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Microsoft has finally gone and done it — it'south made a laptop. The new, loftier-end Surface Book, unveiled today at Microsoft's Windows ten Devices event in Manhattan, marks a turning point for the xl-twelvemonth-one-time company, and could well herald a dramatic change in direction for how Microsoft at present sees itself in the tech industry.

Some specifics: The convertible Surface Book features a xiii.v-inch optically bonded PixelSense brandish with 267 PPI and 6 million pixels, likewise every bit Gorilla Glass iv. Calling information technology "ounce for ounce the fastest thirteen-inch laptop always fabricated," the Surface Book volition characteristic Intel Skylake processors. Plus, there's a discrete Nvidia GPU with GDDR5 retentivity, and so y'all can actually play games on this thing, at to the lowest degree to some (unknown) extent.

Surface Book Nvidia GPU

The Surface Book has a metal enclosure and a sleek blueprint. The backlit keyboard features keys with i.6mm of travel, and there'south a glass touchpad with five contact points for gesture control. The screen also supports pen and impact input, and Microsoft is promising 12 hours of battery life.

Dynamic Fulcrum Hinge

Perchance the biggest design betoken of involvement is the serpent-like Dynamic Fulcrum swivel that connects the screen to the keyboard. You can detach the screen and use information technology every bit a self-enclosed laptop, making information technology a real convertible design (or detachable hybrid, if yous want to call it that). The CPU is in the tablet portion, but the discrete Nvidia GPU is in the base, meaning that at that place must be total PCIe between the two.

Surface-Book-Hinge

During the outcome, Microsoft employees compared the Surface Book with the MacBook Pro, not the iPad Pro as we would have expected. The company is serious virtually taking on Apple directly hither, and merely catapulted themselves over the very OEMs that accept been Microsoft'south life claret for decades. This is different than the Surface, which itself was a fleck of a shot across the bow to Dell and HP at the time. This is a full-on proclamation that Microsoft is serious about hardware. While information technology's always been more of a hardware visitor than information technology gets credit for, thanks to the Xbox, the venerable keyboard and mouse lines, the Zune, the Surface, and and then on, it's never direct pursued a PC-based strategy similar this before.

Surface-Book-Tablet

Taking Surface — and Microsoft — to a new level

The Surface Book runs Windows ten, naturally. It starts at $1,499, and will exist bachelor in configurations with up to 16GB RAM and 1TB wink storage (!); pre-orders brainstorm October 7th, with shipping boxes hitting retail stores Oct 26th. You could contend that this is what the Surface should have been all along; I wouldn't argue that, although the Surface Pro has been a pretty damn expert product that's but been truly hobbled by Microsoft'southward confused marketing and pricing strategies (and leftover mudded Windows RT-related messaging).

Surface Book Laptop

Information technology'll exist interesting to meet how the Surface Book performs in the real world. Simply first impressions are that information technology's good enough to vault Microsoft itself into the top tier of laptop manufacturers — much to the detriment of the OEMs like Asus, Lenovo, and Toshiba information technology has worked and so difficult to courtroom for so long.