The Evolution of Windows: A User's Experience with the Latest Version

As I sat down to review the latest version of Windows, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and trepidation. The operating system has come a long way since its inception, and Microsoft continues to innovate and push the boundaries of what is possible. One of the standout features of this version is the advanced facial recognition technology that sets up the account with ease. It's a neat feature that I'm sure many users will appreciate, but I couldn't help but wonder if my 3D map of my face had been uploaded to the NSA. The thought sent a shiver down my spine, and I wondered how Microsoft could have made such a mistake.

Fortunately, it seems that Microsoft has taken steps to address this issue and ensure that user data is handled with care. However, the company's track record on privacy has been, shall we say, less than stellar in the past. Who can forget the infamous Windows 10 update that reset all my privacy settings back to default? It was a nightmare come true, and I'm still amazed that Microsoft pulled the update without much fanfare. Thankfully, it seems that they've learned from their mistakes and are taking steps to improve their quality control.

One of the things that really impresses me about this version of Windows is its form factor. The laptop's ability to detach the screen and turn it into a tablet is a game-changer for everyday computing. I love using the pen to take notes or create art, and the device feels incredibly responsive in my hands. Microsoft is clearly on to something with this design, and I'm excited to see where they'll take it from here.

Of course, no review of Windows would be complete without discussing its performance. In terms of overall experience, I'd say that this version is a significant improvement over its predecessors. The ability to detach the screen and use the pen as a stylus makes it an ideal device for students, developers, or anyone who needs a reliable tool for note-taking or creative work.

One area where Windows still lags behind is in its support for high-speed peripherals like Thunderbolt. As someone who's been frustrated with the limited capabilities of older systems, I was excited to see Microsoft incorporating Thunderbolt into their latest device. However, it seems that they're still working out some kinks with this technology, and I'm eager to see how they'll address these issues in future updates.

Overall, I'd say that Windows has made significant strides in recent versions. While there's still room for improvement, the device is a powerhouse of innovation and design. If you're in the market for a new laptop or tablet, I'd highly recommend giving this version a look. Just be prepared to shell out some cash – this thing isn't cheap!

The Surface Book is an Innovative Device

Microsoft has been making waves with their latest creation, the Surface Book. This device is truly innovative, pushing the boundaries of what's possible in terms of design and functionality. One of the standout features is its ability to detach the screen and turn it into a tablet. It's a game-changer for everyday computing, and I'm excited to see how users will take advantage of this feature.

The Surface Book is also notable for its sleek and portable design. Weighing in at just 3 pounds, this device is perfect for students, developers, or anyone who needs a reliable tool on-the-go. The screen is incredibly responsive, making it an ideal device for note-taking, art, or any other creative pursuit.

But what really sets the Surface Book apart is its hardware. Inside, you'll find a 15-watt CPU, 16 GB of RAM, and a dedicated GPU that makes it an absolute beast when it comes to performance. Whether you're running virtual machines, creating graphics, or simply browsing the web, this device can handle anything you throw at it.

Of course, no review of the Surface Book would be complete without discussing its price tag. As one of the most expensive devices on the market, I have to wonder if it's worth the investment. But let me tell you – this thing is a powerhouse of innovation and design. The fact that Microsoft has been able to cram so much hardware into such a small package is truly impressive.

As someone who's had the pleasure of using the Surface Book for an extended period, I can confidently say that it's one of the most enjoyable devices I've ever had the pleasure of working with. The device feels incredibly responsive in my hands, and the pen is a joy to use. Whether you're taking notes or creating art, this thing is a dream come true.

But don't just take my word for it – if you're interested in learning more about the Surface Book and its capabilities, I highly recommend checking out the tech forums. There, you'll find users who've put the device through its paces and can share their experiences with others.

The Future of Windows: Expect Great Things

As Microsoft continues to push the boundaries of what's possible with their operating system, I'm excited to see where they'll take it from here. With the Surface Book leading the way, it seems clear that this company is committed to innovation and design.

One area where I think we can expect significant improvements in future updates is in terms of support for high-speed peripherals like Thunderbolt. As someone who's been frustrated with the limited capabilities of older systems, I'm eager to see how Microsoft will address these issues.

But regardless of what changes come down the piper, one thing is certain: Windows has made significant strides in recent years. With its innovative design and powerful hardware, this operating system is an absolute force to be reckoned with.

As a user, it's always exciting to see the latest updates from Microsoft. And let me tell you – I'm looking forward to seeing what they have in store for us in the future. Whether it's improved performance, new features, or innovative designs, one thing is certain: Windows will continue to be a leader in the world of computing.

The Verdict

Overall, my experience with the latest version of Windows has been nothing short of impressive. The device is a powerhouse of innovation and design, and I'm excited to see where Microsoft takes it from here. While there's still room for improvement, this operating system is an absolute force to be reckoned with.

If you're in the market for a new laptop or tablet, I highly recommend giving this version a look. Just be prepared to shell out some cash – this thing isn't cheap! But trust me, it's worth every penny.

