Building The Surface Book: The Very Best Of Microsoft

At one point during the development process of Microsoft laptop-tablet combination of books, engineers on the design team in Redmond company offices 3D printing new chassis structures were daily - make changes to their plans during the day, setting a rapid prototyping machine work overnight, then repeat the process the next day. For a company to develop and duplicate Windows and Office is known, this is something very different. And hardware that has been created is something special.

The initial launch of the application, surface and ambient temperature, and the last device its doors to the book.

The book really impressed people about to announce - a full sized (if thin) 13-inch laptop with a magnesium chassis and full-bleached, with impressive battery life and ultra-fine, high-resolution screen. Oh, and that screen? It is completely separate from the base of the keyboard, but the highest processing power of the Intel Core i7 line and not sacrifice. And the book is for Windows 10, Windows greetings made with an infrared camera, Bluetooth, a pressure-sensitive digitizer pen and two microphones with noise cancellation for voice recognition Cortana.

Microsoft has traditionally been a hardware company, especially in the personal computer, which is almost ridiculous, some version of Windows runs on nearly 300 million devices worldwide.of the competitors - and partners - that is building Windows laptops and tablets for years or decades. So it's no surprise to discover that the birth of the book was not particularly easy or perfect or without problems.

Heart Lab hardware storage space full of huge, multi-ton grinding machine CNC computer-controlled metal deposition blocks the conversion of raw metal - aluminum and magnesium, in particular - the prototypes of various devices, form factors and different body internal honeycomb structures with different properties of strength and weight. But it is big and strong, clear and organized, with a dozen different printers buzz around the size of a truck and repeated in the book of 2 professional level 5, or, or what Microsoft is working on next.

If the heart is the storehouse of 3D printing, then the brain is built around it, in a dozen different rooms dedicated to different disciplines. Microsoft tuned stereo speakers Reserve surface, forward-shoot from the outside edges of the body of the tablet, as well as two microphones with noise canceling surrounding the front-facing camera at the Laboratory of Audio in the building 87 - is the quietest room in the world. Gopal Gopal is a senior engineer Human Factors Microsoft, with a background in the academic world of the human voice and hearing, and led the team that refines the ability of the Reserve of the surface to clearly distinguish different languages ​​such as Xhosa and Zulu .

legendary Steven Bathiche of Microsoft created the Group of Applied Sciences within the company in 1999, and has been instrumental in obtaining patents (has 60) and carrying an interdisciplinary team of scientists who have worked on different devices Microsoft dozens. tactile and face recognition side interfaces, the team Bathiche built a platform that could measure the brightness and color temperature across a wide range of display technologies, and uses experts to refine and perfect screen PixelSense 13 , 5 inches book surface, an incredibly sharp -pixel 3000x2000 panel with incredibly good contrast and black levels and brightness; which is one of the best screens in the world, either tablet or laptop.

Everything from the front and rear cameras surface of the book to the hinge magnetic wire and lock on the inside half of the tablet surface of the book were designed and tested and constructed in the laboratory by a team that knew what competitors were doing and wanted to do better. Kait Schoek is one of the visionaries of the design team from the surface to the idea that the hinge, which operates through Windows hardware and software triggers working together was forged, and was one of the teams day work, day out with new 3D-printed designs and laser cut to make it happen. The first prototypes (one even has a 9-volt Energiser stuck to the glass of the screen to shoot the relays and motors hinge) are a testament to the work surface constructed book.

And all this is beside the point that the vast majority of chassis book surface is occupied by the battery - both on the part of the tablet and the keyboard base - leaving only a tiny amount of space for the motherboard and secondary plates with silicon strip just over an inch wide concealment CPU, RAM, solid state storage, dedicated Nvidia graphics card and all other types of processing e / S. not atiny 13-inch notebook but thousands of hours of effort has gone into making its internal components as tiny as possible.

 

A walk through Lab hardware devices Microsoft in Redmond, it is clear that there is a team within the massive company that works almost like a start bootstrapping, try new things - see what works and what does not work - to build new dispositives. The fact that the hinge self-closing tablet book surface was a surprise, that the kickstand Pro 4 Size is often imitated, Windows Hello is taking off - each of them is a feather in the cap computer devices. The book surface could be a first-generation product, and has been criticized because of that reason. But if it is a first-generation system, which really can not wait to see what comes next.

When you think about the amount of the family of surface has evolved - from the surface not wanted to RT, the Pro surface was an amazing proof of concept that waited years for computing hardware to catch up, with the refined and ready order for-the-world of the Pro 4 surface - in a short space of time, it is doubly impressive that this was done in a place that was a software company. It is nothing more, but it was.