CES: New Microsoft Surface to be priced at $7,600
Microsoft officials showed off “Surface 2.0″ — the new version of the company's multitouch tabletop — at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) yesterday. — There were lots of tweets and relatively few details, but on January 6 …
Context & Ripple Effects
Surface 2.0 appeared the day after Steve Ballmer's CES keynote recast Xbox as an entertainment hub spanning TV and Windows devices, with Windows Phone 7 headed to Verizon and Sprint in the first half of 2011 and Avatar Kinect demonstrating Kinect-based facial tracking. Set against that consumer-facing program, a $7,600 tabletop is a different kind of announcement: a commercial-tier device, not a retail product.
Independent pickup was narrow but pointed — VentureBeat framed the machine as giving LCDs 'the power to see,' i.e. the story here is the vision-enabled display technology, with few details beyond the confirmed price circulating in the show's tweet stream.
First-order effects
- At $7,600 a unit, Surface 2.0 prices out consumers and lands squarely with commercial buyers — retailers, venues and hospitality operators deploying touch tables — leaving Microsoft's consumer momentum at CES to Kinect, Xbox and Windows Phone instead.
Second-order effects
- Inside Microsoft's own CES narrative the lineup splits by buyer: Ballmer's keynote pushed the living-room-and-phone ecosystem while Surface 2.0 addresses installations, so partners building multitouch experiences must treat the tabletop as a separate commercial platform rather than part of the consumer stack.
Third-order effects
- If Microsoft continues seeding expensive, niche interactive hardware to prove interaction models before they filter into mass-market products, Surface functions as a paid proving ground — a structure that keeps R&D visible without staking retail margins on unproven form factors, though whether that migration happens is exactly what the current record cannot yet show.
The trend: Microsoft is using its CES stage to pitch one ecosystem across multiple price tiers — phone, TV and tabletop — with each device aimed at a distinctly different buyer.