Well here’s a surprise! After spending years undermining the laptop—or at least trying to—with the Surface, now Microsoft is making its own damn laptop. Oh hell yes folks, here is Surface Book. Yes, it’s beautiful.
For those of you keeping track at home, yes, this is Microsoft’s first laptop.
The basics: The Surface Book has 13.5-inch diagonal screen. It has six million pixels, which works out to 267 PPI. And yes, it’s got a keyboard. One of the clicky clack kind. Not a touch cover—a real keyboard. Microsoft also touted what seems to be a very fancy glass trackpad.
And though it’s a “laptop” of the backflipping variety, a bit like a Lenova Yoga, that keyboard also detaches.
The tablet portion weights 1.6 pounds, and altogether with the keyboard the weight is 3.3 or 3.5 pounds depending on configuration.
It runs Nvidia GeForce graphics, the latest generation Intel Core processors, and a 12-hour battery. That battery life with all that power seems almost ridiculous. Yup, it’s got discreet graphics in that teensy looking package.
According to Microsoft it’s two times faster than the MacBook Pro, and the company says it’s “ounce for ounce” the most powerful laptop ever made.
The success of this device will ultimately hinge on well, the hinge, which both allows the computer to backflip, to sit upright, and to detach from its keyboard altogether.
It starts at $1500, and it’s available for pre-order tomorrow. For the sweet configuration with discreet graphics, it starts at $1900. It ships October 26th.
I’m a little shocked by this Surface Book. It’s expensive, sure, but it’s really powerful and beautifully designed in a way that somebody might actually choose this laptop. This isn’t the crap Windows laptop your work gave you, it’s the computer you’re happy to fire up every day. Or that’s how it seems—we’ll let you for sure when we try it out.