What you need to know
- The Surface Laptop Studio 2 features a haptic touchpad with an adaptive touch mode.
- The touchpad can be fine-tuned to support a variety of inputs, such as helping people missing digits on their hand to use the touchpad.
- A video from Microsoft showcases the improved touchpad and its adaptive touch mode.
- The Surface Laptop Studio 2 launches today, October 3, 2023, with a starting price of $1,999.99.
Microsoft's Surface Laptop Studio 2 launches today. While the CPU and GPU options may have garnered the most attention, the unique laptop also features an improved haptic touchpad that improves accessibility. A video from Microsoft showcases how the touchpad of the Surface Laptop Studio 2 helps people interact with the powerful PC.
Surface PCs have earned a solid reputation for their touchpads, and that looks to be the case with the Surface Laptop Studio 2 as well. Microsoft improved the touchpad on the device to be more accurate while also adding the ability to customize the feedback when someone presses down to click. The company also added adaptive touch mode, which provides a range of accessibility options.
The video illustrates how traditional touchpads can be limiting and how the Surface Laptop Studio 2 addresses issues presented by many PCs. For example, touchpads generally feature palm rejection to stop accidental clicks or the cursor from being moved accidentally. That's a useful feature in some cases, but it also prevents people missing digits from a hand from using a touchpad.
The Surface Laptop Studio 2's adaptive touch mode can be toggled on to provide full mouse control with a hand that's missing digits.
Other settings can be changed as well, such as adjusting the size of the right-click zone or how much pressure is needed to click. Adaptive touch mode can tweak the timing of a double-click as well, which is important for those who cannot perform a double-click with the settings a laptop ships with.
With the Surface Laptop Studio 2 launching today, we'll be able to share first-hand experience with the device. Keep an eye out for our coverage of Microsoft's most powerful Surface PC to date.
