Surface Laptop Studio 2 is Reportedly Coming Later this Year

Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio may finally get a successor later this year. Windows Central’s Zac Bowden reported that the Surface Laptop Studio 2 could be announced alongside other Surface devices during an upcoming Surface event in September and October.

The Surface Laptop Studio made quite an impression when it launched two years ago. According to the report, the Surface Laptop Studio 2 will keep the same design as the original model that launched in October 2021, with a dual-pivoting screen that lets users easily transform the laptop into a tablet. However, the spec bump could be quite significant.

The original Surface Studio came with 11th gen Intel Core CPUs, with Core i7 models offering either Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti or Nvidia RTW A2000 GPUs in addition to the built-in Intel Iris Xe graphics. According to the Geekbench results from earlier this year, Microsoft’s high-end Surface Laptop Studio 2 model could come with a 13th gen Intel Core i7 CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU, and 64GB of RAM.

“My sources tell me that the company is planning to omit the Intel Core i5 model from the Surface Laptop Studio 2, which suggests the entry-level price point might be a few hundred bucks higher,” Bowden wrote. The reporter also believes that Microsoft has no plans to offer a version of its Surface Laptop Studio 2 with AMD CPUs. Last year, Microsoft also didn’t offer the choice between Intel and AMD CPUs on its Surface Laptop 5.

There is one last bit of information in that report that’s quite unexpected: The Surface Laptop Studio 2 may come with a dedicated neural processing unit providing access to Windows Studio Effects to improve video and audio calls in apps like Microsoft Teams. As of today, you need to have a Surface Pro X or another Windows on ARM device with an NPU to use these Windows Studio Effects.