11 ms·
The Microsoft Surface Book Review
- Cyph0n 11y agoUpto 15 hours of battery life for light usage? Now that's impressive! I wonder how the i5 compares to the latest MacBook Air.
- mrmondo 11y agoIs it though? I get that from my base model MacBook (2015).
- ctvo 11y agoYou get 15 hours when Apple only claims 9 hours of battery life?
- pheroden 11y agoOh, absolutely. Use Safari, never use chrome. And don't play games. If you watch video, only watch h.264. I've often gotten 2 full days of work without plugging it in.
- hackaflocka 11y agoHow does one force the computer to watch video in h.264 please?
- rayiner 11y agoApple's claimed battery life is based on a workload heavier than just refreshing a web page every 30 seconds. My rMBP 15" is rated for 9 hours, but I usually get over 10 doing a mix of Office and Safari browsing.
- JTon 11y agoThat's a refreshing change from every other manufacturer. Microsoft definitely has not taken this route. The SP4s 9-Hr battery life has been overstated by many accounts(including my own)
- mcintyre1994 11y agoIsn't this device immensely more powerful than that? You're comparing a Core M to i series, integrated weak GPU to powerful dedicated GPU, Surface Book has a larger higher resolution display - to be comparable seems incredible. Admittedly Surface Book has a lot more space/weight for battery so it's not really a fair comparison either way you look at it. I'd be amazed if I could get my rMBP (2015) to pull 15 hours though which seems like a fair comparison on most fronts, so I'm definitely impressed.
- rayiner 11y agoOn Ars's reviews, the i5 Surface Book got 749 minutes in the light wifi browsing test, and the 2015 rMBP 13" got 794 minutes.
- mcintyre1994 11y agoThanks for pointing this out, my relative comparison is obviously off. I stand by the comment that the rMBP is the right comparison but presumably the 2015 Macbook would do even better in that test.
- wtetzner 11y ago> Isn't this device immensely more powerful than that? But it's also only claiming that battery life for "light usage", and so I suppose it depends on what that means.
- schuke 11y agoWhy compare it with the Air though, when the latter has an abysmal display for 2015/16.
- mtgx 11y agoWhy not just make it a laptop for significantly less? The tablet thing is mostly a gimmick.
- BorgHunter 11y agoOne person's gimmick is another person's killer feature. Say what you will about the usefulness of the convertible nature of the Surface Book, but it is thoroughly and competently engineered (unlike some other entries in this space). And if people find a competent convertible to be useful, they'll buy it.
- kevingadd 11y agoIt makes a great ebook/email/news reader and that's one of the reasons I like the tablet. I can also use it to do steam in-home streaming or watch a movie. On the other hand, I'm not the sort of person who would buy a dedicated tablet otherwise. I can't stand owning a bunch of devices.
- soylentcola 11y agoNot to mention that there are already laptops. As Apple and other manufacturers have shown, it's often smarter to address market segments that aren't being adequately addressed rather than jumping into a crowded one.
- cm2187 11y agoI see that as gimmick too. I have a surface pro 3 and barely use it as a tablet. As a superlight-no compromise-unlimited budget laptop there was sony's z series, which I really miss. It had everything, including an RJ45 port, 4 cores i7, two SSDd in RAID and was significantly lighter than this thing (just over 1kg). The only thing it didn't have is good speakers.
- Someone1234 11y agoIt is without the pen and OneNote. Now it is a legitimate feature that people legitimately buy a Surface to have. I see people in meetings sitting there and jotting away in OneNote all the time. It is very useful when you project one and then use OneNote as a "whiteboard" of sorts.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jfb 11y agoThat's the nature of tech reviews, however; hundreds of graphs of one-off benchmark results to up page counts; thousands of words reiterating the non-dispositive test results; no editorial voice whatsoever.
- IBM 11y agoThis is what the user experience is. http://forums.windowscentral.com/microsoft-surface-book/391012-hey-microsoft-fix-your-surface-book-before-dies.html http://forums.windowscentral.com/microsoft-surface-book/3910...
- kevingadd 11y agoA lot of that stuff is accurate, but it's hilarious seeing people blame Chrome issues on the Surface Book when Chrome is just mediocre Windows software. The scrolling is a longstanding issue with Chrome that I even experience on my desktop, for example.
- pcunite 11y agoThat many problems in a row is a faulty device. Imagine if everyone's experience was like that?
- Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 11y agoThis is like installing arch Linux and complaining it's not as easy to use as osx. There are literally thousands of other sites that'll tell you what a device "feels" like to use. Anandtech is the only site (except maybe Ars for big launches) that gives you the nitty gritty engineering details, which is what some people are interested in, and hence have upvoted.
- Deinos 11y agoI would throw notebookcheck.net in there as well for sites that give an abundance of detail and data.
- praveenster 11y agotl;dr "The hardware and build quality is very good. Performance is fantastic. Software on the Surface Book is a let down. The first firmware update fixed a lot, but there are still too many outstanding issues to recommend the Surface Book at this time."
- tdkl 11y agoSo basically it has the same issues with Windows 10 as a 300$ laptop. People who pony up that kind of money for same software experience are brave in my view.
- emehrkay 11y agoI got to play with one in best buy the other day. The hardware is pretty damn good. It is a lot thinner than I expected. It isn't too bad to hold as a stand-alone tablet either. I was having issues with ejecting the tablet from the base though. It felt like I was trying to break the thing. The keyboard and trackpad seem fine and very macbook-like. This seems to be a very good machine for a Windows user (I'm not the target demo). My son wondered about its gaming capabilities lol.
- skellington 11y agoI checked it out at the MS store and it's fine. It doesn't have the aesthetic design perfection of a macbook and the hinge is awkward, but if you want a windows machine it seems like a good option. I won't buy any MS devices though because they are incredibly buggy (in my experience). I have a surface and it has so many irritating bugs (mostly related to power management) that I hate it now. Many of the surfaces in the MS store were unusable due to various bugs. I know people bang on them hard in the store, but I never ran into a macbook in an apple store that didn't work as expected.
- kevingadd 11y agoI got a Surface Book on launch day (one of the i7s with an nvidia GPU). A rough summary: Good: * The build quality is stellar. * Having the CPU in the screen means the keyboard never gets uncomfortably hot, even when running games. Very comfortable. * Pretty fast CPU. * The SSD is obscenely fast, I can get more than 1gb/s on sequential reads. Wish I got that kind of performance in my desktop. * All the custom hardware integration (the latch, rotation, tablet mode, etc) is pretty robust. * Good touchpad and pretty decent keyboard. * Great battery life. When I'm reading ebooks or news I can easily get 5hrs out of the tablet; the laptop mode lasts way longer than that. The numbers in the Anandtech review are pretty representative. Playing Armello on the tablet gets a few hours battery life; I'd probably get 5+ using Steam In-home Streaming. * When the fan is running (high cpu load, etc) it's very, very quiet. This is the quietest laptop I've ever owned. * The external port dock is pretty convenient. * The charging connector is magsafe-style and it's already saved me from a couple nasty incidents. * You can charge the tablet by itself if you want to. * The pen and digitizer are great. I have a pretty reasonable time doing web browsing, email and IM on the tablet using the pen to write. The quality of the pressure sensitivity and precision tracking on the pen is pretty good. * The iGPU is actually (though still only somewhat) up to the challenge of driving the panel at full DPI. Past high-DPI laptops I've owned had Intel GPUs that were clearly not up to the task of compositing the whole screen at 60hz while rendering webpages. * Considering the problems I've had with the device, Microsoft customer support has been helpful and responsive. Bad: * In general the Surface Book and its accessories are just too expensive. * Intel's video drivers are a goddamn trainwreck. It's an embarrassment. I've had more BSODs (all in the Intel drivers) and TDRs (at least a dozen video driver resets) in the couple weeks I've owned this thing than I've had all year on my desktop. When you're using the NVIDIA GPU in the keyboard things are pretty solid, except that Intel's surface sharing implementation is also totally hosed so vsync doesn't work right. :( * The WiFi drivers (and probably some other device - I haven't figured out how to profile windows user-mode drivers) are really terrible, they burn a ridiculous amount of CPU and cause latency spikes that make audio hitch. The ethernet in the port dock is fine, at least. * The cable on the port dock is too short and it's actually quite inconvenient. * The keyboard/tablet latch requires ever so slightly too much force to remove - It's pretty hard to do one-handed without lifting the whole device. (Very easy with two hands, though.) * The Fn-lock setup on the keyboard is an annoyance (but not remotely as bad as past Microsoft keyboards with this design) * Microsoft hosed palm detection for pen input in Win10 and it's a real annoyance. It's not as good as it was in 8. * The touchpad drivers don't have adjustments for things like palm detection. * The weight balance between keyboard/tablet is ever so slightly off, such that if you fully extend the screen it tilts backward a little. Not a problem when typing, but it makes me nervous :-)
- joeblow99 11y agobiggest drawback: comes with windows 10.
