When Microsoft announced its Surface Neo back in October, it promised to deliver the dual-screen PC, along with its dual-screen phone the Surface Duo, in holoday season 2020. Apparently that"s not happening, according to a report from ZDNet"s Mary Jo Foley. In fact, you can expect that we won"t see any Windows 10X devices this year.
There are a few reasons for this. One is the obvious one, which is because everyone"s schedule is out of whack thanks to the COVID-19 coronavirus. And of course, it"s not exactly like Microsoft was coming ahead of schedule before this happened. From what I"ve heard previously, Windows 10X was running behind before all of this happened anyway, although I hadn"t heard anything about a delay until next year.
The other, and perhaps more interesting reason is that Windows 10X might actually ship for single-screen devices like clamshells and convertibles first. While it"s not surprising that Windows 10X is coming to more traditional devices, but it"s more surprising that it might come to single-screen PCs first. After all, the OS is designed for dual-screen PCs.
According to the report, Panos Panay internally told the team today that Windows 10X isn"t going to ship this year. The only other OEM to announce a Windows 10X device is Lenovo with its ThinkPad X1 Fold, and that company was already betting on a Windows 10X delay. The foldable PC is slated to ship this summer with Windows 10 Pro, with 10X coming at some point later on.
There are a lot of interesting features in Windows 10X, and they don"t all have to do with dual screens. Many of the shell changes would be welcome by many in a Windows 10 tablet UI, and all of the apps are containerized, a feature that could well make its way into Windows 10 at some point.