The new Surface Book announced at Microsoft’s event has been a breakthrough in terms of Surface’s progress in the laptop market. The Surface by itself was always looked down upon for its lack of performance at a greater price than it should have been. The Surface Book is here now to clear the air and to put it on record that the Microsoft is in the notebook market and it’s playing for keeps. Here are five things that stand out about the new Surface Book.
1) The Battery
The new Surface Book i7 comes with a battery that is bigger than what the old Surface was. While other laptops with a battery life of 7-8 hours are deemed impressive, the Surface Book takes the cake now, claiming around 16 hours of usage in one charge. It’s a pretty bold statement to make, considering power users don’t take those estimations very lightly. It’s likely so that the notebook will be something close to that on average use. But we’re not keeping our hopes up. If it can cross the 10-hour mark, it’s already impressive.
That’s what 30 percent more battery within the Surface will give its users.
2) Improved Muscle Power
The Surface Book, compared to last year’s model, now supports Intel i7 on the base model. We’re suspecting it’s a quad-core Skylake processor that’s going to be doing all the hard work. The main gripe that most people had with last year’s model was the lack of performance in the system. Microsoft went ahead and answered the users, giving more power for the cost that it provides. It’s now cheaper than the current MacBook out there and has much more powerful processing for the same price.
3) Improved Graphics
The special performance base variant of the Surface Book comes with a generous 2GB of RAM, courtesy of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 965M. The graphics for this range is a little outdated. The GTX 980M would have made a better match, but this configuration will work just fine on medium to high performance games. Back in 2014, this was the cutting edge in mobile graphics, trailing right behind the desktop-grade versions of the GPU. Today, they still hold up well!
It’s quite uncommon to find such graphical power on a laptop like the Surface. And seeing as it will be used for CAD designs and graphical interfaces, the GPU should hold up just fine with the tasks it’s set out to do.
4) Better Storage
The new variant of the Surface Book comes with 1TB SSD of storage space, complementing that extra processing power and the addition of a GPU to store those graphic intensive applications. It’ll also come with 16GB of RAM, making it handle a bunch of tasks pretty smoothly. This definitely is summing up to be a contender for one of the best feature-packed laptops today.
5) Better Thermal Management
The last big feature on the new Surface Book is as striking as the last, but is equally effective. Since they have amped up on the power via the processor and the graphics, there would need to be some sort of cooling system installed to filter out the extra heat that will now be conducted by the laptop. So Microsoft developed an all new cooling set up with an extra fan to keep the hot air out. The fact that they could fit a second fan in there while retaining the same size as the last model is pretty impressive.
Overall, the Surface Book is a great offering by Microsoft. It retains all the best qualities that made the Surface Book great in the first place and has increased power where needed. It still won’t come cheap though. For $2,399, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher. But let’s not forget that it comes with a detachable/bendable screen and a stylus. So it’s for the creative folk out there. And they’ll find a great investment in the new Surface Book.
For everyone else, this is just plain cool as a laptop.