Microsoft's Surface Laptop And Windows 10 S Invite Apple And Google To Thunderdome

Microsoft held its education focused event today, hashtag #MicrosoftEDU. So, what did we learn in class today kids? We learned that Microsoft is about to challenge not only Google in the education space by releasing its own education focused line of laptops and operating system in Windows 10 S, but the the Surface Laptop appears to be a direct competitor to the Apple MacBook Pro or Air. The real test will be to see how many juice boxes you can spill on it before it breaks. For the record, Chromebooks take four, or three Capri Sun.

Images of the Surface Laptop leaked ahead of today's event, which didn't seem to bother Microsoft at all. Even Microsoft, apparently content to let its Windows Phone and Surface Books ride off into the Zune sunset, should enjoy a little hype. The laptop was confirmed during the event, all the way down to the leaked specs.

Near the end of the Microsoft event Corporate VP of Devices Panos Panay finally announced the Surface Laptop (which students were apparently asking for), billed as the perfect tool for higher education. The laptop was presented in a slick commercial with a hyper-dramatic version of "You're The One That I Want" from Grease. Then Panay drooled over the laptop for a couple minutes, it was quite romantic. He spent a lot of time talking about how 'elegant' the laptop is. It was bordering on an Apple keynote on how much Panay festishized the design.

The Surface Laptop will come in four adorable colors; platinum, burgundy, cobalt blue or the always tasteful graphite gold. The keyboard will continue to be that soft alcantara fabric used on the Surface Pro 4 and the display will be a 13.5-inch PixelSense display, 3:2 aspect ratio. There will be a single USB 3 port, mini DisplayPort and no USB-C ports. The processor will be Intel Core i5 or optional Core i7 running on up to 16GB RAM with up to 512GB of SSD storage. All this is packed in a machine with an astonishing 14.5 hours of battery life (this is something that will surely be disputed and debunked in real-world testing).

The Surface Laptop is lighter and thinner than MacBook or Air as well as (reportedly) 50% faster than Air. To notch up the competitive nature of this device, the starting price will be $999 and is apparently available for pre-order now for a June release. The truth of this is, you are either an Apple person or a PC person. No matter how elegant or thin or cheap the Surface Laptop is, Apple fanboys will still buy a MacBook or Air over a better performing PC every day, then fight you to the death over which is better.

Also See: Microsoft Windows Phone Is Dead, Long Live The Surface Phone

In addition to the Surface Laptop, the Microsoft event also focused on the impact technology has on empowering students around the world to reach their potential. "How can technology create more opportunity, not for a few but for all? Our mission is to empower every person," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during his opening remarks. "Technology should help, not hinder teacher's work in the classroom. Technology should make teacher's lives simpler and spark students creativity, not distract from it."

Student collaboration and preparing students for technology jobs that don't exist yet was a running theme throughout the event. Terry Myerson, Vice President of the Windows and Devices Group, carried that theme into his Windows 10 S presentation. Windows 10 S is a streamlined version of Windows 10, everything that it runs comes from Windows Store and the apps are optimized to keep the app delivering the same performance from start to finish.

Additionally, the full Office 365 Suite will be coming to the Windows store. Myerson interacted with the Ohbot for a moment, but didn't linger on the block code STEM learning tool for very long. Windows 10 S has some security options to not let kids download apps outside of the Windows store. They also can't mess with the hardware of the computer.

As for the challenge to Google Chromebook domination of the classroom space, Myerson announced that new Windows 10 S education PCs will hit the market this summer starting at $189 through technology partners such as Acer, Asus, HP and Dell. The PCs will come with a free subscription to Minecraft Education Edition. Windows 10 S will also be free for all schools currently using Windows Pro PCs as well as Microsoft Office 365 for Education with Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Teams, launched in March, gets an upgrade as well to help teachers with collaboration. It's kind of like a Slack mixed with the proprietary collaboration tools colleges have been using for a while. The focus is on the conversation, the interaction between teacher and student. It also has emojis and gifs.

There was also a bit on mixed reality, or augmented reality, or what appeared to be Snapchat filters on Windows 10 S.

So will cheap Windows 10 S PCs compete in the classroom with the Chromebooks? It's hard to say. There were a lot of features announced today surrounding Windows 10 S, all of which seem a bit counter-intuitive to the grab-and-go on-the-cheap benefit of having a stack of Chromebooks around.

So I'm not sure how all this is better than a Chromebook in the sense of ease. A Chromebook has no software, nearly no setup and is cheap as hell. For IT guys, while the Windows 10 S setup does seem a bit simpler than any Microsoft OS has been in the past, Chromebooks are cloud based and don't require much of anything in the way of setup.

As for the rest of the Surface line, those items may get their refresh at the Microsoft Build event on May 10th. You'll have to tune in then to find out if Microsoft plans on continuing those lines or dropping them into the ocean with cement blocks tied around their processors. I'm sure we'll see some leaks ahead of that event if there is new hardware coming. If not, let's at least hope for some Surface Book GPU upgrades.