Microsoft may announce a new Surface Laptop tomorrow

Earlier this month, we caught wind that Microsoft was preparing a new, smaller Surface Laptop for later this year, reportedly with a 12.5-inch display. And now, two typically reliable sources are suggesting Microsoft will announce it tomorrow, October 1st.

It’s called the Surface Laptop Go, according to WinFuture’s Roland Quandt, who spotted one listing with Windows 10 Pro that cost as little as €649 (roughly $750 USD), which sounds a good bit less expensive than the Surface Laptop 3’s starting price of $999. Quandt speculates that versions with Windows 10 Home might be priced even lower.

WalkingCat, often reliable with Microsoft rumors, tweeted in mid-September that the company might host on either September 30th or October 1st to announce Surface devices, and Quandt says that tomorrow is now the expected day.

Of course, that lower price suggests you won’t necessarily get the latest and greatest specs. Quandt says we’re looking at a 1536 x 1024-pixel LCD screen (still with that spacious 3:2 aspect ratio, though!), a last-gen Core i5-1035G1 Ice Lake processor, and as little as 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. He also says that Microsoft may have cheaped out on that 64GB of storage again by making it a comparatively slow eMMC instead of a proper SATA or NVMe-based PCI-Express SSD.

In the fuller post, Quandt says we’re also expecting Wi-Fi 6 and a fingerprint reader baked into the power button with Windows Hello support for fast logins. 13 hours of battery also sounds nice if true.

We’re very eager to see what kind of design and value for money Microsoft can bring to the $700-$800 range. We liked the Surface Laptop 3, we liked the Surface Go 2 tablet, and this could be even faster and even less cramped than the Surface Go 2 for a little extra money.