The
Surface Studio Story: How Microsoft Reimagined The Desktop PC For Creativity
A 28-inch screen, a very special hinge,
and a new type of input device add up to an experience conceived with artists
and designers in mind.
"Lean on it!"
Panos Panay, Microsoft's hardware chief, is gesturing toward the
company's newest Surface device. Confused, I ask him what he means. "Lean
on it!," he repeats.
I don't want to do it—after all, busting a new computer during an
interview is bad optics. So he does it himself. Panay slouches over the 28-inch
display of the new Surface Studio desktop PC with his left arm cradling the
workspace on the screen in front of him. The display stays put.
Moments before, he had grabbed the top of the display and pulled
it downward from its upright position until its bottom rested on the desktop in
front of us and the rest angled backward to a 20 degree angle above the table.
It kneeled. That 20 degree angle, it turns out, is the same angle illustrators
like to position their sketch pads. In effect, the whole screen—a touch screen,
mind you—turned into a digital drafting table.
The Surface Studio, which starts at $3,000 and goes up to $4,200
for a fully loaded version, isn’t targeted at average desktop users. Microsoft
named it "Studio" because it’s aimed at giving creative types like
designers, engineers, architects, and illustrators all the tools and power they
need to practice their craft as well as perform everyday computing tasks such
as email and web browsing, all in one place.
With this desktop machine, Microsoft took many of the features,
design themes, and materials from the Surface tablets and the Surface Book
laptop and applied them to a machine for the desktop—the first one it's ever
designed and marketed. Like other Surfaces the Studio uses the
pressure-sensitive Surface Pen as an input device. (The Studio's version is
similar to the one that shipped with the Surface Pro 4, but with some upgraded
electronics.)
The Studio's other input device is an optional rotary dial that
sits directly on the touchscreen and calls up contextual menus, which the
display situates around its base. The Dial, as it's called, is a prime example
of Microsoft's effort to blend real-world experiences with digital ones in the
interest of helping creative types stay in the zone.
"What we wanted to do with this product is take you from
being the most productive person to the most creative person, and bring them as
close together as you can possibly could be," Panay says. "That when
you went to your desk, your desk was transformed into a studio—it was the thing
you wanted to get back to."
Panay oversaw development
of all previous Surface devices and in 2015 was given control of
engineering for other Microsoft hardware, including HoloLens, Xbox, and
phones. An energetic, bearded 40-something, he can be a little intense at
times. And he sometimes lapses into a Steve Jobsian "Isn't this
magical?" patter. But you get the feeling that it's all coming from a good
place. He believes deeply in the products the Surface group is building, and in
the ways the machines pull real creativity and productivity out of users.
I'd come to Building 87 on Microsoft's huge Redmond, Washington
campus to see a new Surface machine, but I’d been told little about it. When
the device was lifted up from under a conference table by Surface Studio
product lead Pete Kyriacou, my first reaction was, "Does the world really
need another all-in-one PC?" The category is already well established and
popular, represented most prominently by Apple's iMac, which pioneered it.
Panay tells me he doesn't like to call the Studio an all-in-one,
and I see his point. With its kneeling display, and pen and Dial input devices,
the Studio seriously stretches the definitional limits of the term. When I saw
the lengths to which his team had gone to put all the tools creatives need
close at hand, I started to see how the Studio could be a real alternative to
the Apple computers long considered the default choice by designers and
artists.
Based on the release timing
of the last few Surface tablets, it was reasonable to expect the next one, the
Surface Pro 5, to be announced at the company's October 26th event in New York
City. Instead, we're getting a desktop PC for creatives. (The Surface Pro
5 is in the works and will launch next year, says a source
with knowledge of Microsoft’s plans.) Microsoft is taking preorders for the
Studio starting today and says it will ship in limited quantities by the
holiday season; broader availability at Microsoft Stores and select Best Buy
locations will follow in early 2017.
And, really, a desktop PC
for creatives isn't a complete surprise. Last year's Surface Book was
aimed at designers and power users, and started at an imposing $1,500 at
launch. In fact, the Surface line as a whole has been shifting toward the high
end, as the Surface Pro found its market and the lower-priced, less-powerful
Surface RT and Surface 3 failed to set the world on fire.
