Microsoft says Surface devices dont have Thunderbolt due to security concerns

Microsoft has explained why its range of Surface laptops and tablets don’t have Thunderbolt ports or removable RAM: security concerns. That detail was revealed in a Surface engineering webinar leaked on Twitter by WalkingCat, wherein a Microsoft employee lays out all the engineering involved in the company’s latest devices.

“No Surface device has Thunderbolt. Why not? Because that’s a direct memory access port,” explains the Microsoft employee. “If you have a well prepared stick that you can put into the direct memory access port, then you can access the full device in memory and all data that’s stored in memory. We don’t believe, at this moment, that Thunderbolt can deliver the security that’s really needed from the devices.”

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