The Surface, Microsoft's original push into making its own hybrid PC hardware, was sold as being a tablet that could replace your laptop. The Surface Book reversed the equation, offering a powerful laptop that also offered many benefits of a tablet.
It was an impressive machine, and though it was a tight race I'd say it was the best laptop I used last year. The latest iteration — the Surface Book with Performance Base — is even better. With brilliant industrial design, a clear focus on creative work and more power under the hood than before (despite still being manageably light), it's a perfectly balanced Windows laptop. If you can stomach the high price.
The same but different
You might think it's bad form to release a new machine that physically looks and feels almost identical to the one from a year before (the important upgrades are all inside, more on that later), but Microsoft nailed it so much with the original Surface Book that I'm actually glad it's more of the same here.
The Surface Book is basically two hunks of magnesium chiselled into a minimalist retro-future design some will love and others will hate (I think it's awesome), with a slick mirrored Windows logo on top. The two pieces are fused by a special joint that keeps the screen secured very tightly to the keyboard, but with the press of a button — and a satisfying electric "thunk"— the screen comes free to be used on its own.
The keyboard, which is slightly recessed this time, is still one of the best-spaced and most comfortable on a laptop, and the trackpad is in my experience 100 per cent reliable (as it should be, given Microsoft makes both the hardware and the Windows software behind it).
If I have one complaint about the keyboard it's that the backlighting really should turn on and off automatically when the ambient light changes. The keys are grey and the light is white, so having it on in a well-lit room only makes the labels impossible to see, yet you definitely need it on in the dark. Thankfully there's a function key to easily adjust this manually, so it's not a huge deal.
The 13.5-inch screen puts many similarly-sized panels to shame, boasting a great contrast ratio and the ability to display 100 per cent of the sRGB range (overkill for many applications, but absolutely essential for design work).
The aspect ratio of the screen is a non-standard 3:2, which is wide enough for general use but not outlandishly tall if using the screen as a tablet. Microsoft calls using the screen detached "clipboard mode", and that describes both the general shape of the panel and what it's best used for. Without the grunt offered by the performance base, the detached Surface is mostly good for when you have to leave your desk briefly or want to keep working while moving around.
If you do want to spend a lot of time in tablet mode — say for drawing, watching videos or 3D modelling — you can detach the screen, flip it around and reattach it backwards. This makes for a very powerful — and very heavy — tablet that can lie flat or stand.
The one issue I had with the non-standard size of the screen (and the subsequent 3000x2000 resolution) is when running fullscreen applications that are expecting a 16:9 ratio. Windows handles this slickly in almost all situations, but movies and games locked at widescreen formats will have thick black bars above and below. If you mirror the display to a 16:9 screen, you'll get black bars on the sides.
The included Surface Pen, which magnets to the side of the device when not in use, is as impressive as always, opening shortcuts and taking screenshots wirelessly with a click of its button while offering smooth sketching and handwritten notes and mark-ups.
Performance upgrades
The main thing separating the new Surface Book from the old is that all models of the new version come with a 6th gen Intel i7 processor, as well as the gutsy Nvidia GTX 965M chip with 2GB of RAM for dedicated graphics. This is twice the graphical power of the highest-end Surface Book previously available, and it fixes the one major complaint I had with that machine.
An excess of video memory (plus up to 16GB of system RAM, depending on how much you spend) will let you run just about any desktop-class software, from 3D modelling and video editing to design drafting and recent video games.
The combination of the form-factor, pen and high-end specs means there's a comfortable way to do just about any creative work on the Surface. Using it as a standard laptop to type up an article, I found the balance between screen and based had improved since the last model, with the machine never feeling like it might fall backwards. When using it purely as a touchscreen you can get a bit of wobble, and I found it best to close the machine entirely and rest it on something instead.
Hooking the Surface Book up to an external monitor, keyboard and mouse opens up further options, like playing games in a proper 16:9 format (it's no replacement for a gaming PC or laptop but it ran most new games smoothly on medium settings) or drawing on the Surface with your reference material on the bigger screen.
There's no fancy USB-C ports in sight here, and while I get the advantages of new laptops adopting that standard (allows for thinner frames, lets you get power, data or video through any port), it's actually a relieving experience to go back to a laptop that just works with all the stuff I have lying around. The Surface Book sports two USB 3.0 ports, a full-size SD card reader and a MiniDisplay port for video.
Battery life on the new Surface Book is especially impressive. In my (very non-scientific) testing, I saw just less than 4 hours of continuous use when using it in detached tablet mode, which is fine considering you can drop it back on the base to keep working when you need to. When attached to the base you can expect more than ten hours of real-world usage, more if you're only doing simple tasks like watching video and browsing the internet. Microsoft claims up to 16 hours.
Should I get one?
If you're thinking it sounds expensive to put all this high-end PC tech into a laptop that's already arguably over-designed (I mean, it uses a mechanism that expands and contracts with electrical currents like a muscle to lock and unlock the screen to the hinge), you'd be correct.
The least expensive Surface Book with Performance Base (with a 256GB solid state drive and 8GB of RAM) comes in at $3799, with the ultimate version (packing a 1TB solid state drive and 16GB of RAM) going for $5199. All versions have the same processing credentials.
You could certainly find (or build) a machine with the same raw specs for a fraction of the price, but what you're paying for here is a machine that can legitimately stand in for a work laptop, home desktop, media device, drawing tablet and practically whatever else you need it to be. Just about everything it does, it does extremely well.
If graphics and grunt isn't that important to you, you can still get the original Surface Book from $2299 and get almost all the benefits of the design (save for some handy balancing tweaks in the new version), but you'll have to put down the extra dough if you want to realise the Surface Book's full potential.
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