While it's not nearly as refined as the new fourth-gen Surface Pro, Microsoft's Surface Book is a powerful, feature-filled premium hybrid that doesn't forget it's a laptop first.
Specifications:
- Screen: 13.5in LCD 3000 x 2000 (267 ppi)
- Processor: Intel Core i5 or i7 (6th generation)
- RAM: 8 or 16GB
- Storage: 128, 256 or 512GB
- Operating system: Windows 10
- Camera: 8MP rear, 5MP front-facing
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB 3.0, SD, mini DisplayPort
- Laptop dimensions: 232.1 x 312.3 x 22.8mm
- Laptop weight: 1.52 or 1.58Kg
- Tablet dimensions: 220.2 x 312.3 x 7.7mm
- Tablet weight: 726g
Surface Book is the best Windows laptop has an excellent back-lit keyboard, really great track-pad, enough ports and it’s relatively light at just over 1.5kg. Some Windows laptops are thinner, some are lighter, but none have quite as good a combination of screen, keyboard, power and industrial design.
Both the Pro and Book versions of the Surface also share many component options, and in fact, our Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 review units had the same Intel Core i5 processor (from Intel's new sixth-generation chips, sometimes referred by the code-name Skylake), and the same 8GB of RAM. In the Surface Book, the Core i5 is included in the $1,499. On the Surface Pro 4, it's an upgrade (to at least $999 from the $899 base price).
Design:
With features and specs that are so similar to the Surface Pro in so many ways, the physical design is what really stands out about the Surface Book. It's hefty to both look at and pick up, especially compared with some of the super-slim laptops we've seen this year, such as the Dell XPS 13 or the Lenovo LaVie Z .The Surface Book, when closed, goes from 13mm thick in the front to 22mm thick in the rear, and weighs between 3.3 pounds (1.4kg) for the non-GPU version to 3.5 pounds (1.6kg) for the configuration with the Nvidia GPU. By way of comparison, a 13-inch MacBook Pro is 18mm thick and weighs 3.4 pounds (and no, there is no discrete graphics option for that particular MacBook).
The keyboard itself has the same familiar widely spaced keys as nearly every other current laptop, as well as the newly redesigned keyboard cover for the Surface Pro 4. Unlike most 13-inch laptops, however, the keys here have an especially deep click, which makes for a very satisfying level of feedback while typing. One quirk found both here and in the Surface Pro is the lack of a labeled function key command for controlling screen brightness.
That's especially important, as the auto-adjusting light sensor built into the system seemed a little overzealous at times, and the on-screen brightness controls in the Windows 10 action center only jump in 25 percent increments. Fortunately, there's a workaround. If your Windows 10 laptop lacks labeled brightness controls, Fn+Del and Fn+Backspace usually work.
The large touch-pad has a glass top and a friction-free matte surface, but multi-touch gestures, such as two-finger scrolling, are not quite as responsive as in the very best laptops -- although, scrolling down long Web pages was much smoother in Microsoft's own Edge browser than Google's Chrome. The biggest leap for the Surface Book keyboard over the Surface Pro 4 one, is that the more traditional design means it'll sit easily on your lap, whereas the Pro's kickstand and keyboard cover combo was never quite right for balancing on your knees.
As a tablet:
The tablet is held onto the keyboard by a very fancy “memory wire” locking mechanism, which changes shape when a current is applied across it. The mechanism for doing so is one of those quirks that gives the Surface Book a first-generation feel in places. Most pull-apart hybrids right now use a strong magnetic connection that you simply have to pull apart. It's not perfect, but I've never had a hybrid screen fly off when I didn't intend to remove it, and the magnetic system is better than older hybrids that required complex latches and buttons to detach.Microsoft has somehow managed to combine both systems into something less easy to use than one might hope for. First, you locate a screen detach button at the right end of the function key row on the keyboard. You need to press and hold that button for approximately three quarters of a second, a tiny green light comes on and you can hear the latching mechanism release. But that's not the end. You then have to hold the base down with one hand, while you pull sharply up with the other in order to pull the screen away from, you guessed it, a none-too-wimpy magnetic connection.
