There are leaks, and then there are things just make you wonder. This falls into the latter category.

As you may recall, Microsoft recently revealed that Surface head Panos Panay would appear at a London event in October, fueling speculation that he would announce the arrival of the previously-revealed new Surface Pro with LTE. This triggered an investigation—partly based on insider information, partly on educated guessing—into what the Surface release schedule might look like going forward.

All sources point to the October appearance being nothing more than the Surface Pro LTE announcement. That this is the only reason Mr. Panay is going to get up on a stage and address an audience publicly.

So it is with some confusion that I can now report that Microsoft this week actually revealed that the Surface Pro LTE models will be made available globally on December 1. That, as Neowin notes, it will be sold in two configurations: Core i5/4 GB RAM/128 GB SSD and Core i5/8 GB/256 GB. These revelations came from a session at Ignite this week in Orlando.

Why on earth would someone from Microsoft blurt out this information just weeks before these devices were officially announced?

I cant only speculate. But I see two possibilities here.

One, the more likely scenario, that this was a mistake on the speaker’s part, and that he has been suitably chastised for this.

Or two, something a bit more interesting.

Maybe Surface Pro LTE isn’t the only announcement we’ll get in October. Maybe this October event is really about something else. Always-Connected PCs perhaps. Or even Windows on ARM.

That is, perhaps we’re going to see some combination of Surface Pro and Surface Laptop revisions that will be in one or both of those camps. Always-Connected PCs, which use embedded SIMs, or e-SIMs (on either Intel or ARM). Or, better yet, Surface Pro and Surface Laptop revisions that utilize the ARM architecture (and are thus also Always-Connected PCs).

Revealing this information at Ignite doesn’t make sense. Something is going on here.

Tagged with Surface Laptop, Surface Pro (2017)