Microsoft Surface Book Announced – Is It The Ultimate Laptop?

Microsoft today unveiled the new Surface Book a powerful, high-performance laptop that the company believes the Surface Book “redefines everything you’d expect from a laptop”. The 13.5-inch Microsoft Surface Book is powered by a 6th Generation Intel Core i5 or Core i7 ‘Skylake’ processor and has a discrete NVIDIA GeForce ‘Maxwell’ mobile GPU with GDDR5 memory to ensure the graphics performance is superb. The Surface Bok is 7.7mm thick and weights just 1.6 pounds, so it will be highly portable. Battery life with the Skylake processor and Maxwell GPU is outstanding, with purportedly up to 12 hours of battery life. The really cool hardware design feature of the Surface book is that the discrete GPU is in the base of the Book and is only used when the screen is attached. When the screen is detached the device will use Intel Skylake integrated graphics. Microsoft claims that the Surface Book is twice as fast as the MacBook Pro! This design and is likely going to open the eyes of system builders builders as Microsoft just really stepped up their game.

The Microsoft Surface Book is crafted from high-end metals to compete with Apple and the keyboard features backlit keys that have a travel distance of 1.6mm. There’s also a glass trackpad with five points of touch sensitivity. The Surface Books 13.5-inch 267dpi touch screen display (6 million pixels with a 3:2 aspect ratio) makes Windows 10 look as good as possible and should be competitive with other displays on the market. The Surface Book has full sized USB 3.0 ports and an SD memory card reader in the base.

The Surface Book will be available in the US on October 26th, 2015 with pricing starting at $1,499. Microsoft will begin taking pre-orders on October 7th, 2015.