Microsoft Surface 3 to be discontinued in Q4 2016: what’s next?
It’s official: Microsoft will end manufacturing of the Surface 3 at the end of this year, which means that stock availability of the Windows 10 tablet will begin to dwindle in the coming months.
Microsoft launched its third iteration of the Surface tablet in May 2015, two months prior to the official release of Windows 10, with students as the initial target demographic, as well as other categories looking for a cheaper option, other than a full-fledged laptop. Initially, Surface 3 shipped with a full desktop edition of Windows 8.1, but it wasn’t until the official launch of Windows 10, that the tablet really took off.
An Apple-like pattern begins to show
In many respects, there are striking similarities between the Surface tablet and the Apple iPhone: both product lines started with two very primitive, and underrated iterations, until their third version, in which the true power of the device began to show.
By this token, we could say that the Surface Pro 3 and 4 are a bit like the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4, with previously unseen capabilities, as well as a sharp improvement in performance and design.
Based on this impression, it’s easy to speculate that the next Surface tablet will continue on to follow a pattern of innovation, in both design and hardware specs, which should be a warning against underestimating this device, as well as the rest of the Surface line of products.
Is Microsoft going full-on Pro?
With the Surface 3 to be discontinued, the Surface Pro will be spearheading the Surface tablet product line. At this stage of the game, it’s becoming clear that the Pro in Surface Pro stands for Productivity, which is not surprising, considering that productivity is a constant in Microsoft’s strategy. Based on this assumption, there is a reasonable chance that Microsoft will stick with the Pro suffix at least until 2018, when new CPU architectures will open Surface tablets as well as other devices to a different level of performance and specs.