- hitgeek 11y agoi was a 100% windows user for a long time, even had a Windows phone in the blackberry era. Decided to switch to Apple after using iPhone 4 and original iPad. Bought Macbook 4 years ago and with an SSD and RAM upgrade its still great. Gave microsoft a second chance with the flagship Lumia Windows Phone 7, and Surface RT, because I was primarily a windows dev. Needless to say, I was burned on both of those devices (buggy, very poor and limited apps, and microsoft basically gave up on both platforms within 2 years). I've since purchased an iMac, two more iPhones, and a new iPad Looking at some of the early problems with the Surface Book, I'm worried microsoft is going to drive more users away.
- Kurtz79 11y agoI'm a converted Mac user as well, but I cannot see the Book (which is a first generation product, and an impressive one as that), Surface and Windows 10 as anything else as steps in the right direction for Microsoft, and for consumers in general. Apple really needs an heavyweight competitor that can challenge them in terms of design and innovation, otherwise they will get complacent (IMHO they already are, to an extent).
- radiorental 11y agoHadn't thought of it like that... Where Apple used to have their CEO 'drive' innovation - New Microsoft are replacing that motivation driver.
- intended 11y agoI think it's worth remembering that MSFT should consider itself lucky, that it has customers to drive away. The pro 1 came out only a just few short years ago, and they wrote down a lot of that product. It's really weird to say this about the guys who once were called the Borg, but I have faith in their design team. Sadly they seem to be creating an expectation that one should wait for the 3rd device in a series.
- radiorental 11y agoPerfect is the enemy of done From a business perspective - the end result is the same. Whether you wait for Steve to stop barking say 'ship it'. Or you ship when it's 'good enough. Apple knew where the hockey puck was heading as early as the mid 90's [1] and could probably have shipped something better than the Newton but before the iPhone. They were touch and go there for a while. Microsoft can afford to ship first and ask questions later. The end result in terms of getting the product right within a given timeframe is the same. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPS1DMlzz0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPS1DMlzz0M
- thebouv 11y agoI've been drooling over getting one of these but the cost kind of keeps me away. However, I think I am going to try and track down a Surface 3 which is hopefully a bit cheaper now with the 4/Book out.
- annacollins 11y agoIn tablet mode, the Surface Book is thin and light, and the new Pen is quite responsive.
- mands 11y agoLooks like great hardware let down by poor software. I just gave Windows 10 another try with a view to purchasing a Surface 4 if successful (OneNote + Stylus = :)) - but after a few weeks reverted back to Linux (Fedora). Apart from the inferior development experience (outside of VS - which is top-notch), there are just too many bugs, unfinished pieces and a general lack of polish. Updates wouldn't install, the Store kept crashing/disappearing, Modern Apps would interact badly with virtual desktops. Win 10 should never have been released in such a state. I'm hoping the Threshold release out this week will go some ways to repairing the damage and presume will be a better fit for the Surface Book. Maybe I'll look at the Surface line again in a few months.
- nextos 11y agoAre you running Fedora on your Surface?
- mands 11y agoNo, on a small 11in netbook. I needed a mobile dev environment, and it was either a Surface that could double as a tablet and run Linux VMs, or a netbook running Linux. You can run Linux natively on the Surface, SecureBoot isn't a problem, but the bigger issues are drivers and a touch-unfriendly UI. (I went with an Acer Aspire E11 - $150, 8hr battery, and fanless - it may be the best Linux netbook every made!)
- Someone1234 11y ago> Updates wouldn't install, the Store kept crashing/disappearing, Modern Apps would interact badly with virtual desktops. Sounds like a hardware issue. Cannot reproduce. Are you running the mainline release or did you opt in to the experimental builds?
- mands 11y agoMainline release on a modern Dell/Intel laptop with all drivers installed. Same laptop runs Linux fine so unlikely hardware issue. Updates would crap out with random errors like 80074005 - which a casual user should never see. I got it working again by stopping the update services from the console (net stop ...), deleting the cache and re-running. The store would be running, then you'd Alt-Tab out and back again and it would be gone. Same happened with other Universal apps, OneNote in particular. It certainly got more reliable over time, and I have tried the insider builds on a spare laptop and they're better - but the initial 10240 release was sub-par.
- yasky 11y agoA laptop that doesn't have great trackpad interface is a non-starter. Really looking forward to trying out the Microsoft laptop in person. But still using my 2010 macbook pro and smooth-as-glass scrolling is a minimum bar.
