4 ms·

I'm not sure you could call the Surface Book a hybrid form factor. It just looks like a laptop until you lop the screen off.

Joeri 11y ago
Typically the tradeoff is balance. I'm curious to see how well it balances on a lap.
- codeulike 11y ago
  True, yeah. It seems theres a lot of batteries under the keyboard so it might be ok.
  - pjspycha 11y ago
    Makes you wonder how good the battery life of the tablet will be. There has to be some trade offs? If they pull this off thou.. I'll line up for one.
    - zantana 11y ago
      I have a bay trail asus T200 which is a similar, albeit low-end, device. The problem for me, under Windows 8.1, has been getting the machine to enter a true low power sleep state. If the machine enters the true low power state than it can work like a tablet, and if you use it lightly (say an hour a night) you can get a week's worth of use without recharging. Unfortunately if any of the hardware components doesn't go to the low power state, the device will likely be dead or close to it if you don't use it for a day. Microsoft has a utility which tells you which component is keeping device from powering down, but doesn't tell you what software is causing this behavior. Windows 10 is supposed to improve this, but you can't turn off windows update so you lose one way to fight the battery drain. One way you can fight this, besides plugging it in every night, is powering it down when you are finished, which isn't as bad as it seems because the device boots cold in about 5 seconds.
pizza234 11y ago
That's the definition of hybrid :-) Academic definitions aside, there hybrids have to choose a very serious compromise due to the balance: if you make the base light (surface pro case), you won't really have a laptop, instead a tablet which sits on your legs. if you make the base heavy, you're making a relatively heavy laptop. now, there is of course a spectrum of choice, but practically speaking, even they make a very light tablet part (say, 850 grams), with a "heavy base", you will add 550 grams at least (550 being an odd balance). I'm absolutely happy to have a 1.4 kg hybrid, but it's not going to compete with the upcoming wave of ultrabooks (note that I'm somewhat skeptical it will be 1.4kg, I bet it will be a little more).
- pizza234 11y ago
  Update: they've just published the spec, and it weighs, as I was suspecting, 1.5kg, which is not bad for a sturdy (I assume it's going to be robustly built) hybrid.

Joeri 11y ago

Typically the tradeoff is balance. I'm curious to see how well it balances on a lap.

codeulike 11y ago
True, yeah. It seems theres a lot of batteries under the keyboard so it might be ok.
- pjspycha 11y ago
  Makes you wonder how good the battery life of the tablet will be. There has to be some trade offs? If they pull this off thou.. I'll line up for one.
  - zantana 11y ago
    I have a bay trail asus T200 which is a similar, albeit low-end, device. The problem for me, under Windows 8.1, has been getting the machine to enter a true low power sleep state. If the machine enters the true low power state than it can work like a tablet, and if you use it lightly (say an hour a night) you can get a week's worth of use without recharging. Unfortunately if any of the hardware components doesn't go to the low power state, the device will likely be dead or close to it if you don't use it for a day. Microsoft has a utility which tells you which component is keeping device from powering down, but doesn't tell you what software is causing this behavior. Windows 10 is supposed to improve this, but you can't turn off windows update so you lose one way to fight the battery drain. One way you can fight this, besides plugging it in every night, is powering it down when you are finished, which isn't as bad as it seems because the device boots cold in about 5 seconds.

pizza234 11y ago

That's the definition of hybrid :-) Academic definitions aside, there hybrids have to choose a very serious compromise due to the balance: if you make the base light (surface pro case), you won't really have a laptop, instead a tablet which sits on your legs. if you make the base heavy, you're making a relatively heavy laptop. now, there is of course a spectrum of choice, but practically speaking, even they make a very light tablet part (say, 850 grams), with a "heavy base", you will add 550 grams at least (550 being an odd balance). I'm absolutely happy to have a 1.4 kg hybrid, but it's not going to compete with the upcoming wave of ultrabooks (note that I'm somewhat skeptical it will be 1.4kg, I bet it will be a little more).

pizza234 11y ago
Update: they've just published the spec, and it weighs, as I was suspecting, 1.5kg, which is not bad for a sturdy (I assume it's going to be robustly built) hybrid.