Microsoft Corp. today expanded its Surface device lineup with a collection of new products headlined by the Surface Book 3, a developer-friendly laptop that packs high-speed storage and Nvidia Corp. silicon.

The company also announced a refreshed version of its compact Surface Go laptop, plus four new accessories.

The Surface Book 3 comes in two models. There’s a 13.5-inch variant that starts at $1,599 and a 15-inch version set to retail from $1,599 with more powerful internals. Customers can order the machines with a quad-core Core i5 or quad-core Core i7 processor from Intel Corp.’s recently introduced H Series chip line, which offers up to 44% better performance than a three-year-old system.

The 15-inch Surface Book 3 can also be ordered with a standalone Nvidia graphics card. The top-end configuration starts at $3,499 and ships with Nvidia’s Quadro RTX 3000, a professional-grade chip used in mobile workstations. Robin Seiler, the head of product management for Microsoft’s devices group, told The Verge that the card provides an up to 50% rendering for visually intensive design programs such as the Solidworks engineering application.

Microsoft has added in hardware options for developers as well. Users can configure their Surface Book 3 with up to 32 gigabytes of random-access memory if they plan to run memory-intensive workloads such as virtual machines and local Kubernetes test environments. In the storage department, meanwhile, Microsoft says that it has equipped the laptop with the “fastest SSD we have ever shipped” to speed up tasks such as compiling code.

The Surface Book 3 is joined by the Surface Go 2, a new iteration of Microsoft’s smaller laptop. The company upgraded the original’s 10-inch screen to 10.5-panel without making the device bigger and enhanced the internals with new processor options.

The top-end configuration, which targets business users, pairs an Intel Core m3 processor with 8 gigabytes of RAM, a 256-gigabyte flash storage and LTE support. Microsoft is promising up to 64% better performance than the original Surface Go.

To address the surge in remote work and learning, the company has equipped all versions of the machine with new camera features. The Surface Go 2 has an app that uses the rear camera to scan documents and whiteboards automatically, while the front camera is paired with a dual-microphone array that promises better audio capture.

Microsoft capped off the product announcements by expanding the selection of accessories available for Surface users. It introduced a refreshed version of the wireless Surface Headphones that comes with a $249 price tag and active noise cancellation technology, which generates sound waves that cancel out outside interference. A dial on the headphones allows users to adjust the degree to which the device blocks external sounds.

Microsoft also announced that the Surface Earbuds, a pair of wireless earbuds originally unveiled last year, will become available on May 12 for $199, and debuted the Surface Dock 2 and USB-C Travel Hub docks. The latter accessories provide USB ports that make it easier to connect a Surface machine to an external device such a standalone display or an iPhone. 

Images: Microsoft