(techno hip hop music)

Let's clear something up about the Microsoft Surface Book.

This is a laptop.

It does break in half and you can use it as a tablet.

But all the good things about this are laptop things.

The back story here is that Microsoft

has been making the Surface Pro and Surface,

which are mostly tablets, for a few years now.

They're good devices for what they are.

But it turns out that most people who use laptops,

still want to use laptops.

They want good keyboards and trackpads,

fast processors, the whole deal.

So the Surface Book is the whole deal,

plus a few other things.

(mumbles)

Every Surface Book has a 13.5-inch 3,000 by 2,000 screen.

It weighs about three and a third pounds,

and is a little less than an inch thick all in.

With all of them, you get a Surface Pen

which sticks magnetically to the side

and does its job fine.

It doesn't feel as smooth as on the Surface Pro

and it seems to lag a little bit sometimes,

but it does work.

They all run Windows 10, obviously.

They start at $1500, and for that price you get

an Intel i5 processor, the new Skylake chips,

plus 128GB of solid-state storage and eight gigs of RAM.

With the top few models, you also get discrete graphics,

which means this thing can also be a gaming machine.

The GPU is built in to the keyboard half

of the Surface Book, and activates

when you attach the device.

That's one of the cool things about this, actually.

When you have it just like a tablet,

it's light and thin and actually

really easy to carry around.

It works fine, but the Skylake chips actually seem

to be really good.

But then when you dock it back in,

it becomes a performance monster.

It's a really clever idea and one

of the best things about this device.

And, if you're feeling crazy, you can detach

it, flip it around, reattach it,

and use it in what's called Clipboard Mode.

And then you get this super-powerful,

super-awkward-to-hold tablet.

From a design perspective, everything

about the Surface Book exists

to make these transitions possible.

This rolling and unrolling hinge,

which Microsoft calls a dynamic fulcrum hinge,

is designed to make it easy to use in any

of these different modes.

It's really cool and really clever,

and even though I feel weird about putting

it in my bag with the hinge that stays separate like this,

it seems to do its job fine.

It's clean and simple.

The whole thing is aluminum

and very straight-forward and classy.

I really like it.

Since this is, after all, mostly a laptop,

the keyboard and trackpad become really important.

The trackpad, in particular, is really, really nice.

It's smooth and glassy, and just works exactly

the way that it should.

The keyboard might be slightly more polarizing.

It has these really mushy keys

that really thwack every time you hit one.

And some people like it, and some people won't.

I don't love it, but it also doesn't really bother me.

From almost every perspective, it's a really good laptop.

Good battery life, I get a full day out

of it without trying very hard.

Good performance, even easy usability.

It's a little heavier than I'd like,

but this is a pro laptop with a capital P.

In that context, this is actually pretty light.

It's also when you need it, a good tablet.

Because so much of the battery

and power is actually in the keyboard base,

this can be light and thin and easy

to carry around and hold.

I don't expect Microsoft thinks people will use

it all that much this way, but it's really handy

to have when you need to show somebody your screen

or when you just wanna kick back and watch

a movie on your couch.

It's also a pretty good tablet.

Because so much of the power and battery

is in the keyboard base, the tablet itself can

be pretty light and thin and easy to carry around.

The individual parts are great.

But the problem with the Surface Book

is that the transitions are kind of a mess.

To undock it, you have to press a button,

wait a second, and then quickly yank it out

or else it'll go back to being attached.

The dock itself is kind of awkward to slide back into.

The magnets catch early and you have to get it just right

to get it back in.

Sometimes when you dock it, the cursor will just disappear

and you have to undock it and put it back in

to get your trackpad back.

The screen wobbles because the hinge is on here.

The whole situation of a tablet is great

and the laptop is great, but moving between

them is a problem.

Microsoft had exactly the right idea here.

The Surface Book is 100% a laptop.

It just happens to be able to do a couple

of other things too.

It's the first Surface ever that actually can replace

your laptop, because if you buy this,

it will slot right into your life

without changing much of anything.

But in this first iteration, it's a little too expensive

and a little too awkward when you try

to take advantage of everything it can do.

My recommendation is just use it like a laptop.

Enjoy the way the weird futuristic robot hinge looks

and forget about all the things it can do.

Someday, a couple of years from now,

Microsoft's hardware and Windows 10 will

have both gotten better to the point where

these transitions are perfect.

Until then, this is just a really good laptop.

And thank goodness for that.