Comic book to Surface Book:
The included stylus pen is the same as on the Pro 4 (and interchangeable with this one), and similarly attaches to the side via a built-in magnet. You'll find much more detail on the stylus pen and using it for drawing apps in my review of the Surface Pro 4 , but in short, it works great with a variety of apps, including the built-in Fresh Paint for drawing and sketching, the New York Times crossword puzzle app, which took pen input and converted it to printed characters, and Microsoft's OneNote, which automatically launches when you click on the eraser-like button on the back of the pen.As an illustrator who works both on paper and in programs such as Photoshop, he was impressed by the feel of the Surface Pen and especially its eraser. You can see more of his reactions (and a live drawing demo) in this video and slideshow. The resolution of the 13.5-inch Surface Book screen is 3,000x2,000 pixels, while the 12.3-inch Surface Pro is 2,736x1,824. Otherwise, the two screens are very similar, and both look great even from side angles.
The higher resolution makes sure you won't see individual pixels, even when reading plain black text on a white background. Apple calls this kind of very high-resolution "retina," and has rolled it out across much of its product line. Microsoft calls it PixelSense, but it's essentially the same concept.
Performance and Battery:
In a hybrid like the Surface Book that's more of a laptop than anything else, you've got a decent amount of space for connections. There are two USB 3.0 ports, mini-DisplayPort for video, an SD card slot, and an audio jack. Except for the audio jack, all the ports are on the keyboard base, so they don't go with you when the screen is detached. The Surface Pro 4 has a similar collection, but drops one of the USB ports and swaps the full-size SD card slot for a microSD one.Another point of similarity between the two Surface families is that both offer Intel Core i5 and Core i7 processors, all from the latest Skylake generation of chips just hitting products now (the Surface Pro 4 also offers a lower-cost Core M option). Both our Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 review units actually had the same Intel Core i5 processor, and the same 8GB of RAM. As one might guess from this, their performance in our standard tests was similar, and both were a bit faster than the previous Surface Pro 3 (which was two CPU generations behind).
The Core i5 is the standard mainstream starting point, and more than fast enough for web browsing, media streaming, office productivity and other common tasks. Photoshop and other graphics-intensive apps, such as drawing and sketching programs, also presented no problem. Like any mainstream PC with only Intel's built-in integrated graphics, this Surface Book is not a machine for more than the most casual of gaming. But, that's not where the story ends.
One of the more intriguing optional features of the Surface Book is a new custom Nvidia graphics chip, packed into the keyboard base of the system. That was an enticing option, because few small laptops have any kind of graphics hardware, aside from Dell's Alienware 13 or the 14-inch Razer Blade. In common game benchmarks, the GPU didn't run terribly fast, only turning in 23.5 frames per second in BioShock Infinite at high detail settings and 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution (it's doubtful many games would run at all at the native 3,000x2,000).
But, by turning the detail settings in the game down to medium, we got a much more playable 37.2 frames per second. Anecdotal tests in a variety of games, from the new indie horror game Soma to Grand Theft Auto V, ran smoothly enough to play, as long as most detail settings were kept to medium-to-low. It works for casual on-the-go gaming, but I wouldn't want to play a hundred hours of Fallout 4 on it. Battery life needs to measured two ways in this particular system, as the battery is split into two segments.
Most of the battery is in the keyboard base, with only one quarter of the total battery capacity in the tablet half of the system. Clearly this is a device intended for long-term use in its full laptop form and only short-term use as a tablet, a situation which may or may not fit your needs. The combined Surface Book ran for 11:24 on our video playback battery drain test, while just the tablet ran for 2:51, which is just about 25 percent of the total run time of both batteries combined.
Two interesting notes about the the Surface Book batteries: Smartly, the system will drain mostly from the base battery first, leaving the tablet battery almost fully charged as long as possible, so you can still detach and use it even after hours of running the laptop. It also recharges in the opposite order -- tablet first, then base.
The second note is another of those Surface Book quirks. I had been using the tablet on its own for a few hours, and its battery was almost completely drained. I plugged it back into the base, then decided to pull it apart again to check on something. But, despite pressing the release button on the keyboard, the system would simply not allow the tablet to come off, popping up a system message telling me to wait until the tablet battery was recharged a bit.
Conclusion:
Microsoft could have started with the laptop-like Surface Book and then moved into the tablet-like Surface Pro years later, after its initial system had been nearly perfected. But the way it worked out was that the Surface tablet line came first, spurred perhaps by the idea that Windows 8, with its big, finger-friendly tiles, would be the ultimate way to bring touchscreen tablets and keyboard-centric laptops together at a time when the then-new iPad seemed like an existential threat to PC computing.While it's not the ultimate laptop yet, the Surface Book offers features, such as a touch screen, stylus, and optional GPU, that the 13-inch MacBook Pro leaves out. It has a few quirks that take getting used to, but those are minor, especially considering this is a first-generation product. And, unlike the highly rated Surface Pro, it'll actually stay on your lap.
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