If you were planning to buy a Windows 10 laptop anytime soon, your plans just changed. It doesn’t matter what brand, model, or device you were thinking of getting, the Microsoft Surface Book will probably make you want to change your mind.
It’s not the thinnest laptop in the world. But with maxed-out computing guts, including discrete Nvidia graphics, it’s about as thin as a high-end PC can get. It also happens to function as a dedicated tablet that you can pluck out, by the way, as well as a highly-capable drawing tablet (in conjunction with the Surface Pen stylus) that settles into an angle ideal for sketching when you reverse the orientation of the screen.
Billed as “the ultimate laptop,” the Microsoft Surface Book employs an innovative hinge that uses Muscle Wire to hold the screen in place, while enabling it to easily detach at the push of a button. Core specs include a 13.5-inch PixelSense display (3,000 x 2,000 resolution), 6th-gen Intel Core CPUs (either i5 or i7), up to 16GB of RAM, up to 1TB SSD, and a discrete NVIDIA GeForce Graphics Processor. Since it can function as a tablet when detached from the hinge, it comes with dual cameras, dual mics, and stereo speakers, along with a complementary set of sensors.
Designed to serve as a “creative workhorse,” Microsoft claims the Surface Book is twice as fast as the MacBook Pro – an assertion that will undoubtedly be put to task as soon as examples of the laptop begin landing in people’s hands. If you want to find out for yourself, preorders are now ongoing, with prices starting at $1,499.