HDMI, no Display Port, no SD card
slot and no USB – just two USB-C ports on
the entry-level 13-inch model, and four on
the 15-inch and higher-end 13-inch models.
The result is a machine that’s slightly
slimmer than its predecessor, but whatever
weight you save is likely to be more than
made up for by the number of dongles and
adaptors you’ll need to carry around – each
of which also adds to the cost. £10 here or
£20 there might not sound a lot, but given
that even a midrange 13-inch MacBook
Pro costs £1,749, while the top-of-the-range
2.7GHz 15-inch with a 512GB SDD costs a
whopping £2,699, having to fork out extra for
a pocketful of dongles does smack of adding
When even a midrange
13-inch MacBook Pro costs
£1,749. having to fork out extra
for a pocketful of dongles
adds insult to injury
37 April 2017