Scuttlebutt about the
Surface Studio, and even its internal code name, "Cardinal," had
been swirling through the
rumor sites for months. A 2015 patent for a "modular computing
device" showing the exact outlines of the new machine showed up last
winter. But as I would soon find out, the patent sketches and rumors didn’t
tell the whole story—not even close.
The Surface Studio consists of a low-profile base unit that sits
on the desktop and houses the guts of the computer. Those components include
Intel’s core i7 processor, a powerful Nvidia graphics processor, and a pair of
stereo speakers, and the PC uses three fans and a heat pipe to keep it all
cool. As Panay steps through these features, the included mouse and keyboard
are sitting there, but he says nothing of them. He wants to talk about the
display.
A two-armed chrome hinge extends from the base to hold up the
28-inch display, which is only 12.5 millimeters thick. When the display is in
its kneeling position, it completely hides the base and the chrome arms of the
hinge.
"The
role of the display is to re-create the things you see in real life as
accurately as possible."
When Panay leans on the 13-pound display, the arms of the hinge
behind it seem to have no trouble with the weight pressing down on it. I hear
no creaks or groans. Nor does the display wiggle around. This is crucial for
designers and illustrators drawing exacting lines on the touch screen, and a design
concern that makers of conventional all-in-ones don't have to worry about.
Senior mechanical engineer Robyn McGlaughlin explains to me that
the chrome hinge is loaded with 11 springs that work together to create a fixed
range of motion between the upright display position we’re used to on the
desktop, and the 20-degree drawing-board mode. The user can position the
display at any point between those two extremes. As the hinge moves downward
from its upright extreme it begins rotating the display upward until it reaches
the 20 degree position at the bottom of the range.
Ralf Groene, who leads Industrial Design for the Microsoft Devices
group, says that he believes users will use the drawing-board display position
for detailed work, then use the upright position to get perspective.
"I have this awesome picture of Matisse where he works on
this huge piece and then he steps back from the canvas," he says.
"You do this in your work, when you are working on the detail. . . working
on this little solution here and then you step back to see how it fits within
the whole—we all do this."
Microsoft industrial
designer Kait Schoeck (who is, incidentally, one of the inventors of the
Surface Book's unique hinge mechanism) tells
me how the display positions fit into her workflow. "I do my normal CAD,
fast sketching, whatever, [in sketchpad mode]," she says. "And then
kind of prop it up and zoom back and do little tweaks here and there."
NOT ABOUT THE MEGAPIXELS
You'd expect that a $3,000 computer for artists and designers
would have a retina-class display, and the Studio does. But making the pixels
imperceptibly small wasn't the only challenge.
"The role of the display is ... to re-create the things you
see in real life on the screen as accurately as possible," says Stevie
Bathiche, a 19-year Microsoft veteran whose title is "Distinguished
Scientist/Director of Research, Applied Sciences Group." As you might
guess, he has a big brain. He’s also a personable guy, tall and gangly with
slightly out-of-control black hair. He talks fast, but, it seems to me, not
quite fast enough to keep up with his brain.
Bathiche says that the strategy for building the display was to
get it tuned perfectly with the operating system and apps, rather than going
for spec records. Perhaps the most striking example of this optimization was
when the Surface team decided to make the display true-to-scale, so that a
character in 12-point font on the screen would be exactly the same size as the
same character printed out on paper. An 8.5-by-11 piece of paper held up to the
screen matches perfectly the size of its digital cohort—a major benefit for
designers creating stuff that will eventually end up in print.
When Bathiche and his team were working out the specifications for
the Studio monitor, Apple had recently released a 27-inch iMac with a 5K
display. "I had the option to very easily beat Apple without really doing
anything in resolution," Bathiche said. "So I went to Panos and said
‘we can beat Apple by a megapixel, or we can do a true-to-scale display.'"
Panay and Bathiche agreed that true-to-scale trumps bragging rights.
But the screen resolution and dimensions had to work out just
right mathematically to make it all work. This started with a hard requirement
that the display’s have 192 dots per inch (DPI), because it made it possible
for Windows 10's scaling software to work out the number of pixels necessary to
display text and objects in their actual size on the display. That key number
then dictated some of the other key specs, such as the screen's diagonal
measurement of 28.165 inches.