One final thought: as Microsoft continues to innovate and push the boundaries of what's possible with their operating system, one question remains on my mind: what's next? What exciting features can we expect from future updates? Only time will tell, but one thing is certain – I'll be here, eagerly waiting to see what the future holds.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enjust so you know what you're getting yourself into I'm a computer nerd and I'm going to review the Surface Book why because I have one now let's break this video down into four basic parts uh this is the unboxing and the visual eye candy uh the normal functionality uh the cool stuff and the not so cool stuff and then the really nerdy stuff because last time I went kind of Overboard if you saw the Surface Pro 3 video that we did here at Tech syndicut then uh yeah it went sort of crazy it was good but you know turn the nerdiness up to about a 9.5 give or take going to dial it back just a little bit on this and talk a little bit more about usability and some of the other nerdy stuff but don't worry I'll get fairly nerdy um so first off let's talk about the eye candy the surface book is designed with a similar aesthetic to the Surface Pro 3 and the Surface Pro 4 in the surface 3 uh it's a silvery magnesium alloy finish uh and it's textured um this is sort of Microsoft's answer to the Windows laptop so Microsoft has been working on their surface line but now we also have the Surface Book a new and interesting piece of Hardware from Microsoft in that it's a laptop that can convert into a tablet whereas the surface pro has always been a tablet that can also be a laptop but the Surface Book on the other hand is actually a really solid laptop and the screen is detachable now this isn't the first laptop with a detachable screen but Microsoft has some tricks up their sleeves as far as that goes but we'll talk about that more in a minute I was really generally overall very satisfied with the build quality there were a few little weird things like like when you open the Surface Book all the way the little hinge the special hinge that it has uh will sort of make the base of the laptop a little bit longer so it's a little bit more rigid and a little bit more stable with the hinge will come in contact with whatever surface your surface is on surface surface anyway I think that that's for stability I don't think they had a choice not to do it that way because otherwise it would it would tilt back a little bit or do something like that but it's really easy for the Magnesium to get scuffed up on that hinge for me the design aesthetic is really clean uh there are vent holes all the way around and just three buttons on the top part power on and then volume up and down those are your three buttons just like the Surface tablets I did find that it was really easy to accidentally hit the power button when the surface was in your bag or when it was otherwise closed and it will happily turn on get hot and run the battery all the way down I really hope that they add a thing to the UEFI so that if you turn it on with the lid closed it'll just go back to sleep because they really ought to do that and it's not like that right now now unlike the Surface Pro 3 and the Surface Pro 4 there's a Micro SD slot behind the the sort of the kickstand that those have this laptop has a full-size SD card slot but the SD card slot you can't fit an SD card all the way inside the laptop now you can get an SD to micro SD adapter that is sort of a compact size I happen to have this one from Adafruit and it basically fits all the way inside the laptop so if you're planning to use an SD card for media storage or something like that you'll have to get one of these adapters to permanently install alternately you can get 128 gig or 64 gig flash drive to plug in the USB port and use that it'll stick out a little bit but it's still not too bad for extra storage for me I opted to get the 512 gig version so that I would have Ample Storage now in terms of other connectivity there are two usb3 ports on this side along with the memory card the SD card slot and then on the other side there's the display SL do connector and then you've also got the normal standard mini display port uh port for your monitor of course when you're looking at the Surface Book for the first time the really the first thing that catches your eye is the hinge the hinge goes all the way across and it's a very very sort of unique mechanism the laptop sort of ends up being wedge shaped which is kind of unusual I think as far as the hinge goes some people will like it some people are not going to like it me personally I like it mechanically and in terms of the engineering is really clever you see there's a lot of Hardware in the screen and there's a lot of Hardware in the keyboard and to avoid the laptop being topheavy so that when you open it you know the screen is weighing it down and then you touch the screen it may be off center it may be off balance so that the the whole thing tilts back so this hinge kind of unrolls and that provides more stability um for the overall laptop because what it does effectively is it makes the whole device just a little bit longer and so that sort of changes the center of gravity for the laptop so that the screen can be a little bit heavier and the weight in the keyboard especially the front of the keyboard acts like a lever to keep the whole thing steady it's really a pretty clever approach and I think it works really well for their use case the other thing that was interesting was when it was closed and you hold it like a book I found that holding it you know holding it in my right hand and riding with my left hand and doing some other stuff with my left hand felt very natural it felt almost like the The Binding of a book or something like that like a paperback book where you've got the the cover uh curled around and you're holding it in one hand I actually found it easier to hold that way um although you can detach the screen and just use the screen by itself that's completely fine too but the battery in the screen will only last you know two to four hours when you're opening the screen the hinge also kind of has a divot in it so when you open it all uh when you open open it up it sort of has a spot that it wants to go to now you can keep opening it further than that but I think this angle the reason they did that is so that when you touch the laptop it doesn't really want to move around or wiggle too much so even though you can set the screen at whatever angle you want there are two angles that are really optimized for touch and then if you put them in those angles the screen's not going to move around too much now if you try to put the screen at another angle and use it for touch then it's going to move around a little bit but for this this angle and then the farther back angle that's a perfect angle for touch and it's got kind of locking mechanism to prevent it from moving around too much while you're touching the screen now the bottom of the surface book is completely nondescript except for two long rubber feet at the back of the device um the surface book has the profile of a wedge as I said before uh it's a very sexy lightweight device uh but it's a wedge nonetheless I found it difficult to open one-handed uh the normal way where you know I would just put my hand on the front and you know sort of like do this kind of a maneuver to try to to flip it open but that doesn't really work what You' got to do instead when you're holding the laptop is sort of put your finger in here and run it down the edge until this until the laptop pops open uh once I got used to opening the laptop that way I found it very easy to open one-handed so that's something to keep in mind I think the reason they went with such a strong magnetic seal was to prevent the uh laptop from opening up in your bag and waking up and getting hot and then dying now with the Surface Book open you can really appreciate the 3x2 aspect ratio screen this is not a normal 16 by9 screen that you see on most laptops today uh essentially the screen is taller it is about the same height as a traditional 15.6 in laptop but a little bit more narrow and it's about 13.6 in diagonally it is a gorgeous 300 x2000 resolution which means you'll probably be using windows display scaling in order to be able to read it and windows display scaling is not without its own faults but I'll just say that if you're using windows display scaling and you're also using Legacy applications you may actually want to run Windows at a lower resolution so that you don't have to use windows display scaling because it's still not right if you're running Legacy applications if you're running applications that support it though it's it's gorgeous it works really well it's just like Retina display on a Mac but if you got older Windows applications the windows display scaling can make them crash and do some seriously weird stuff so keep that in mind the bezel on this is also quite a bit smaller than is seen on the surface pro line of of tablets from Microsoft now I didn't test this for color reproduction myself and the reports from the industry on these displays is that the color reproduction is very very good and in one report it actually edged out the iPad Pro and that's something that Apple always has paid attention to in terms of you know color accuracy and color reproduction on their devices which a lot of people liked also while we're looking at the screen you'll notice the recessed speaker design now this originally came up on the Surface Pro 3 and the engineer that did this I think really knows what they're doing uh this has some of the best sound that I've ever heard from a laptop of the size and weight class uh the Surface Book improves the design of the Surface Pro 3 which is the first place that showed up at by having a low density material fill the cutout gaps that are in the screen for the