Meet the new Microsoft, a maker of premium hardware products

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

By launching its own Apple-esque spread of super-desirable and sexy handsets, tablets, notebooks and wearables, Microsoft can show the world ideal products that work best with its software and services. 

Windows 10 might have been made available for free, but enjoying the optimal Windows 10 experience on Microsoft's new devices is going to cost you.

Microsoft just unloaded a kaboodle of new hardware and none of them can be considered cheap, even if the unified OS which they run, Windows 10, is one of the most accessible and available operating systems in the market today. Since it launched eight weeks ago, Windows 10 has been installed in over 110 million devices by users hoping to exorcise the demons left behind by Windows 8 on their PC's, 2-in-1's and tablets.

The event, which took place in New York this morning, revealed some expected devices like the leaked Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL flagship smartphones. A sleeker and more acceptable (and available to Canadians, too) Microsoft Band 2, puts 11-sensors and Cortana on active user's wrists.

The much awaited thinner but slightly bigger Surface Pro 4, updates to Microsoft's innovative HoloLens mixed reality apparatus (prototypes now available to developers for the price of US $3,000!), and as a 'one more thing,' at the event a sleek and powerful Surface Book notebook, the first that Microsoft has ever designed in house.

Microsoft's focus shifts from budget to luxury

None of the devices announced today were cheap. The new Lumia devices start at CAD $749.00 before taxes. This is for the smaller 5.2-inch Lumia 950 smartphone running a hexa-core Snapdragon processor 32GB of storage and 20-megapixel camera. This is a huge departure from a year ago when we had various competing cheapo Lumias that had very little differentiation.

The larger Lumia 950 XL phablet has a 5.7-inch display and will cost CAD $849.00. These are the flagship Lumias that Windows Phone loyalists have been screaming for, and Microsoft's delivered them, now the question is whether people are willing to pay the price to be able to run Windows 10 on a phone.

The Surface Pro 4 is an expected an incremental upgrade from the hugely popular Surface Pro 3, pricing of that tablet (which still requires the 'optional' Type Cover), is in line with Surface Pro 3 prices. While the SP4 boasts the latest Intel SkyLake processors, it isn't too much of a performance departure from its predecessor which is still a solid 2-in-1 and should still be popular at a cheaper price as Microsoft clears inventory.

The new Surface Book, which is aimed directly at Apple's MacBook Pro line of high-performance, thin and light notebooks, brings the power of Intel's latest processors, high-resolution displays and a full-QWERTY keyboard that's also detachable, making the Surface Book a powerful tablet and Ultrabook.

Pricing for this gem starts at CAD $1,949.00 for 128GB of storage and 8GB of RAM. You can expect to pay up to CAD $4,000 for the top of the line Core i7 model with a 512 SSD drive. That's quite insane, even for a souped up PC.

Some of finest products in the market

These are no doubt some of the very finest products in the market and having owned a few Surface and Surface Pro devices, I can attest to the high degree of build quality and software compatibility that Microsoft designed devices bring with them. I'm just wondering if pricing them at the premium scale will be a strategy that works in the long term.

I get what Microsoft is doing. The PC market is so afflicted that manufacturers are caught in a race to the bottom and churning out cheap and crappy notebooks and desktops just to make a sale. Microsoft makes almost nothing on consumer licenses of Windows now that it has given it away for free (somewhat).

By launching its own Apple-esque spread of super-desirable and sexy handsets, tablets, notebooks and wearables, Microsoft can show the world ideal products that work best with its software and services. 

This new Microsoft is exciting, what they showed with the HoloLens alone constitutes impressive innovation and daring while their growing portfolio of hardware looks compelling, specially when tied to their various ecosystems and services. These new products actually have me looking forward to visiting a Microsoft Store to check them out and I'm excited to see how people will react to these aspirational new devices.