Microsoft Surface is 10 years old

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Microsoft Surface is 10 years old - Here's a look back

By Rich Woods

Published Oct 26, 2022

Microsoft's Surface lineup has officially been on sale for a decade, so we put together a timeline to show how the product line has evolved.

On October 26, 2012, Microsoft released the Surface RT, the first computer that the company every produced. That was 10 years ago today, and a lot has changed. I hadn't even written a blog post yet, but the things Microsoft was doing in the hardware space was exciting me.

I live on Long Island, an area of New York that got hit hard by Hurricane Sandy on October 29. On the 30th, I drove up to the Roosevelt Field Mall, as planned (I know; not on launch day), and bought my Surface RT. I already knew that I wouldn't even have power in my home to charge it up, but that was OK.

I've been a Windows user my entire life, and Windows 8 was about to be the most radical change to the OS in its history. The Surface RT was a little more mysterious though, because it ran Windows RT, something that looked and felt exactly like Windows 8, but wasn't. Users would browse the web and see apps that work on Windows 7 and above, and those apps wouldn't work on Windows RT, because you needed apps from the Windows Store.

Windows RT was short-lived. Partners abandoned it immediately, and Microsoft stuck with it for one more generation with the Surface 2 and an effort to save it with Windows RT 8.1. What's more interesting is that it's how Surface began.

The Surface RT was actually announced alongside the Surface Pro, a product that made no sense at the time, but hey, it's Microsoft and the company loves to put full Windows on things. The original model was too heavy to be a tablet and too small to be a laptop. It was in 2014 with the Surface Pro 3 that it started to make sense. That's when we got a lot of the things that we still see in Surface today, like 3:2 screens, Microsoft Pen Protocol, and Surface Connect.

Indeed, the Surface product line has come a long way. Check out the timeline below.

Fast-forward to now, and Surface is a pretty broad lineup. You've got the Pro series that lives on to this day; indeed, it's the best-selling Surface. The Surface Laptop is there for people that want something more traditional but still want that Surface design. If you're looking to spend less, there are budget options like the Surface Go and Surface Laptop Go, and you can also spend more on something for creators, like a Surface Studio or Surface Laptop Studio. There's even a Surface phone, the Surface Duo.