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Surface Laptop 2

Last week, Microsoft appear new Surface devices, including the Surface Pro 6 and Surface Laptop 2. Equally part of the announcement, the company cut the base cost on both units down to $899 and $999 respectively. But in that location are some asterisks attached to those offers that you lot may want to be aware of before going shopping for a unit. While this isn't the showtime time Microsoft has done this, the visitor charges a fee for sure colors and restricts some arrangement configurations depending on which colors you choose.

For example, the $999 Surface Laptop 2SEEAMAZON_ET_135 See Amazon ET commerce with 8GB of RAM, a Core i5, and a 128GB SSD? It'southward only available in one color — Platinum. And that'due south non the color that the Surface Laptop two selects by default, which means that if you start with the default color (blackness), the cheapest system you lot'll encounter available is a 256GB laptop for $1,299. The 128GB storage option is grayed out on a blackness system (the image beneath shows this: the 2 boxes I've selected take outlines around them, while no storage selection has been chosen yet).

Surface-Laptop2

If you want the $999 Surface Laptop 2, yous have to cull Platinum. And so far as I can tell, nothing in Microsoft's guidance suggests that this is true, which ways most users will see the $1,299 toll tag as the minimum they can buy. It's an excellent instance of a dark pattern; Microsoft doesn't disembalm that its product configurations vary by color, and the colour with the cheapest arrangement configuration is not the default.

Microsoft's configurator isn't exactly known for its wide range of choices. Yous're sharply constrained in most respects, including limits on how much RAM and storage a Core i5 is even allowed to ship with. Similarly, if y'all choose 8GB of RAM and a Core i7, you lot're only allowed to buy a 256GB SSD, despite the complete nonsensicalness of this arroyo. Platinum is also the only colour to offer a 1TB SSD, only simply when paired with a Core i7 and 16GB of DDR RAM.

Microsoft has a right to sell its products at different prices depending on the paint job. This practice is actually fairly common at boutique builders similar Origin, Alienware, or Falcon-Northwest, all of which have offered various paint options or customization capabilities for years. The difference, notwithstanding, is that these companies typically communicate when the paint jobs you are using limit arrangement configurations or will effectively raise the price of the machine.

Equally for why Microsoft doesn't communicate information technology, the answer is obvious. When yous charge $300 for an actress 128GB of SSD storage, you've got every reason not to want customers to purchase the $999 option. Given that PCI-E-based, NVMe-supporting 128GB SSDs are available for equally little as $38 at retail, it's hard to explain how Microsoft is charging $300 for the same corporeality of storage. Every bit you might wait, the value proposition of the Surface Laptop two drops like a rock once you're paying such ridiculous premiums for mediocre storage upgrades.

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