 Hi, I'm a Mac. And I'm a PC. I'm great for music, pictures, movies, you know, stuff like that. My Retina display is bright, beautiful, and accurate enough for everything from looking at old cat photos to creating the next stunning magazine cover. Design is in my DNA. I'm pretty much perfect for anyone who's both tech savvy and cool. Wait, PC, what are you doing? And now I am too. TunnelBear is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse privately and enjoy a more open internet. Try TunnelBear for free at the link below. Okay, so that wasn't an ad. This video isn't sponsored by Microsoft. It's just a fun little skit that we decided to do. But the Microsoft Studio is a huge departure from the spreadsheets and word processors image that Microsoft has had and even embraced in the past as a company whose bread and butter has pretty much always been businesses. One of the most immediately attention grabbing features of the Surface Studio is its aptly named Studio Mode, where the display moves with incredible ease on the zero gravity hinge from a vertical position down to just 20 degrees, an angle that was specifically chosen because it perfectly matches a standard drafting table. In this position, it is not only stable, but it is optimized for natural interactions with the Surface Pen and the Surface Dial, which we will check out in more detail later on. For now, let's take a moment to talk about its impressive 28 inch 3 by 2 aspect ratio, 4500 by 3000 resolution PixelSense display. This aspect ratio will naturally give you a lot more actual surface area than a similar widescreen monitor in the more cinematic 16 by 9 aspect ratio that has become standard on modern devices. But that's not its only interesting feature. It has 13.5 million pixels at a density of 192 ppi, which may not seem earth shattering at first, but consider this. Windows, since the 1980s, has been written for 96 dpi, meaning that at 192 you can run Windows 10 at exactly 200% scaling and avoid the text dithering and visual artifacts that show up at other scaling percentages or with other dpi counts in Windows. With the Surface Studio at 200% scaling, you get the great image clarity of the higher resolution, but the usability of larger icons and, for those of you still printing documents, 12 point font on the display is identical to 12 point font on a printed page, and if you hold up a piece of paper to the screen, 1 inch on the paper is 1 inch on the screen, just like the old days. And that's not the only thing that makes it look amazing. Each and every display is color calibrated at the factory to guarantee color accuracy and precision, which are not the same thing, by the way. It's the thinnest LCD monitor ever built at this size, with color profiles of sRGB, DCI-P3, and vivid. And they even threw in 10 point multitouch for those who, after seeing it for the first time, want to get the hands-on experience. Moving on to the base of the Surface Studio's display, we have the entire computer, actually. They fit everything in here that runs the screen, and I do mean to say it that way. It almost feels like there's been a role reversal here, where the computer feels like an accessory to the display instead of the other way around. To help you understand what I mean by this, we'll need to take a look at the specs. Our unit comes equipped with a mobile Intel Core i7-6820HQ processor and a mobile graphics card, last generation's Nvidia GTX 980M, along with 32GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 2TB hybrid drive rocking 128GB of solid-state storage at $4200. This is unsurprisingly the highest-end model, but don't imagine that the base version is particularly affordable, either. It costs $3000 and drops down to a Core i5, 8GB of RAM, an anemic GTX 965M, and half the storage. And no, it's not user-upgradable. iFixit gave it a 5 out of 10 due to its soldered RAM, CPU, and GPU. And you can't buy the screen by itself, and you can't even use the screen once the hardware becomes outdated by just plugging in another computer. There are no video inputs, just a singular video output in the form of mini-displayport on the back. Also at the back is an ethernet jack, a full-sized SD card reader, four Type-A USB 3.0 5GB ports, and a headphone and microphone jack. That's it, so pretty barebones for a desktop computer. But there is actually a rather cool grip-release AC power cable that won't give way to random tugs. That's kind of interesting. Back to the hardware. Let's talk about performance. The Surface Studio is using not just mobile technology, but last-gen mobile tech from both Intel and Nvidia, which means that while using it is smooth in the vast majority of still-art applications like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft's own Fresh Paint, and of course you can edit videos on it, its limited expandability and unexceptional specs mean it doesn't feel like a high-end video editing workstation, which was really disappointing to our editors here who were amped about using the dial for timeline scrubbing and other cool stuff on the Surface and whatever it is those guys do all day. And then that excitement was kind of lost. Microsoft's response to this criticism was that they were limited due to their design window. Making the Surface Studio work with these new technologies would have involved re-engineering the thermal design. But I can think of other solutions. Why not allow people to buy the screen and run their own more powerful computers like Wacom does with their Cintiq line of products, which I guess actually leads us into that comparison. Can the Surface Studio penetrate Wacom's stranglehold on the professional digital writing Surface market? Well, it holds up fine. The screen looks great and the huge surface area is awesome. But artists, including our neighbor Steve, who's pretty great at things, have issues with the Surface Pen not being as accurate in terms of pressure when compared to offerings from the other side. In the box, you get a Surface Studio, a Surface Pen, a Surface Keyboard, a Surface Mouse, a fancy Surface Power Cord, and that's it. No Surface dial. But before you go back to Microsoft in a huff and purchase the dial that you assumed was included in the box, considering how prominently they featured it in like all of its advertising, you might want to keep a few things in mind. One, it works with all Bluetooth equipped Windows 10 PCs, which is nice. It's not just a Surface device. Two, there is a relatively simple Windows Wheel API for application developers to integrate its functionality with their programs. But outside of developers, developers, developers, it is not user programmable in the same way that something like a Logitech or Razer keyboard would be. Sorry, Taron. No fancy custom macros, at least not yet. And three, you're probably just going to be using this thing on your desk, not on the screen. And if you want to use it that way, you'll be constantly moving it on and off of the display. That whole thing looked super cool in their video. But if you just leave it on your screen, it will ever so slowly slide downwards. Unfortunate as it almost hangs on even at relatively high angles. The dial is very cool with its 3600 points of precision and its beautiful modern design. But it feels like it's more something that will be used because it's nice and it's easy rather than because it's useful for hardcore professional use. So in conclusion, the Surface Studio is one of the most interesting product releases in my opinion of 2016 hands down. And I mean that about all aspects of the experience from just opening the box and seeing how they designed their uniquely elegant product packaging all the way to the specs of the computer itself and the truly courageous and unapologetically artistic screen. This is a new direction for Microsoft and one that I'm excited to see them continue to explore. It's expensive, but for high end consumers, it's a very cohesive experience. And as for professionals, I don't expect to see Cintiqs in the garbage behind all the local design houses just yet. But if the Surface Pro is anything to go by, give it a generation or two and we could be looking at a very different landscape. FreshBooks is excited to announce the launch of a new version of their cloud accounting software. It's been redesigned from the ground up, custom built for how you want to work. FreshBooks is a simple way to be more productive, organized and get paid quickly. You can create and send professional looking invoices in less than 30 seconds. And you can set up online payments with just a couple clicks and get paid up to four days faster. So put an end to the invoice guessing games and for an unrestricted 30 day free trial, just go to freshbooks.com slash tech tips and enter Linus Tech Tips in the How did you hear about us section. Thanks for watching guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do, but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit the like button or consider checking out the link of where to buy stuff that we featured in this video at Amazon in the video description down below. Also linked down below in the description is our merch store where you can buy cool shirts and hopefully get people that are in the studio to stop talking. I don't know if you can buy that option, but it is available. What you can do is watch this video, which is Pella's favorite video that we've made. That's a lot of pressure.