Following the introduction of a new entry-level Surface Laptop which is $200 (around £140, AU$250) cheaper, Microsoft has pulled the same trick with the Surface Book 2 over in the US, with a fresh base model that retails at $1,199 (around £850, AU$1,500).
That’s $300 (around £210, AU$380) less than the previous minimum amount you had to fork out for a 13.5-inch Surface Book 2, and the move obviously makes the hybrid a more attractive proposition for those who don’t want to do too much damage to their wallets.
The catch is that the new model has had its storage cut to 128GB, where previously it was 256GB. The 256GB version of the Surface Book 2 is still on sale at $1,499 (around £1,070, AU$1,890), and the range remains the same – save for this new entry-level spin on the convertible.
If you’re eyeing the 15-inch model, there is no cheaper version with a lesser amount of storage, sadly. The bigger brother still starts at an eye-watering $2,499 (or £2,349/AU$3,649, with it only just becoming available in the UK and Australia last month).
There may well be folks out there who think cutting down storage to 128GB is well worth it, considering this brings down the price of the 13.5-inch hybrid to much nearer a thousand bucks, and as such seems like a more palatable outlay.
Territorial missing
As with the Surface Laptop, the new variant is only on sale in the US currently, but we’re hopeful that we’ll see it in the UK and other territories before too long. Although Microsoft can take its sweet time when it comes to getting fresh hardware distributed outside of the US. Fingers crossed that isn’t the case here.
Maybe these new base Surface Laptop and Surface Book 2 variants will help to stoke up sales of both devices a bit, which is perhaps what Microsoft is thinking given the stagnant sales that the Surface range as a whole is currently suffering from.
Via The Verge
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