Microsoft has sold twice as many Surface Studio PCs as expected

Microsoft unveiled the Surface Studio PC at an event in October, and the device started shipping late last month. The Surface Studio is Microsoft's response to Apple's iMacs, boasting top specs in the all-in-one form factor. It has a 28-inch touchscreen with with 4,500 x 3,000 resolution, a zero-gravity hinge mechanism, a quad-core Intel Skylake processor, the Nvidia GeForce 980M GPU, 32GB of RAM, a 2TB hybrid disk, and a 2.1 integrated sound system.

With those innards you'd expect it to be expensive, and indeed it is. The Surface Studio starts at $2,999, and you can configure it up to $4,199. Hence, you shouldn't expect its sales to be in the millions.

That said, a new report coming from "Taiwan-based supply chain makers" claims that Microsoft has actually managed to sell twice as many Surface Studio PCs as expected. While the initial sales projections for the fourth quarter of 2016 were for 15,000 units, demand was much better than that resulting in around 30,000 orders. Taking this into account, Microsoft has ordered another 30,000 units from its production partners, which it expects to sell in the first quarter of next year.

Apple, on the other hand, sells around 3.5 to 4 million all-in-one computers each year, so Microsoft still has a lot of catching up to do in that respect. It probably doesn't help that worldwide shipments of all-in-ones are dropping by 3-5% each year compared to the previous one, and this trend is expected to continue in 2017. Yet since Apple hasn't refreshed its iMacs recently, Microsoft may grab some customers from its competitor.

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