Microsoft's other new system, the less expensive Surface Pro 4, is clearly intended as a full-time tablet that can double as a part-time laptop, thanks to its clever (but sold separately) keyboard cover. And in practice, the Surface Pro is better as a tablet, and certainly great to draw on, but it doesn't do as much for the rest of us who live in the slightly more buttoned-down world of offices, meetings, word processing and all the things that work best on a traditional laptop.
Still, even after watching successive generations of Surface Pro tablet go sliding off my lap, I never thought to myself that Microsoft ought to make a more laptop-like version of its ambitious crossover PC.
And yet, Microsoft went and did just that, surprising nearly everyone (including purportedly all the PC makers who buy Windows 10 from Microsoft to install on their own laptops and tablets) with the Surface Book, a 13.5-inch premium laptop with a detachable touchscreen display and the same high-end stylus pen as the Surface Pro 4.
These two new Surface products are similar but different, like two cover versions of the same song. Both have unusual 3:2 screen aspect ratios, which matches the shape of the standard A4 paper size. If you're using the tablet half in portrait mode and working on projects designed for print, that may indeed be very useful.
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 codename Skylake), and the same 8GB of RAM. In the Surface Book, the Core i5 is included in the $1,499 (AU$2,299, but UK release details have not been announced yet) base model. On the Surface Pro 4, it's an upgrade (to at least $999 from the $899 base price).
Our Surface Book review unit is closer to the $1,699 model that doubles the internal solid-state storage to 256GB (we have a 512GB SSD, which does not appear to be a currently available option with the Core i5 CPU). As this review was being written, we also received a second test unit that included one of the more intriguing Surface Book options, a custom Nvidia graphics chip built into the keyboard base (so it's only available when the two halves of the system are together), plus a faster Core i7 processor and 16GB of RAM, for a total of $2,699. Spoiler alert: The significant added expense doesn't turn this into the ultimate PC gaming laptop, but it's good enough for mainstream games at medium graphics settings, and helpful for HD-or-better photo and video editing. (Look for some game benchmarks further along in this review.)
I'm enjoying the Surface Book overall, and I don't feel like I'm wasting its potential just because I'm not using it to design websites or illustrate graphic novels. It's intended to be a three-quarter-time laptop and one-quarter-time tablet, as intuited by the fact that 75 percent of its battery capacity is housed in the keyboard base, with the remaining 25 percent packed behind the display, along with the CPU, memory and most (but not all) of the other components.
So, now that I've got my lap-friendly version of the Surface, does it fulfill all my hybrid hopes and dreams? Microsoft calls the Surface Book the "ultimate laptop," which is a bold claim. Despite my positive impressions of the Surface Book, it's important right up front to say that if I were designing the ultimate laptop, it would not have the unsightly gap between the screen and base visible here when the clamshell is closed; nor would it weigh about 3.5 pounds.
Showing the Surface Book to others, those are first two things that nearly everyone mentions right away. The gap -- "Is it supposed to be like that?" -- and the weight. It doesn't help the latter issue that there's something about the slight wedge shape of the system when closed and its bulky hinge that makes it just slightly awkward to pick up and carry with one hand.