January 03, 2014, 6:00 AM —
Did you get a Surface Pro 2 tablet for Christmas? Well, I've got some news you might want to sit down for. I'm sorry to say your tablet is obsolete even though it probably still has that "new gadget smell."
I'm joking of course. Mostly. But according to The Verge Microsoft has quietly bumped up the clock speed of the i5 CPU in the Surface Pro 2. The Verge says Microsoft has confirmed that this is the case.
When the Surface Pro 2 started shipping on October 22nd it had a 1.6 GHz Intel i5-4200U chip and the most recent models have a 1.9 GHz i5-4200U. The change seems to have happened late in December, which means only procrastinating gift buyers will have wound up with the sped up version. I'll refer you to The Verge post for the rest of the details.
I almost purchased a Surface Pro 2 as a Christmas gift for myself, but was thwarted by short supplies. Microsoft was back-ordered, Best Buy Online was back-ordered, and supplies at brick and mortar Best Buy stores seemed pretty picked over. I found one store that claimed (according to the Best Buy website) that it had a tablet but no keyboard covers. Another had the keyboard covers but no tablets. In the end I decided to wait and now I'm glad I did.
I'm not sure if the clock speed bump is why the tablets were in such short supply, or if the Surface is just becoming more popular. A post at Wired implies the latter: they say Surface tablets got a boost of .5% of Internet traffic, which sounds pretty minor until you learn that it sits now a 2.3%. Wired based its post on data from advertising service Chitika .
Are any of my readers using a Surface Pro or Pro 2? I have a friend who sprang for one and he seems to be very pleased with it. I'm really intrigued by the possibility of going from desk to lap to laying in bed using the same device and working on the same projects. I just wish they were a bit cheaper.
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