The Studio display ended up having 4.5K resolution versus Apple’s
5K. "That gives us 13.5 million pixels, which is a million and a half less
than Apple, but more than enough to make the pixels disappear," Bathiche
explains. "I’m trading off this tiny bit of resolution that doesn't matter
at all."
When I stared closely at the Studio display, I could see no
pixilation. And the clarity and color depth is as good as anything I’ve seen on
a screen that size.
During my Microsoft visit, I heard the Surface Studio's inventors
say over and over that they wanted to make a piece of hardware that brings
creators up close and personal with their work. They like to talk about the
theme of "floating pixels," meaning that the person using the machine
is engaged with the touch screen, and everything else on the machine stays out
of the way, or better yet, disappears.
This sounded familiar—it’s a mantra repeated by Steve Jobs when
Apple introduced the iPad. I also heard a lot of talk about tight and elegant
integration of software and hardware, another big Apple theme from way back.
Apple may have embraced these themes long ago, but both seem very relevant at
Microsoft at this point in its history, as it takes on the challenge of
building great hardware to run its operating system.
"Part of the philosophy is that the computer creates a stage
for software, and we keep everything else quiet," Groene says.
Groene and his industrial design team did a lot to achieve that.
There’s almost no bezel around the screen, and no "chin" or
"forehead" of black space below and above the display. The base unit
and the chrome hinge hide behind the display when it's in drawing board mode.
The squarish base unit sits squat on the desktop, its outside
surface nondescript (but not ugly) and almost completely devoid of details. A
narrow groove runs around the machine just below its top edge; it contains small
cooling vents, which were a problem for the designers because they created
something to look at.
"We have a machine that paints the groove inside here and
reduces the contrast that you have between the holes," Groene tells me.
"And [senior industrial designer Tim Escolin] spent weeks with many trips
to China making sure that the color is absolutely right and we get everything
quiet."
All of these things have a cumulative effect. The base says
"nothing to see here" so well that the eye just moves on. Same
strategy with the chrome arms that hold up the display. The designers decided
to use chrome so the arms camouflage themselves by reflecting the environment
around them. And that’s about the best a piece of metal can do to disappear.
As Panay continues his conference-room demo, he produces a small
aluminum alloy dial—about the size of a large tuner knob on an old stereo
receiver—and puts it smack down on the touchscreen, which is then in drawing
board mode. The touch screen immediately produces a circular menu around the
physical perimeter of the dial. Then he starts turning the dial. By
highlighting various menu items, he switches between various modes and
functions of the app on the screen. I hear the word "whoa" come out
of my mouth.
This was the Surface Dial,
a totally new concept to me—if not altogether without precedent. It
provides users with an outboard, tactile controller for navigation and
selection that would normally be done digitally by tapping on the touch screen.
It has a rubbery material on its bottom so it doesn’t slide off (or damage) the
Studio’s touch screen. While a mouse’s specialty is pointing, the Dial is designed
for scrolling and moving quickly through menus.
The Surface
Dial,
as seen with the StaffPad music app
"The vision for a long time when Pete and I were designing
this product was connecting digital and analog worlds, and to continue to blend
them until everything digital starts to feel analog," Panay says.
"The idea that I can put something on the screen and watch it start to
come to life, and this theory that you can blend these two worlds is a pretty
impactful one."
The Dial can be used on the physical desktop or on the touch
screen of the Studio, but it’s when the user has the Dial up on the screen in
one hand and is using the Surface Pen with the other that the Studio really
sings. Back over in Industrial Design, Kait Schoeck sits in a tall drafting chair
sketching in the Sketchable app. She has the Pen in her right hand and uses the
her left hand to change ink colors and adjust stroke thicknesses with the Dial,
which is sitting on the touch screen, in her left. All I see on the screen is a
continuous line that keeps getting thicker and narrower and changing color. She
tells me she gets so engrossed in sketching or designing on the Studio that the
hours pass quickly.