speakers now next up we have the pen out of the box you have to twist the pen to turn it on now this pen is the same pen between Surface Pro 4 and the Surface Book and it's even Backward Compatible with the Surface Pro 3 the pen has a top eraser button and a single recessed button at the end of the rubber strip this is different than the Surface Pro three pen which had two buttons but you couldn't use the Eraser like an eraser with this one you can actually use the Eraser like an eraser for Creative types the pen accuracy on the surface book is really just an incremental improvement over the previous generation Surface Pro 3 as well although there are some minor lingering issues reported by some blogger artists out there at this point I think the only better digitizer drawing option is probably a dedicated tablet from um wcom maybe the one wcom centique or something like that but those will be a little bit more expensive the iPad Pro also has not yet been well received as far as drawing and tablet functionality goes although the hardware is not terrible for a drawing tab I think that a lot of that is probably just the software waiting to catch up because the iPad Pro is really just a larger iPad whereas the surface line of stuff is a full-fledged computer and with this this is closer to a laptop than a tablet although you can go into tablet mode the pen comes wired up to one note and Cortana by default so you can tap the button once to bring up one note or you can double click to bring up Cortana or you've got a third option where you can take a screenshot with the pen now of course that's configurable and different applications will allow you to set even more customizations in terms of what the buttons do on the pen the keyboard is the next thing up on my list to discuss it's great uh easily this is one of the best laptop keyboards on a Windows laptop that I have ever used ever the key travel the feeling the tactile feedback just the way that it feels is great the key spacing between Keys the layout everything is really good I can only complain a little bit about the up Arrow key I really it was like this on the Surface Pro 3 I don't really care for the combined up down arrow key but I've gotten used to it and it's really not terrible but other than that the keyboard experience on this is completely enjoyable they also finally got the touchpad right I think in my opinion uh it's probably the best Windows trackpad that I've ever used uh the only real downside on the trackpad is that mechanically it's only clicky for about the bottom 2third of the pad so if you're somebody who is used to mechanically clicking the pad uh it's not going to be that great if you're a tap person and you don't mechanically click the touch pad then you'll be fine you can just tap and you can continue to tap as normal and it's completely okay I would recommend also in the software when you get the surface that you go in and configure it um for two finger scroll delay because by default it's something like a half a second and so when you touch feel at least that's what it feels like so when you touch the touchpad and start two fingers scrolling it can feel kind of sluggish to respond but there's actually a software setting for that and you can set it for a low delay I think Microsoft does that because they probably ran a test and most people didn't even know about two-finger scroll or they were squirly users or something and so the focus group said uh people may not understand two- finger scroll let's put the delay in there so that you have to be touching the thing for 5 minutes before it'll actually go into two finger scroll mode but you can change the preference for that I set mine to low delay and it's very responsive the the touchpad is unbelievably responsive it's one of the best if not the best Windows trackpad that I've ever used I can't believe it they finally got it right it's it's unbelievable the Mac people have had that for for years and they're not wrong Apple for all of its fault has a damn good touchpad on their laptops but uh it's nice to see to finally have it on something that's not Apple Hardware so there's that at the top of the keyboard you can see vent holes now one nerdy thing under the hood we're going to talk about more later is is the video card in the keyboard yeah I know that's crazy uh but it is the video card in the keyboard it really is uh everything else is in the screen but the keyboard contains the main battery and the GPU and this thing has about 70 wat hours of battery power most of which is in the in the keyboard part but there is a secondary battery in the screen so the screen can run independently for 2 to 4 hours so that's something now not all Surface Book models have the dedicated Nvidia GPU in the keyboard but this one does the particular model that we're looking at here is the Intel Core i7 7 that's a 6600 U with a maximum turbo clock of 3.4 GHz a stock a normal speed of 2.6 GHz and you know it can down clocked like 500 or 800 MHz or something like that this is the 16 GB of RAM model with 512 gig SSD uh the GPU is a special version it's a special special present from Nvidia it's the GM 108 it's about equivalent to an Nvidia 940m but it's only got one gigabyte of video memory I think this is also only connected with two PCI Express lines but being a 940m it's not really going to bottleneck cuz we're talking PCI Express 3.0 but it's interesting that the interconnect between the screen and the keyboard is PCI Express but we'll talk more about that in the nerdy section now in terms of the 940m and the performance there uh yeah this is not a gaming laptop this is an ultra portable the 940m really gives you better performance in applications like the Adobe Creative Suite and other software that can benefit from GPU acceleration so this laptop is really made for Creative people that want something super portable and on the go with a pretty good to Crazy battery life yes there are laptops out there with way more Graphics horsepower yes there are laptops out there with way more CPU horsepower but in terms of portability versus battery life versus performance I think this is pretty top tier just for its weight class the size of the screen and how small it is overall right now this is one of the top laptops in those categories now there are laptops you know like I say that are are faster have more battery life and they're also going to be heavier or more unwieldy and so we're really talking about a 15 wat CPU with that I've wandered into the nerdy section so this is really cool there a GPU in the keyboard it's got a PCI Express interconnect or Thunderbolt it's almost the Thunderbolt type deal because you know it is kind of hot plug sort of and with that you can detach the screen so what happens is you press this button on the keyboard and then the light turns green if it can be ejected so what has to happen here what's going on it's got a mechanical lock so you can't separate the screen from the keyboard unless the software okays it and that makes sense some people are able to wiggle their screen and produce a blue screen and I think this is because of noise on the PCI Express bus or Thunderbolt orever how this has been implemented some kind of PCI Express some kind of portable PCI Express and the drivers just aren't set up to deal with that I think it's going to be a while before Nvidia really figures that out and really really sets it up right now the other interesting thing is that you have to jump through hoops to install both the Intel driver and and the Nvidia driver and so like Star Wars Battlefront right now at the time of this video if you're using the Microsoft official driver you can't play Star Wars Battlefront you have to have a newer version of the Nvidia driver and it just doesn't work on the surface book but again the surface book is not really meant for gaming I mean you can game on it I was playing a little bit of Fallout and a little bit of GTA 5 just to see what it would do you're going to be running at low resolutions you know 1280 by 800 1280 x 720 rocket League runs great at 1920 x 1080 um a lot of older games or directx9 games run great at higher resolutions but newer games are really not going to run at anything you know above uh console resolution because I mean it's it's basically equivalent to an Nvidia 940m the other weird thing is that the open CL drivers so Nvidia kind of supports opencl now but the NVIDIA drivers that Microsoft provides don't actually support opencl it's been neutered and so I wonder if there's something weird because you know Microsoft's video game division uses AMD gpus I wonder if there's something in their licensing agreement or something in their legal agreement that prevents Microsoft from Distributing open CL stuff with an Nvidia chip I don't know but if you manually install it it works fine if you want to see more about that and like the nitty-gritty of that head on over to the tech forums and you know ask a question or or post there because you can manually install both the Intel drivers and the individ drivers and basically be okay the other tweak that you got to do is set everything to maximum performance when you're plugged in because out of the box it tries not to have The Thermals go too out of control so you can go into power management Etc everything maximum and actually get significantly higher performance from both the GPU and the CPU the physical design of this where the heat producing CPUs in the screen and the heat producing gpus in the bottom means that this thing can actually get quite a bit hotter than your normal laptop because the CPU and the GPU are physically separated normally on a laptop it's not like that the CPU and the GPU often have a common heat pipe and so one is basically dumping heat into the other the separate design of this gives Microsoft a lot more thermal room to deal with heat dis so that works out really well for us the end user in terms of being able to