Over the Christmas and New Year period, we’ve seen some pretty tempting discounts on Microsoft’s Surface Book, but now there’s some bad news regarding the damage a purchase will do to your wallet, with Brexit-fuelled price hikes hitting the convertible.
Thanks to the steep drop in the value of the pound relative to the US dollar following the decision to leave the EU, all Surface Book models have seen their price go up by £150 on Microsoft’s online store.
That means the base Surface Book with a Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage will now set you back a rather eye-watering £1,449 (you could get one for a discounted £1,104 just a month ago). The next model up, with the discrete GPU and double the storage, now costs £1,849.
As for the top-end of the range, the Core i7 offering with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage now tips over the three grand mark, at £3,049 to be precise. Ouch indeed.
- Still, Windows 10 makes the price hike bittersweet
Market misery
Microsoft confirmed the price rise to TechCrunch, telling the site: “In response to a recent review we are adjusting the British pound prices of some of our hardware and consumer software in order to align to market dynamics.”
Surface Pro 4 prices haven’t been affected – at least not yet. But if you’re mulling an SP4 purchase, now might be the time to make a move before any potential hike takes effect.
Back in October of last year, Microsoft announced it would be raising the prices of its cloud-based services by around 20%, and software by about 13%, although those increases were aimed at business users, not consumers.
Brexit is causing plenty of pain across the board in the tech world, with news earlier this week that Sonos is upping price tags across its range, and let’s not forget the likes of Apple, Dell and HP also increased the cost of their notebooks last year.
- Believe it or not, the Surface Pro 3 is still alive and kicking
