The hefty price hikes were spotted by our chums over at Windows Central, and if you're a fan of Microsoft's laptops and tablets, it won't make for pleasant viewing. How about a starting price of $1,500 bar a cent for the base 13-inch Surface Pro, with 16 GB of memory and a 512 GB SSD? Err, no thank you.
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with my 11-inch Surface, which I use exclusively for work trips. It's very compact and lightweight, making it perfect for stuffing into a carry-on bag when flying. It's also rather slow, a tad prone to overheating, and has a battery life that's underwhelmed, if I'm being generous.
The closest current- generation Surface laptop that I could replace it with, should I feel the urge, is a 12-inch model, powered by an eight-core Snapdragon X processor. It has 16 GB of memory and a 256 GB SSD, which is better than what I have to use at the moment, but Microsoft wants me to hand over $1,150. That's around $250 more than at launch, and that doesn't include the Type Cover, which will set you back another $149.
Sure, that only has 8GB of memory, and it's basic, and it's essentially an i Phone stuck inside a laptop body, but for doing simple work on the go, I know where my money would be going. Now, we all know why this has occurred, since tech news is pretty much all directly related to it: the global supply shortage of Dram and flash memory, caused by the insatiable appetite (and copious wallet) of the AI industry. There are relatively few sectors unaffected by this in the PC market right now, and while it has taken a few months for computer vendors to ramp up their prices, we've only just seen the hikes take hold.
Give it another six to eight months, and it's likely to be even worse. Some vendors may well find themselves priced right out of the market. Even Microsoft, with all its money and gravitas, can't escape the fact that there simply aren't enough memory and storage chips going around, and they're being priced accordingly.