have something that that's a fairly crazy amount of horsepower whenever we're plugged into the wall and so Microsoft says you're going to get 12 hours of of battery life from this thing real world performance for me was actually 7 to 10 hours which is pretty impressive for a 15 wat CPU and an ultra portable was probably the right choice now in terms of the integrated Graphics is the Intel HD graphics 520 it has a maximum clock speed of 1 GHz the big difference here is that 4K at 60 HZ unlike the Surface Pro 3 is actually plug and play yeah that's right you can actually plug in an external 4K display and have it work the good old Samsung U 28d 590d which is like the worst 4k monitor ever it was plug-and play it totally worked never could get that monitor to work with a Surface Pro 3 so let's talk about one other thing that's super Nerdy with this thing it was only recently enabled on the Windows 10 th2 update Intel Speed Shift yeah another name for Stuff uh so what is it well what is speed shift it's like well you know how the processor moves from 800 MHz to faster clocks like 2.6 or 3.4 on the turbo side well it turns out that takes time and you've probably heard us talk about that in our other videos where we're talking about things like Haswell where it's got the fully integrated voltage regulator and they did that so the CPU would be able to better respond and then they moved it back off on Skylight because it you know wasn't as bad in the heat production and that kind of thing well on Skylake because these are these are mobile Skylake CPUs um there are more hard Ware power States or P States um that are available for the hardware to manage that kind of thing and so when the CPU is going from 800 MHz to 2.6 or or 3.2 leaving the operating system to manage that means that it can take 60 80 100 milliseconds to do that 100 milliseconds is a tenth of a second so that's basically an eternity in terms of computation in terms of like a responsive UI so if you're sitting there with a laptop and you're reading something and you reach out to touch the screen or you do something that requires computation on the laptop then it has to wake up and move to a higher clock speed and the time it takes to do that uh it sort of factors in to how responsive the user interface is well with speed shift you're able to do these things about three to 10 times faster depending on on what you're doing I mean it's able to do that and some some graphs are saying that it's you know 6 8 milliseconds in terms of responding and that's just because with the Windows 10 th2 update a lot of the pstate changes where it goes from a low power state to a high power State happen in hardware and because it's happening in Hardware it happens a lot faster and so it's able to upshift and downshift a lot faster as well so overall you can still have greater power savings um because you're not wasting so much time going from faster to slower but it also means the system is more responsive so when you touch a screen and scroll you can see more stuff now PC perspective actually has a really good ride up in a demo of this where they they got a high-speed camera I think it was just an iPhone camera 120 HZ or whatever and they were demoing it you know just scrolling in a web page and in Internet Explorer Edge or Internet Edge or whatever Microsoft wants to call their browser these days and it was noticeably more responsive with speed shift because the system was able to wake up and respond to that whereas it had been in a very low power State when it was just displaying information I mean that's how you get 12-hour battery life out of your laptop and so it makes sense that they would try to improve the situation as far as responsiveness goes and so Intel speed shift for new hardware that supports it was just enabled in the th2 update so it's nice to feel it on the surface book and I could definitely tell a difference when the th2 update was applied just in terms of how applications responded especially when I was traveling with the Surface Book let's do a mini review of the Microsoft Surface doc this is the new Doc this is for the Surface Pro 4 and the Surface Book it's also Backward Compatible with Surface Pro 3 um unlike the previous doc where it mechanically snapped in this looks like a glorified power brick it actually comes with a power brick that's exactly the same size as the dock itself but this is the dock the dock gives you an internet connection Audio Two mini display port and 4 USB 3 let me just summarize for you and say this is piece of crap don't buy it it costs too much and it still doesn't work exactly the way that it should if you going to try to run two 4K displays with this dock at 60 HZ it is not going to work period again and again at the surface launch event or whatever uh Panos pan said oh in just a minute we're going to hook this up and power these two 4K displays that never actually happened because this doesn't work for that now if you're going to run two 1920 x 1080 displays or possibly even two 2560 X 1440 displays off of this then yes you can absolutely do that two 4K displays not so much there are some people that have been able to get this to work with two 4K displays at 30 htz but they specifically said 4K 60 HZ the irony is that the Skylake chips actually do support driving to 4K displays at 60 HZ but this is not wired up this dock is not wired up in such a way to actually support that what's worse is if you've got the Surface Book which has the discrete GPU this connector actually blocks the display port connection this is not the case on the surface so if you have the Surface Pro 4 Tablet you can actually use the dock with one display port connection as well as a display port connection on the physical surface you know tablet itself and you can actually power two 4K displays at 60 HZ from the surface but you got to plug in the dock and a monitor separately with the Surface Book this blocks the mini display port connection so you cannot use the mini display port connection on the surface book without whittling down a cable and I tried but this connection is also really really fiddly so if you plug this connection in slightly wrong uh it doesn't actually make connection and I'm not really sure why that is uh you just have to sort of wiggle it so you have something you have to pay attention to when you're magnetically attaching it and if you move the laptop around while this is connected it is liable to shift slightly and then it takes the laptop off charge and unless you notice that then your laptop will be dead as you you know it's I don't understand it's unch charge no the connector was just being fiddly so I really think Microsoft has re it's it's frustrating because it's so close I mean Microsoft is on to something with this form factor businesses crave this kind of a format this is really sexy hardware and it almost works perfectly right uh I think 90 8% of the problems on the surface book are down to software and that's probably good because it's going to improve windows and it's going to make things better for everybody because Microsoft sort of has to eat their own dog food and now deal with some Hardware Oddities that manufacturers for a long time have been saying hey Microsoft can we maybe not have a blue screen whenever the PCI bus does something slightly weird which is what a lot of the blue screen problems that you read about with the Surface Book are but uh it's not quite there yet I think there's going to be a lot of updates to Windows 10 in the spring 2016 that will hopefully fix a lot of these issues but you know by then we're halfway through the product life cycle so the Surface Book Two is probably the probably the device you want to look for that where they've sort of solved all these problems maybe I don't know there's also Skylake shortages right now so that's maybe another another thing to worry about but overall the dock the dock they completely missed the mark on again it's really exciting and it's especially frustrating because it's almost perfect they've got the right idea but the execution oh the ex execution has so many fatal flaws so overall what's the final verdict on the surface book well the hardware is amazing but you can do better for Price versus performance now with a detachable screen there's not a kickstand on it or anything like that you just carry it around it's literally just a screen there's not even any ports on it other than the headphone port and of course the dock connector you can plug the dock directly into the screen but you know the battery life is a little limited on that 2 to four hours you can flip the screen around the other way so that you can you know close it and hold it like a book like I was talking about but the price is really steep I really I really wish would Microsoft would would come down a little bit on the price but it is new Innovative interesting Hardware uh because it's new Innovative interesting Hardware the Linux support is not there yet the Surface Pro 3 it took about 6 months for good Linux support to show up and I suspect that's going to be the case with the surface book as well only because in terms of the hardware the hardware is really solid I'm really impressed with the build quality and I'm really impressed with all of the other components around the Hardware this is easily one of the best Windows laptops that I've ever used and in terms of Linux and in terms of developing a good touch interface that is Linux that's not Android this would be a good piece of Hardware to do it on where it not so crazy expensive but it is a very premium feeling device I also love the screen the 3x2 aspect ratio screen oh I don't 16x9 in a laptop is bad I had no idea how bad it was until I used the screen on this 16 by9 is just terrible I love being able B to have two things side by side but have a lot of vertical room for the applications this screen is really the perfect size the laptop also doesn't feel heavy