- josefresco 11y agoFrom the article: "The other half of the typical notebook interaction is done with the trackpad, and here Microsoft has delivered one of the best trackpads on any Windows PC." "With that one quirk aside, anyone who uses a Surface Book is likely going to be very happy with the trackpad experience." "The surface is glass, which makes it very smooth and easy to glide your finger over."
- tothepixel 11y agoThe scrolling in Chrome is a major concern for me though. After using Apple trackpads it is downright painful to use Windows hardware and scrolling. Microsoft needs to nail these software issues in order to compete, because in terms of hardware, they're vastly superior to Apple right now. I hope they don't squander that advantage.
- josefresco 11y agoScrolling between browsers always seems like an issue for me, even with a mouse. I'll configure Firefox, and then Chrome/IE/Safari will be too fast or not fast enough.
- intrasight 11y agoWhile I am indeed disappointed by the technical issues being reported for the new MSFT devices, I still applaud them for some outstanding engineering. I am considering the Book or Surface Pro 4 as a desktop replacement. But frankly I don't consider it a good value. I'll stick with my 5 year old desktop, which gets a respectable 7.3 experience index. What I REALLY would like is a Windows 10 tablet in the 9"-10" range and in the $400 range. Perhaps there'll be a Black Friday sale on the Surface Pro 3.
- dangrossman 11y agoThe Surface 3 will be $399 on Black Friday at Best Buy.
- phonon 11y agoBoom. http://www.fudzilla.com/reviews/39204-cube-i7-stylus-tablet-reviewed http://www.fudzilla.com/reviews/39204-cube-i7-stylus-tablet-... http://www.gearbest.com/tablet-pcs/pp_227132.html http://www.gearbest.com/tablet-pcs/pp_227132.html
- bebna 11y agoCan you install linux or is the bios locked down?
- pjc50 11y agoCheap windows tablets are a thing: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00YCX7SEW/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00YCX7SEW/ - of course every concievable corner has been cut, so it's an atom with little storage. My favourite which I'm tempted to actually buy is http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00O636WJU http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00O636WJU , which costs ~£60 and comes with a year of Office 365 + terabyte cloud storage which also normally costs £60.
- drcode 11y agoIf I pay a gorgeous screen, I want that screen CLOSE to me, so I can benefit from it as much as possible. I'm not sure how I feel about a notebook that advertises "Look at our awesome hinge that moves the screen as far from you as possible!"
- Synaesthesia 11y agoYou can bring it really close by detaching it.
- drcode 11y agofair point.
- tothepixel 11y agoAre you really complaining about the screen being set back by 1"?
- drcode 11y agoI actually think most laptops have the screen weirdly far away from the user- The only recent laptop that I really like for this reason is the Aspire Switch 12, which is an absolutely superb laptop: http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/series/aspireswitch12 http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/series/aspireswitch12
- red_admiral 11y ago"Since this is a device from Microsoft, you get zero bloatware installed." A very strong selling point for the Surface family, in my opinion.
- mark_l_watson 11y agoPro tip: you should always buy Windows laptops, etc. directly from the Microsoft store. Their signature branding for many other manufacturers's products means that they sell for about the same price, but with no crapware.
- fisherjeff 11y agoAmen. I bought four of the new Dell XPS 13s for work. The three from the MS Store are fantastic; the one from Dell took several hours just to make it useable.
- AdmiralAsshat 11y agoUnless of course Windows' update completely bricks your laptop. I bought a family member an Asus laptop from the Windows Store that was running 8.1, and the Windows 10 update has destroyed it. Asus refuses to look at it, calling it a "software issue". So now I'm in the process of trying to get Microsoft to look at it, and waiting to see whether they will take responsibility or shove it off to someone else.
- Athtar 11y agoTake it to one of their retail stores, if you/they live close to one. They should be able to help.
- AlexeyBrin 11y agoGood tip, except for when you want to be able to customize your laptop. You can't customize say a Dell laptop in Microsoft Store.
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- rasz_pl 11y agoI just love how Intel sells dual core as an "i7".
- soylentcola 11y agoI know this is nitpicking and borderline off topic, but does the white balance on those photos look so far off that it's distracting to anyone else?
- AdmiralAsshat 11y agoSince Microsoft is clearly aiming at this to be a Macbook killer, it would be nice if the performance comparisons included the various Macbook models.
- brokentone 11y ago"It’s not light, especially if you consider 3.34-3.48 lbs (1.51-1.58kg) heavy." Interesting tautology.