Microsoft will launch the Studio with just seven app developer
partners that have created custom on-screen Dial controls in their apps. They
are: the CAD app NX (Siemens), the PDF navigation app Bluebeam Revu (Bluebeam),
the PDF markup app Drawboard PDF (Drawboard), the illustration app Sketchable
(Silicon Benders), the 3D sketch app Mental Canvas (Mental Canvas), the music
composition app StaffPad (StaffPad), and the animation app Moho 12 (Smith Micro
Software). The developers used an API Microsoft quietly released in August with
the Anniversary Edition of Windows 10 to create the Dial controls.
Note that big-name apps such as Photoshop and AutoCAD are not
included in that list. Microsoft says it’s now talking to or working with a
number of larger developers—including Adobe for Photoshop—that plan to add
deeper Dial menus and controls to their apps next year.
The apps I saw that already have Dial integration use it to keep
users locked in on their work rather than fumbling around with app controls.
The device is especially handy in apps that use timelines, like music and
animation apps. In StaffPad, for example, the Dial lets the music composer move
forward and backward in a piece of music, changing notes here and there, all
the while hearing the changes in the music through the Studio’s speakers.
The
Dial's arrival is the fulfillment of a very long-standing dream of Microsoft's.
StaffPad also wanted to radically simplify navigation by putting
many of the most-used tasks, such as play and pause, in a single menu around
the Dial. In one of the wilder uses I saw, a composer can pick up the Dial and
use it like a rubber stamp on the touch screen to paste oft-used figures to
various points on the timeline.
The coolest app I saw
running on the Studio with Dial was a 3D illustration app called Mental Canvas. It’s a bit hard to
describe, but it helps users make 2D drawings into 3D experiences by
mathematically working out the 3D perspectives of objects.
Mental Canvas is the brainchild of a Yale professor named Julie
Dorsey, who says that the Studio’s display, pen, and Dial make it the perfect
machine for her software. It uses the same general layout and some of the same
tools you see in other illustration apps—color wheel, layering, pen settings,
etc.—but rather than using a menu around the Dial on the touch screen to switch
between modes and tools, the user just moves the Dial near a mode button at the
bottom of the screen to go into that mode. This is a big click saver and can
help keep the user focused on the work and not on the software.
"There was this kind
of confluence of pen technology, and multi-touch through the tablet and so on,
that all made the timing for this particular technology just right,"
Dorsey says of the Studio. "It’s really like the device.
When I saw this I was elated."
The Dial can be used to do some basic functions in third-party
apps without requiring the developer to do any integration work. That’s because
the Windows team at Microsoft built a number of Dial functions into Windows 10.
These include things like selecting, scrolling, or zooming. For instance, it
will work for undo/redo and zoom in Photoshop, no work required on Adobe's
part. Users can also use it in Windows 10 apps such as the Edge browser and
Maps.
The Surface Studio and Dial work so well together that it seems
like an odd decision on Microsoft's part not to have bundled them. Instead, the
Dial is a $99 add-on, sold separately. (Microsoft is throwing in a free Dial
for anyone who pre-orders a Studio from Microsoft or Best Buy before December
1, however.) The Dial also works with other PCs that run Windows 10 Anniversary
Edition, but only the Studio lets users place the Dial directly on the screen.
The Surface Dial's arrival
is the fulfillment of a very long-standing dream of Microsoft's, dating all the
way back to the Surface table computer that
the company released with much hoopla in 2007. (It didn't take off and
eventually gave up its name to the Surface tablet line.) For that project,
Bathiche's team used infrared cameras that could detect objects placed on the
Surface's, well, surface—such as a board game with real pieces.
"The whole point was that we wanted to have physical objects
interacting with digital objects," Bathiche says. Now the Dial does just
that, in a way that enhances the Surface Studio's emphasis on creative
productivity.
In some ways, the Surface
Studio's biggest competitor isn't any Mac, but rather Wacom's Cintiq, the
pen-and-touch digital display popular with many designers and illustrators. A
current model with HD, touch, pen and a comparably sized screen—the 27QHD touch—costs
$2,800. That's not including the cost of a Windows PC or Mac needed to drive
the device.