or bulky or weird or out of place or anything like that I really like the screen on the surface book I also like it because the bezels are smaller and the display is really sharp and the color reproduction and all that kind of thing I also really liked Windows hello Windows hello the login system basically takes a 3D picture of your face it's a stereoscopic infrared thing and tries to figure out your face in 3D so it's a a little bit more sophisticated than just holding up a picture of your head in order to log you in and this works like that and so you can just sort of be in front of the computer and it does face recognition and signs you in that's really neat but I really hope a 3D map of my face hasn't been uploaded to the NSA I suspect it has because the other neat feature of Windows th2 was that it sets all your privacy settings back to whatever Microsoft wants it's like oh you you turn everything off and you disable search and you do all the stuff oh that's cool you want the update yeah I'm going to reset all that for you it was so bad they uh I guess people noticed and then Microsoft was like hm should we not have done that and they pulled the update so I think that's been fixed by now but still you know that's very bad Microsoft's going to do a better job with their their quality control because I don't need 3D pictures of my face being uploaded I me how crazy would it be if you walk into the Microsoft store and it's like oh hey Bob how's it going yeah know welcome to the Microsoft store it's like it's not creepy at all that's that's just very bad and overall there are a lot of software bugs but in terms of the Windows laptop experience it's actually really good and I like the ability to detach the screen and turn it into a tablet and use the pen I think Microsoft is on to something with this form factor and I think they're on to something with the pen for everyday Computing overall I like that Microsoft is trying to innovate by coming up with new and interesting Hardware that's very good for the ecosystem I think it's also true that Windows support for Hardware is going to improve as a result of this exercise the fact that Windows the windows kernel or the Windows driver architecture can't really deal well with PCI Express flakiness means that the next generation of Windows is going to deal well with high-speed peripherals because you know Max have had Thunderbolt for years but the reason the PCS have never really figured out Thunderbolt is because the bus has direct access to the system memory and a whole lot of the system and so a lot of PC vendors really see that as a security risk I mean you don't want to be able to plug a thunderbolt device into a computer and have it completely take over the computer the way that it was with fire wire and so a lot of stuff the last couple of generations has had optional Thunderbolt add-in cards so you can get a thunderbolt card for a PC and add it in and use that but now Microsoft is having to actually use Thunderbolt or at least a hot plug PCI Express connection with their own core hardware and so that means this part of Windows is really going to be short up and it's really going to be improved and so I think if Microsoft continues on the path with this and improves the Surface Book Hardware the ecosystem in 6 months or even a year is going to be amazing I think that it is a really really expensive device for what it is and unless you really want to save on the weight you really want the portability or you really want you know the tablet ability there are other options that are dramatically less expensive that are almost as good yeah they don't use a 15 watt CPU yeah they don't have the sexy 3x2 display um but you can get a much bigger bang for the buck if that's what you're shopping for but if you want a super premium super portable device uh this is pretty good no is this pretty good it's also Innovative in terms of the hardware form factor they've really pushed the envelope of of of what they're able to do and I think this a pretty high praise for Microsoft and overall this really would be a five-star device if the software were a little bit better the software being as bugy as it is really detracts from the price tag and that's really the long and short of it but the fact they were able to cram a GPU in this thing and they're doing the stuff that they're doing with the hardware I really like it so overall I'm going to play with this for the next couple of months so if you've got one or you thinking about getting one of these head over to the tech forums and let us know let us know what your thoughts are let us know what your experiences are I'd be curious to hear from you what your experiences have been for students or people that are taking notes or doing development I mean in terms of like a development workstation this is actually really good 16 gab of ram I can run virtual machines and do all kinds of neat things so I like that part of it as well I also like that it's super portable and that the screen is the way that it is so overall I'm fairly satisfied even though the price tag does sting a little bit I'm wendle I'm signing out and I'll see you in the forums ajust so you know what you're getting yourself into I'm a computer nerd and I'm going to review the Surface Book why because I have one now let's break this video down into four basic parts uh this is the unboxing and the visual eye candy uh the normal functionality uh the cool stuff and the not so cool stuff and then the really nerdy stuff because last time I went kind of Overboard if you saw the Surface Pro 3 video that we did here at Tech syndicut then uh yeah it went sort of crazy it was good but you know turn the nerdiness up to about a 9.5 give or take going to dial it back just a little bit on this and talk a little bit more about usability and some of the other nerdy stuff but don't worry I'll get fairly nerdy um so first off let's talk about the eye candy the surface book is designed with a similar aesthetic to the Surface Pro 3 and the Surface Pro 4 in the surface 3 uh it's a silvery magnesium alloy finish uh and it's textured um this is sort of Microsoft's answer to the Windows laptop so Microsoft has been working on their surface line but now we also have the Surface Book a new and interesting piece of Hardware from Microsoft in that it's a laptop that can convert into a tablet whereas the surface pro has always been a tablet that can also be a laptop but the Surface Book on the other hand is actually a really solid laptop and the screen is detachable now this isn't the first laptop with a detachable screen but Microsoft has some tricks up their sleeves as far as that goes but we'll talk about that more in a minute I was really generally overall very satisfied with the build quality there were a few little weird things like like when you open the Surface Book all the way the little hinge the special hinge that it has uh will sort of make the base of the laptop a little bit longer so it's a little bit more rigid and a little bit more stable with the hinge will come in contact with whatever surface your surface is on surface surface anyway I think that that's for stability I don't think they had a choice not to do it that way because otherwise it would it would tilt back a little bit or do something like that but it's really easy for the Magnesium to get scuffed up on that hinge for me the design aesthetic is really clean uh there are vent holes all the way around and just three buttons on the top part power on and then volume up and down those are your three buttons just like the Surface tablets I did find that it was really easy to accidentally hit the power button when the surface was in your bag or when it was otherwise closed and it will happily turn on get hot and run the battery all the way down I really hope that they add a thing to the UEFI so that if you turn it on with the lid closed it'll just go back to sleep because they really ought to do that and it's not like that right now now unlike the Surface Pro 3 and the Surface Pro 4 there's a Micro SD slot behind the the sort of the kickstand that those have this laptop has a full-size SD card slot but the SD card slot you can't fit an SD card all the way inside the laptop now you can get an SD to micro SD adapter that is sort of a compact size I happen to have this one from Adafruit and it basically fits all the way inside the laptop so if you're planning to use an SD card for media storage or something like that you'll have to get one of these adapters to permanently install alternately you can get 128 gig or 64 gig flash drive to plug in the USB port and use that it'll stick out a little bit but it's still not too bad for extra storage for me I opted to get the 512 gig version so that I would have Ample Storage now in terms of other connectivity there are two usb3 ports on this side along with the memory card the SD card slot and then on the other side there's the display SL do connector and then you've also got the normal standard mini display port uh port for your monitor of course when you're looking at the Surface Book for the first time the really the first thing that catches your eye is the hinge the hinge goes all the way across and it's a very very sort of unique mechanism the laptop sort of ends up being wedge shaped which is kind of unusual I think as far as the hinge goes some people will like it some people are not going to like it me personally I like it mechanically and in terms of the engineering is really clever you see there's a lot of Hardware in the screen and there's a lot of Hardware in the keyboard and to avoid the laptop being topheavy so that when you open it you know the screen is weighing it down and then you touch the screen it may be off center it may be off balance so that the the whole thing tilts back so this hinge kind of unrolls and that provides more stability um for the overall laptop because what it does effectively is it makes the