Microsoft Brings DALL-E 2 to Bing and Edge
And announces some new Surface upgrades.
Microsoft announced a bunch of new hardware, software and services at Ignite so let's run through them.
First the laptops.
The Surface Laptop 5 now runs on Intel's 12th-gen i5 and I7 processors, no more option for AMD. But you also get Thunderbolt 4 and WiFi 6. The Display has DolbyVision IQ support. But overall it's pretty similar to the last version. You can preorder now. It's available in 13.5-inches starting at $1,000 and 15 inches starting at $1200. Shipping October 25th.
The Surface Pro 9 and 9 with 5G replace the Surface Pro and Surface Pro X lines respectively. The Surface Pro 9 has Intel's 12th-gen processors and the 9 with 5G has Microsoft's SQ3 chip. And no, you can't get 5G on a Surface Pro 9 with Intel, only with the Arm processor. That Arm chip is Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 but customized for Microsoft to work well with Windows and by all accounts it does. Both Surface Pro 9s have 13-inch 2880 x 1920 displays with up to 120 Hertz refresh rate. The Intel model adds Dolby Vision IQ support. They both weigh around 880 grams. A Neural Processing Unit comes to the 5G model as well, that can adjust eye contact, automatically frame shots and blur backgrounds as well as remove background audio. The Surface Pro 9 starts at $1000 and the Pro 9 with 5G starts at $1300, for pre-order now, shipping October 25th.
Microsoft also announced the Studio 2+ with a 28-inch 4500 x 3000 touchscreen display running on Intel's 11th Gen i7 CPU and Nvidia's RTX 3060 GPU, with a terabyte of storage. It adds Dolby Vision, and Auto Color Management, WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1 along with Dolby Atmos speakers. And with the three USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports it can support up to three 4K 60 Hertz external displays. You can preorder it now, shipping October 25th for $4,299 or $4,499 with a stylus, keyboard and mouse included.
Now to the software and services.
Microsoft announced two design products. Microsoft Designer for the web and the Image Creator tool for Bing and Microsoft Edge. Both use OpenAI's DALL-E 2. Microsoft Designer is a web app, similar to Canva, for quick designs of things like posters, invitations, graphics and such. You can start with text and the generator will give you an image you can then modify. It also offers user-created and stock art as well, of course. It's free during the private preview period and will eventually be included in Microsoft 365 with a limited free version available to try. Image Creator on the other hand will be available for everybody for free. It will show up in the Edge browser and in the Bing search engine and works like a front end to DALL-E 2, letting you put in text and get an image. It will launch in preview in select locations before rolling out more widely. Microsoft is also launching a new hub for all of Microsoft's design-related products to at create.microsoft.com.
There were lots of other announcements. Here are a few more highlights.
Defender Cloud Security Posture Management and Defender for DevOps are new offerings in Microsoft Defender or Cloud. They work with GitHub and Azure DevOps to use some algorithms to identify security weaknesses and prioritize fixes.
Microsoft Edge is getting Workspaces, a feature that can share a set of browser tabs with new project members as a single link. The tabs update in real time as the project progresses.
The Microsoft Teams App Store adds an Avatars app that lets you customize and animated avatar to show up on video. Similar to what Zoom offers.
And Microsoft Teams Premium is a new tier that offers lots of premium features, as you might expect, including "Intelligent Recap" which automatically creates tasks, chapters and highlights as well as translation of captions into 40 languages.
Microsoft Places lets you see who's working from where so you can better plan office use. It includes things like travel time, including traveling within an office to meeting rooms. Places is coming in beta soon.
Finally Apple TV and Apple Music apps will be available for Windows in the Microsoft Store starting next year. So long iTunes for Windows. And the Windows 11 Photo App is adding iCloud integration.