The Studio combines a digital sketchpad and computing functions in
one device. "We want to remove all these things around your desk that you
think you need to work on, including papers, including a Cintiq or some other
thing you were writing on, including any other device that might be on your
desktop," says Panay. "I don’t want to say [the Cintiq] is gone
because I’m a big fan of Wacom but, fundamentally what this product is doing is
replacing that."
"It’s nice to stay
focused on one device," says illustrator Mike Krahulik, who cofounded the
video-game webcomic site Penny Arcade. He was one of a handful of
artists Microsoft chose to beta-test the Studio and the Dial. And before he got
his Studio, his desk was dominated by his Cintiq.
"My desk was for drawing and that’s it; I’m not going to play
games on my Cintiq, and even if I wanted to I can’t make it sit
vertically," Krahulik tells me. "If I wanted to answer email I did it
on my laptop on the little screen."
Krahulik adds that his only qualm about the Dial is that it
doesn’t have the customization options he’d have liked: "It’s incredibly
handy and works great out of the box with my drawing software, but I’d love the
ability to really go nuts and customize everything about what it can do on a
per-program basis."
People like Krahulik do
their design work from a home desk, but the Studio could begin to catch on with
companies full of designers, too. I can see a scenario where a large design
firm or ad agency might buy Studios for a whole department of creative people.
If they'd otherwise need computers andCintiqs, the Studio's price
tag starts to make sense—assuming that nobody's so Windows-adverse as to make
the Studio a non-starter. Krahulik told me the Surface Pro 3 and Surface Pro 4
have helped Microsoft's image among creatives.
Panay seems to have realistic expectations about the Surface
Studio’s acceptance curve, especially given that its price puts it at the
tippy-top of the market. "Don’t get me wrong I hope the demand is
off-the-charts great, but it starts at $3,000, so it’s not like we’re coming
out with an $800 PC," he says. "This is a premium [device], it’s for
professionals, it’s for creators..."
The
Surface Group at Microsoft isn't desperate for an immediate hit.
Yet he doesn’t believe that the Studio will ultimately be limited
to commercial customers. "I believe that creators are everywhere," he
says. "There’s going to be a whole group of people who just want this
device in their home because it’s beautiful."
As for sales expectations, "we’re going to take our time; this
isn’t one where I’m worried about ‘are we going to ship 100,000 units, or a
million units or 10 million units or 20 million units day one," he tells
me. "We’re going to ship the right amount to get it to market so that
people can get their hands on it."
It’s not like the Surface
Group at Microsoft is desperate for an immediate hit. Only a few years ago
people were making fun of
the original Surface, but you don't hear that very much anymore. In Microsoft’s
most recent earnings report, it said that Surface sales (mainly of the Surface
Pro 4 and Surface Book) jumped to $926 million for the quarter; that’s a 38%
jump from the $672 million in Surface revenue in the same quarter last year.
Bulk sales (read: enterprise sales) of 500 devices or more increased 70%
year-over-year, the company reported—a fact that helps explain how Microsoft's
PC line fits into the company's overall strategic
emphasis on workplace productivity.
That growth is proof of Panay’s understanding of the market, and
it’s gained him some real cachet within Microsoft. It could be that he and his
people had some breathing room to plan and build a Surface machine they always
hoped to create.
Still, he’s not taking
anything for granted. At the end of our meeting he shows me the Studio promo
video that will be shown at the October 26 launch event. The music is a cover
of "Pure Imagination," the late Gene Wilder's signature song in Willy
Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. You see some sexy shots of the Studio—the
thin display, the chrome arms. You see the Dial in action on the touch screen.
You see people getting really into creating things. You see the Microsoft
designers, and some of the people who developed apps for the Dial. It's slick.
As we walk down the hall after our meeting, Panay isn’t sure about
the music and whether it will play just right with the audience at Microsoft's
October 26th event.
"When you’re creating, at this point everything is at a
paranoid stage," he says. "You’re powering through and it’s our baby,
it’s our latest, you know, and you don’t want to miss, you don’t want to make a
mistake."
Hits and misses are hard to predict, but it's already clear that
Microsoft has brought fresh thinking to the desktop PC with the Surface Studio.
MARK SULLIVAN
https://www.fastcompany.com/3064893/the-surface-studio-story-how-microsoft-reimagined-the-desktop-pc-for-creativity
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