whole device just a little bit longer and so that sort of changes the center of gravity for the laptop so that the screen can be a little bit heavier and the weight in the keyboard especially the front of the keyboard acts like a lever to keep the whole thing steady it's really a pretty clever approach and I think it works really well for their use case the other thing that was interesting was when it was closed and you hold it like a book I found that holding it you know holding it in my right hand and riding with my left hand and doing some other stuff with my left hand felt very natural it felt almost like the The Binding of a book or something like that like a paperback book where you've got the the cover uh curled around and you're holding it in one hand I actually found it easier to hold that way um although you can detach the screen and just use the screen by itself that's completely fine too but the battery in the screen will only last you know two to four hours when you're opening the screen the hinge also kind of has a divot in it so when you open it all uh when you open open it up it sort of has a spot that it wants to go to now you can keep opening it further than that but I think this angle the reason they did that is so that when you touch the laptop it doesn't really want to move around or wiggle too much so even though you can set the screen at whatever angle you want there are two angles that are really optimized for touch and then if you put them in those angles the screen's not going to move around too much now if you try to put the screen at another angle and use it for touch then it's going to move around a little bit but for this this angle and then the farther back angle that's a perfect angle for touch and it's got kind of locking mechanism to prevent it from moving around too much while you're touching the screen now the bottom of the surface book is completely nondescript except for two long rubber feet at the back of the device um the surface book has the profile of a wedge as I said before uh it's a very sexy lightweight device uh but it's a wedge nonetheless I found it difficult to open one-handed uh the normal way where you know I would just put my hand on the front and you know sort of like do this kind of a maneuver to try to to flip it open but that doesn't really work what You' got to do instead when you're holding the laptop is sort of put your finger in here and run it down the edge until this until the laptop pops open uh once I got used to opening the laptop that way I found it very easy to open one-handed so that's something to keep in mind I think the reason they went with such a strong magnetic seal was to prevent the uh laptop from opening up in your bag and waking up and getting hot and then dying now with the Surface Book open you can really appreciate the 3x2 aspect ratio screen this is not a normal 16 by9 screen that you see on most laptops today uh essentially the screen is taller it is about the same height as a traditional 15.6 in laptop but a little bit more narrow and it's about 13.6 in diagonally it is a gorgeous 300 x2000 resolution which means you'll probably be using windows display scaling in order to be able to read it and windows display scaling is not without its own faults but I'll just say that if you're using windows display scaling and you're also using Legacy applications you may actually want to run Windows at a lower resolution so that you don't have to use windows display scaling because it's still not right if you're running Legacy applications if you're running applications that support it though it's it's gorgeous it works really well it's just like Retina display on a Mac but if you got older Windows applications the windows display scaling can make them crash and do some seriously weird stuff so keep that in mind the bezel on this is also quite a bit smaller than is seen on the surface pro line of of tablets from Microsoft now I didn't test this for color reproduction myself and the reports from the industry on these displays is that the color reproduction is very very good and in one report it actually edged out the iPad Pro and that's something that Apple always has paid attention to in terms of you know color accuracy and color reproduction on their devices which a lot of people liked also while we're looking at the screen you'll notice the recessed speaker design now this originally came up on the Surface Pro 3 and the engineer that did this I think really knows what they're doing uh this has some of the best sound that I've ever heard from a laptop of the size and weight class uh the Surface Book improves the design of the Surface Pro 3 which is the first place that showed up at by having a low density material fill the cutout gaps that are in the screen for the speakers now next up we have the pen out of the box you have to twist the pen to turn it on now this pen is the same pen between Surface Pro 4 and the Surface Book and it's even Backward Compatible with the Surface Pro 3 the pen has a top eraser button and a single recessed button at the end of the rubber strip this is different than the Surface Pro three pen which had two buttons but you couldn't use the Eraser like an eraser with this one you can actually use the Eraser like an eraser for Creative types the pen accuracy on the surface book is really just an incremental improvement over the previous generation Surface Pro 3 as well although there are some minor lingering issues reported by some blogger artists out there at this point I think the only better digitizer drawing option is probably a dedicated tablet from um wcom maybe the one wcom centique or something like that but those will be a little bit more expensive the iPad Pro also has not yet been well received as far as drawing and tablet functionality goes although the hardware is not terrible for a drawing tab I think that a lot of that is probably just the software waiting to catch up because the iPad Pro is really just a larger iPad whereas the surface line of stuff is a full-fledged computer and with this this is closer to a laptop than a tablet although you can go into tablet mode the pen comes wired up to one note and Cortana by default so you can tap the button once to bring up one note or you can double click to bring up Cortana or you've got a third option where you can take a screenshot with the pen now of course that's configurable and different applications will allow you to set even more customizations in terms of what the buttons do on the pen the keyboard is the next thing up on my list to discuss it's great uh easily this is one of the best laptop keyboards on a Windows laptop that I have ever used ever the key travel the feeling the tactile feedback just the way that it feels is great the key spacing between Keys the layout everything is really good I can only complain a little bit about the up Arrow key I really it was like this on the Surface Pro 3 I don't really care for the combined up down arrow key but I've gotten used to it and it's really not terrible but other than that the keyboard experience on this is completely enjoyable they also finally got the touchpad right I think in my opinion uh it's probably the best Windows trackpad that I've ever used uh the only real downside on the trackpad is that mechanically it's only clicky for about the bottom 2third of the pad so if you're somebody who is used to mechanically clicking the pad uh it's not going to be that great if you're a tap person and you don't mechanically click the touch pad then you'll be fine you can just tap and you can continue to tap as normal and it's completely okay I would recommend also in the software when you get the surface that you go in and configure it um for two finger scroll delay because by default it's something like a half a second and so when you touch feel at least that's what it feels like so when you touch the touchpad and start two fingers scrolling it can feel kind of sluggish to respond but there's actually a software setting for that and you can set it for a low delay I think Microsoft does that because they probably ran a test and most people didn't even know about two-finger scroll or they were squirly users or something and so the focus group said uh people may not understand two- finger scroll let's put the delay in there so that you have to be touching the thing for 5 minutes before it'll actually go into two finger scroll mode but you can change the preference for that I set mine to low delay and it's very responsive the the touchpad is unbelievably responsive it's one of the best if not the best Windows trackpad that I've ever used I can't believe it they finally got it right it's it's unbelievable the Mac people have had that for for years and they're not wrong Apple for all of its fault has a damn good touchpad on their laptops but uh it's nice to see to finally have it on something that's not Apple Hardware so there's that at the top of the keyboard you can see vent holes now one nerdy thing under the hood we're going to talk about more later is is the video card in the keyboard yeah I know that's crazy uh but it is the video card in the keyboard it really is uh everything else is in the screen but the keyboard contains the main battery and the GPU and this thing has about 70 wat hours of battery power most of which is in the in the keyboard part but there is a secondary battery in the screen so the screen can run independently for 2 to 4 hours so that's something now not all Surface Book models have the dedicated Nvidia GPU in the keyboard but this one does the particular model that we're looking at here is the Intel Core i7 7 that's a 6600 U with a maximum turbo clock of 3.4 GHz a stock a normal speed of 2.6 GHz and you know it can down clocked like 500 or 800 MHz or something like that this is the 16 GB of RAM model with 512 gig SSD uh the GPU is a special version it's a special special present from Nvidia it's the GM 108 it's about