Surface Hub 2X: Microsoft may have canceled it

Surface Hub 2X may have been canceled by Microsoft, or at least postponed significantly. For the moment there are no official statements, but the information was leaked from a webinar created by the company itself and dedicated to customers. In other words: the source is official, but has not been publicly confirmed.

Surface Hub 2 are huge boards / PCs / TVs announced in 2018 and dedicated to the corporate world, with a key innovation: the most traditional components of a computer, such as processor, memories, motherboard and GPU, are in a certain sense "separated" from the monitor / TV. Just take out the cartridge that contains them and replace it with a new one, containing newer or more powerful hardware, to perform the upgrade. Surface Hub 2X should therefore have been a new cartridge for Surface Hub 2S. Microsoft had promised it for 2020, while it now says it doesn't plan to release a new cartridge this year.

The cartridge was eagerly awaited because it should have enabled some very early features, such as rotation and the ability to create a single screen by placing several units side by side (see animations above), but Microsoft says it should do it without the need for new hardware: an important software update based on Windows 10 20H1 (whose official version should be 2004), which will make them available. The patch will be released for free.

It was assumed that the cartridge software Surface Hub 2X would have been based on Windows Core OS, the project to rewrite Windows 10 in order to make it more modular and easy to adapt to various categories of device (an implementation of Core OS will be for example Windows 10 X, which we will find on the two-screen folding Surface Neo). The Surface Hub 2S software update, however, will still be based on the "old" code.

Talking with The Verge, Microsoft simply said that the priorities for this year are the release of the already anticipated (last April) 85 "Surface Hub 2S, which will then be added to the current 50" model, and the distribution of "a major update", without however specifying what it contains.