Tuesday, October 6th 2015
Microsoft Announces the Surface Book
Microsoft announced its very first laptop, the Surface Book. It's Microsoft's imagining of the Surface with the strengths of a proper laptop. Microsoft claims at weight-by-weight, this is the most powerful 13-inch class laptop ever made. What sets it apart from other performance laptops in its class is that it's a convertible. You can detach the top half from the bottom, and use it like a large Surface tablet; or you could dock it with its base in either direction, and get the advantage of a proper mechanical keyboard, a multi-touch trackpad, additional battery (up to 12 hours), and additional connections.
The two halves join at a curious looking spinal joint, and an electric muscle joint that senses when you're trying to detach the two halves, and makes the process effortless. When it senses that you aren't trying to take them apart, it lends enough grip to let you lift both halves by holding one of them. The top half features a 13.5-inch display with a high-precision multi-touch touchscreen that's primed for Microsoft Pen (a smart stylus with 1024 pressure levels and high drawing resolution); with 267 ppi display resolution. Both halves are made out of milled aluminium, and are about 7.5 mm thick, each. Most of the hardware is located in the top half, while most of the battery is located in the bottom one. Microsoft has taken advantage of modern connectivity such as 4G LTE, 802.11 ac WLAN, USB 3.0 type-C, SDXC, and more.What makes this the most powerful notebook is what's under the hood - a 6th generation Intel Core i7 "Skylake" processor, discrete NVIDIA GeForce GTX "Maxwell" graphics with dedicated GDDR5 memory, 16 GB of DDR4 memory, and 1 TB of storage. It comes pre-loaded with Windows 10, Office 2016, and a the Windows Store app ecosystem. Pricing of the Surface Book starts at US $1,499.
The two halves join at a curious looking spinal joint, and an electric muscle joint that senses when you're trying to detach the two halves, and makes the process effortless. When it senses that you aren't trying to take them apart, it lends enough grip to let you lift both halves by holding one of them. The top half features a 13.5-inch display with a high-precision multi-touch touchscreen that's primed for Microsoft Pen (a smart stylus with 1024 pressure levels and high drawing resolution); with 267 ppi display resolution. Both halves are made out of milled aluminium, and are about 7.5 mm thick, each. Most of the hardware is located in the top half, while most of the battery is located in the bottom one. Microsoft has taken advantage of modern connectivity such as 4G LTE, 802.11 ac WLAN, USB 3.0 type-C, SDXC, and more.What makes this the most powerful notebook is what's under the hood - a 6th generation Intel Core i7 "Skylake" processor, discrete NVIDIA GeForce GTX "Maxwell" graphics with dedicated GDDR5 memory, 16 GB of DDR4 memory, and 1 TB of storage. It comes pre-loaded with Windows 10, Office 2016, and a the Windows Store app ecosystem. Pricing of the Surface Book starts at US $1,499.
Image Credit: Engadget
34 Comments on Microsoft Announces the Surface Book
GRID in Azure
Maxwell in Surface Book
I'm glad they finally adopted the Asus like keyboard attachment dock for tablets and the GPU addition puts a nice spin on it (like when Asus added an SSD in the keyboard dock).
Very slick!
It puts the new iPad Pro in a very odd spot indeed,....
I'm waiting for reviews, but everything Microsoft announced today has been really interesting to say the least.
The dedicated graphics card could just be a 940m too.
Yeah, still pretty decent power for the form factor, but nothing that will blow me away.
Why do you even care?
I guess it depends on how sturdy and seamless the connection between the 2 parts is, because if its not solid enough and it will not feel like a real laptop it'll be a deal breaker.
Also I see that both the screen and the base are a bit thick while the side where they come together is even thicker.
More than this it will be interesting to see what the GPU actually is, as from the games presented on stage I was not impressed at all about the performance, but maybe they choose poorly the games. If it is GTX 960 level of performance it will be fantastic.
Either way I'm not really sold on the concept of the surface book, however I would really like to try the continuum, that looks pretty cool :)
I know plenty of people that bought Macs just because they looked better built than the others. Even when you tell them you can get better specs on a Windows device for the same money, they dont care....and thats why Apple is successful. Image and styling.
I would seriously consider this device. Its a great move by Microsoft. This makes Apple's Mac book and Ipad devices kind of outdated. Why have a Macbook and Ipad when you can have both
Nice design but overpriced as shit. MacBook killa? Not likely
The biggest elephant in the room is the Nvidia GPU which does not make sense, if you are trying to make a laptop with dGPU this laptop would probably need to have features ultrabooks do not have like ethernet port and more USB ports because I would not buy a laptop with bad-Ultrabook-like connectivity.
I have never used an Apple laptop and never will buy one but for layman I would recommend Apple laptop just because of the more trouble free OS that comes with it.
13.5 inches and 3000x2000 resolution? Yeah right