equivalent to an Nvidia 940m but it's only got one gigabyte of video memory I think this is also only connected with two PCI Express lines but being a 940m it's not really going to bottleneck cuz we're talking PCI Express 3.0 but it's interesting that the interconnect between the screen and the keyboard is PCI Express but we'll talk more about that in the nerdy section now in terms of the 940m and the performance there uh yeah this is not a gaming laptop this is an ultra portable the 940m really gives you better performance in applications like the Adobe Creative Suite and other software that can benefit from GPU acceleration so this laptop is really made for Creative people that want something super portable and on the go with a pretty good to Crazy battery life yes there are laptops out there with way more Graphics horsepower yes there are laptops out there with way more CPU horsepower but in terms of portability versus battery life versus performance I think this is pretty top tier just for its weight class the size of the screen and how small it is overall right now this is one of the top laptops in those categories now there are laptops you know like I say that are are faster have more battery life and they're also going to be heavier or more unwieldy and so we're really talking about a 15 wat CPU with that I've wandered into the nerdy section so this is really cool there a GPU in the keyboard it's got a PCI Express interconnect or Thunderbolt it's almost the Thunderbolt type deal because you know it is kind of hot plug sort of and with that you can detach the screen so what happens is you press this button on the keyboard and then the light turns green if it can be ejected so what has to happen here what's going on it's got a mechanical lock so you can't separate the screen from the keyboard unless the software okays it and that makes sense some people are able to wiggle their screen and produce a blue screen and I think this is because of noise on the PCI Express bus or Thunderbolt orever how this has been implemented some kind of PCI Express some kind of portable PCI Express and the drivers just aren't set up to deal with that I think it's going to be a while before Nvidia really figures that out and really really sets it up right now the other interesting thing is that you have to jump through hoops to install both the Intel driver and and the Nvidia driver and so like Star Wars Battlefront right now at the time of this video if you're using the Microsoft official driver you can't play Star Wars Battlefront you have to have a newer version of the Nvidia driver and it just doesn't work on the surface book but again the surface book is not really meant for gaming I mean you can game on it I was playing a little bit of Fallout and a little bit of GTA 5 just to see what it would do you're going to be running at low resolutions you know 1280 by 800 1280 x 720 rocket League runs great at 1920 x 1080 um a lot of older games or directx9 games run great at higher resolutions but newer games are really not going to run at anything you know above uh console resolution because I mean it's it's basically equivalent to an Nvidia 940m the other weird thing is that the open CL drivers so Nvidia kind of supports opencl now but the NVIDIA drivers that Microsoft provides don't actually support opencl it's been neutered and so I wonder if there's something weird because you know Microsoft's video game division uses AMD gpus I wonder if there's something in their licensing agreement or something in their legal agreement that prevents Microsoft from Distributing open CL stuff with an Nvidia chip I don't know but if you manually install it it works fine if you want to see more about that and like the nitty-gritty of that head on over to the tech forums and you know ask a question or or post there because you can manually install both the Intel drivers and the individ drivers and basically be okay the other tweak that you got to do is set everything to maximum performance when you're plugged in because out of the box it tries not to have The Thermals go too out of control so you can go into power management Etc everything maximum and actually get significantly higher performance from both the GPU and the CPU the physical design of this where the heat producing CPUs in the screen and the heat producing gpus in the bottom means that this thing can actually get quite a bit hotter than your normal laptop because the CPU and the GPU are physically separated normally on a laptop it's not like that the CPU and the GPU often have a common heat pipe and so one is basically dumping heat into the other the separate design of this gives Microsoft a lot more thermal room to deal with heat dis so that works out really well for us the end user in terms of being able to have something that that's a fairly crazy amount of horsepower whenever we're plugged into the wall and so Microsoft says you're going to get 12 hours of of battery life from this thing real world performance for me was actually 7 to 10 hours which is pretty impressive for a 15 wat CPU and an ultra portable was probably the right choice now in terms of the integrated Graphics is the Intel HD graphics 520 it has a maximum clock speed of 1 GHz the big difference here is that 4K at 60 HZ unlike the Surface Pro 3 is actually plug and play yeah that's right you can actually plug in an external 4K display and have it work the good old Samsung U 28d 590d which is like the worst 4k monitor ever it was plug-and play it totally worked never could get that monitor to work with a Surface Pro 3 so let's talk about one other thing that's super Nerdy with this thing it was only recently enabled on the Windows 10 th2 update Intel Speed Shift yeah another name for Stuff uh so what is it well what is speed shift it's like well you know how the processor moves from 800 MHz to faster clocks like 2.6 or 3.4 on the turbo side well it turns out that takes time and you've probably heard us talk about that in our other videos where we're talking about things like Haswell where it's got the fully integrated voltage regulator and they did that so the CPU would be able to better respond and then they moved it back off on Skylight because it you know wasn't as bad in the heat production and that kind of thing well on Skylake because these are these are mobile Skylake CPUs um there are more hard Ware power States or P States um that are available for the hardware to manage that kind of thing and so when the CPU is going from 800 MHz to 2.6 or or 3.2 leaving the operating system to manage that means that it can take 60 80 100 milliseconds to do that 100 milliseconds is a tenth of a second so that's basically an eternity in terms of computation in terms of like a responsive UI so if you're sitting there with a laptop and you're reading something and you reach out to touch the screen or you do something that requires computation on the laptop then it has to wake up and move to a higher clock speed and the time it takes to do that uh it sort of factors in to how responsive the user interface is well with speed shift you're able to do these things about three to 10 times faster depending on on what you're doing I mean it's able to do that and some some graphs are saying that it's you know 6 8 milliseconds in terms of responding and that's just because with the Windows 10 th2 update a lot of the pstate changes where it goes from a low power state to a high power State happen in hardware and because it's happening in Hardware it happens a lot faster and so it's able to upshift and downshift a lot faster as well so overall you can still have greater power savings um because you're not wasting so much time going from faster to slower but it also means the system is more responsive so when you touch a screen and scroll you can see more stuff now PC perspective actually has a really good ride up in a demo of this where they they got a high-speed camera I think it was just an iPhone camera 120 HZ or whatever and they were demoing it you know just scrolling in a web page and in Internet Explorer Edge or Internet Edge or whatever Microsoft wants to call their browser these days and it was noticeably more responsive with speed shift because the system was able to wake up and respond to that whereas it had been in a very low power State when it was just displaying information I mean that's how you get 12-hour battery life out of your laptop and so it makes sense that they would try to improve the situation as far as responsiveness goes and so Intel speed shift for new hardware that supports it was just enabled in the th2 update so it's nice to feel it on the surface book and I could definitely tell a difference when the th2 update was applied just in terms of how applications responded especially when I was traveling with the Surface Book let's do a mini review of the Microsoft Surface doc this is the new Doc this is for the Surface Pro 4 and the Surface Book it's also Backward Compatible with Surface Pro 3 um unlike the previous doc where it mechanically snapped in this looks like a glorified power brick it actually comes with a power brick that's exactly the same size as the dock itself but this is the dock the dock gives you an internet connection Audio Two mini display port and 4 USB 3 let me just summarize for you and say this is piece of crap don't buy it it costs too much and it still doesn't work exactly the way that it should if you going to try to run two 4K displays with this dock at 60 HZ it is not going to work period again and again at the surface launch event or whatever uh Panos pan said oh in just a minute we're going to hook this up and power these two 4K displays that never actually happened because this doesn't work for that now if you're going to run two 1920 x 1080 displays or possibly even two 2560 X 1440 displays off of this then yes you can absolutely do that two 4K displays not so much there are some people that have been able to get this to