Hands-on with Microsoft's Surface Hub 2S: a beautiful and powerful piece of hardware that's thinner than the old model, but much depends on forthcoming software
Tom Warren / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
The Surface Hub line has been a slow build: Microsoft announced the original 84-inch pen-and-camera Surface Hub back in 2015, then teased a rotating, Teams-powered 50.5-inch successor in 2018 (the Surface Hub 2 peek). Today it ships the middle path — the Surface Hub 2S, a 50-inch 3840x2560 display landing in June at $9,000.
First-order effects
- Corporate buyers get a dramatically thinner, wall-friendly 50-inch unit in June, but at $9,000 they are effectively paying upfront for Teams software that has not yet shipped — exactly the caveat in Tom Warren's hands-on.
Second-order effects
- Rival collaboration-display vendors now face Microsoft selling the screen as the entry point and Teams as the ongoing relationship, pressuring them to bundle their own conferencing software or compete on hardware price alone.
Third-order effects
- The later corpus confirms the trajectory this hands-on hints at: Microsoft added an AI-powered Smart Camera in 2022, and by 2023 the second-generation Hub 2S became the first 'touch-enabled board' to run Teams Rooms on Windows — meaning the display's long-term value sits in the software layer, not the glass.
The trend: Premium collaboration displays are turning from standalone hardware into delivery vehicles for meeting-software platforms, with Microsoft betting that Teams subscriptions outlast any single screen's depreciation.