Microsoft Surface Pro Price Stands Tall As Best Buy Launch Event Ushers in a New Era on Feb. 9

On midnight on Feb. 9, handpicked journalists will sleuth through New York City's rain slicked streets to one of the several Best Buy locations in New York City, and exclusively witness the release of Microsoft's Surface Pro device. The launch event signals the advent of the company's promising tablet-laptop hybrid, which retrofits the consumer-oriented Surface RT with a supercharged processor alongside additional RAM in an effort to capture power users. Ubergizmo reports that the General Manager of Microsoft's Surface Team, Panos Panay, will appear at the event to usher the Pro into the marketplace.

Recently, Microsoft confirmed that pre-installed data bars 45GB of space from users in both the 128GB and 64GB versions of the Pro, dampening excitement for the launch. The Redmond-based company also took the opportunity to squash rumors that the new Surface would ship with Microsoft Office 2013 onboard, a disappointing but altogether expected move to boost profit margins.

The Pro replaces the RT's scaled-back version of Windows 8 with the full operating system and features a multi-touch 10.6-inch screen with a 1920x1080 resolution, Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, USB 3.0, an integrated Intel GPU, up to 128GB of memory, and a new pressure-sensitive pen tailored for graphic artists and image editing software. The Pro comes in both 64GB and 128GB flavors, priced respectively at $899 and $999.

Its predecessor, the Microsoft's Surface RT, boasts a 10.6-inch screen, but only displays at a 1366x768 resolution. A quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor, 2GB of RAM fill out both 32GB and 64GB versions of the device.