work with two 4K displays at 30 htz but they specifically said 4K 60 HZ the irony is that the Skylake chips actually do support driving to 4K displays at 60 HZ but this is not wired up this dock is not wired up in such a way to actually support that what's worse is if you've got the Surface Book which has the discrete GPU this connector actually blocks the display port connection this is not the case on the surface so if you have the Surface Pro 4 Tablet you can actually use the dock with one display port connection as well as a display port connection on the physical surface you know tablet itself and you can actually power two 4K displays at 60 HZ from the surface but you got to plug in the dock and a monitor separately with the Surface Book this blocks the mini display port connection so you cannot use the mini display port connection on the surface book without whittling down a cable and I tried but this connection is also really really fiddly so if you plug this connection in slightly wrong uh it doesn't actually make connection and I'm not really sure why that is uh you just have to sort of wiggle it so you have something you have to pay attention to when you're magnetically attaching it and if you move the laptop around while this is connected it is liable to shift slightly and then it takes the laptop off charge and unless you notice that then your laptop will be dead as you you know it's I don't understand it's unch charge no the connector was just being fiddly so I really think Microsoft has re it's it's frustrating because it's so close I mean Microsoft is on to something with this form factor businesses crave this kind of a format this is really sexy hardware and it almost works perfectly right uh I think 90 8% of the problems on the surface book are down to software and that's probably good because it's going to improve windows and it's going to make things better for everybody because Microsoft sort of has to eat their own dog food and now deal with some Hardware Oddities that manufacturers for a long time have been saying hey Microsoft can we maybe not have a blue screen whenever the PCI bus does something slightly weird which is what a lot of the blue screen problems that you read about with the Surface Book are but uh it's not quite there yet I think there's going to be a lot of updates to Windows 10 in the spring 2016 that will hopefully fix a lot of these issues but you know by then we're halfway through the product life cycle so the Surface Book Two is probably the probably the device you want to look for that where they've sort of solved all these problems maybe I don't know there's also Skylake shortages right now so that's maybe another another thing to worry about but overall the dock the dock they completely missed the mark on again it's really exciting and it's especially frustrating because it's almost perfect they've got the right idea but the execution oh the ex execution has so many fatal flaws so overall what's the final verdict on the surface book well the hardware is amazing but you can do better for Price versus performance now with a detachable screen there's not a kickstand on it or anything like that you just carry it around it's literally just a screen there's not even any ports on it other than the headphone port and of course the dock connector you can plug the dock directly into the screen but you know the battery life is a little limited on that 2 to four hours you can flip the screen around the other way so that you can you know close it and hold it like a book like I was talking about but the price is really steep I really I really wish would Microsoft would would come down a little bit on the price but it is new Innovative interesting Hardware uh because it's new Innovative interesting Hardware the Linux support is not there yet the Surface Pro 3 it took about 6 months for good Linux support to show up and I suspect that's going to be the case with the surface book as well only because in terms of the hardware the hardware is really solid I'm really impressed with the build quality and I'm really impressed with all of the other components around the Hardware this is easily one of the best Windows laptops that I've ever used and in terms of Linux and in terms of developing a good touch interface that is Linux that's not Android this would be a good piece of Hardware to do it on where it not so crazy expensive but it is a very premium feeling device I also love the screen the 3x2 aspect ratio screen oh I don't 16x9 in a laptop is bad I had no idea how bad it was until I used the screen on this 16 by9 is just terrible I love being able B to have two things side by side but have a lot of vertical room for the applications this screen is really the perfect size the laptop also doesn't feel heavy or bulky or weird or out of place or anything like that I really like the screen on the surface book I also like it because the bezels are smaller and the display is really sharp and the color reproduction and all that kind of thing I also really liked Windows hello Windows hello the login system basically takes a 3D picture of your face it's a stereoscopic infrared thing and tries to figure out your face in 3D so it's a a little bit more sophisticated than just holding up a picture of your head in order to log you in and this works like that and so you can just sort of be in front of the computer and it does face recognition and signs you in that's really neat but I really hope a 3D map of my face hasn't been uploaded to the NSA I suspect it has because the other neat feature of Windows th2 was that it sets all your privacy settings back to whatever Microsoft wants it's like oh you you turn everything off and you disable search and you do all the stuff oh that's cool you want the update yeah I'm going to reset all that for you it was so bad they uh I guess people noticed and then Microsoft was like hm should we not have done that and they pulled the update so I think that's been fixed by now but still you know that's very bad Microsoft's going to do a better job with their their quality control because I don't need 3D pictures of my face being uploaded I me how crazy would it be if you walk into the Microsoft store and it's like oh hey Bob how's it going yeah know welcome to the Microsoft store it's like it's not creepy at all that's that's just very bad and overall there are a lot of software bugs but in terms of the Windows laptop experience it's actually really good and I like the ability to detach the screen and turn it into a tablet and use the pen I think Microsoft is on to something with this form factor and I think they're on to something with the pen for everyday Computing overall I like that Microsoft is trying to innovate by coming up with new and interesting Hardware that's very good for the ecosystem I think it's also true that Windows support for Hardware is going to improve as a result of this exercise the fact that Windows the windows kernel or the Windows driver architecture can't really deal well with PCI Express flakiness means that the next generation of Windows is going to deal well with high-speed peripherals because you know Max have had Thunderbolt for years but the reason the PCS have never really figured out Thunderbolt is because the bus has direct access to the system memory and a whole lot of the system and so a lot of PC vendors really see that as a security risk I mean you don't want to be able to plug a thunderbolt device into a computer and have it completely take over the computer the way that it was with fire wire and so a lot of stuff the last couple of generations has had optional Thunderbolt add-in cards so you can get a thunderbolt card for a PC and add it in and use that but now Microsoft is having to actually use Thunderbolt or at least a hot plug PCI Express connection with their own core hardware and so that means this part of Windows is really going to be short up and it's really going to be improved and so I think if Microsoft continues on the path with this and improves the Surface Book Hardware the ecosystem in 6 months or even a year is going to be amazing I think that it is a really really expensive device for what it is and unless you really want to save on the weight you really want the portability or you really want you know the tablet ability there are other options that are dramatically less expensive that are almost as good yeah they don't use a 15 watt CPU yeah they don't have the sexy 3x2 display um but you can get a much bigger bang for the buck if that's what you're shopping for but if you want a super premium super portable device uh this is pretty good no is this pretty good it's also Innovative in terms of the hardware form factor they've really pushed the envelope of of of what they're able to do and I think this a pretty high praise for Microsoft and overall this really would be a five-star device if the software were a little bit better the software being as bugy as it is really detracts from the price tag and that's really the long and short of it but the fact they were able to cram a GPU in this thing and they're doing the stuff that they're doing with the hardware I really like it so overall I'm going to play with this for the next couple of months so if you've got one or you thinking about getting one of these head over to the tech forums and let us know let us know what your thoughts are let us know what your experiences are I'd be curious to hear from you what your experiences have been for students or people that are taking notes or doing development I mean in terms of like a development workstation this is actually really good 16 gab of ram I can run virtual machines and do all kinds of neat things so I like that part of it as well I also like that it's super portable and that the screen is the way that it is so overall I'm fairly satisfied even though the price tag does sting a little bit I'm wendle I'm signing out and I'll see you in the forums a\n"