Here’s a pretty good way to help spark sales in the post-holiday doldrums of early February. This week, Microsoft rolled a handful of new configurations that drop the entry level pricing on a few of its Surface products, in an effort to help drum up some sales during a particularly slow time of year.
The updates were spotted by Windows Central — after all, Microsoft’s not exactly broadcasting the new SKUs. Most of the primary messaging behind the company’s proprietary line of PCs and convertibles has centered around their high-end specs. It’s a point the Microsoft has hammered home as it’s worked to make the products viable MacBook competitors.
A $799 Surface Laptop is the most compelling of the bunch. That makes the product $200 cheaper than the former entry level model. It’s a pretty tempting price point for the hardware, even if the specs are pretty dismal as far as these things go. The system’s powered by an Intel Core m3 chip coupled with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage.
Though the fact that device is running the stripped down Windows 10 S could help it make the most out of lackluster hardware. After all, while the education-focused version of the operating system was launched along side the Surface Laptop, it’s really designed to run on low-priced hardware, like the $189 systems its hardware partners have been producing for the classroom.
For what it’s worth, I very much dug the Laptop’s design when I reviewed the system a while back. Granted, there was a lot more firepower under the hood in that configuration.
There’s also a cheaper version of the Surface Book 2 on the site now. That one’s $1,199 for an i5 processor, 8GB RAM and 128GB of storage.