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Microsoft has finally gone and washed it — it's made a laptop. The new, loftier-terminate Surface Book, unveiled today at Microsoft'due south Windows ten Devices event in Manhattan, marks a turning point for the 40-year-former company, and could well herald a dramatic change in direction for how Microsoft now sees itself in the tech industry.

Some specifics: The convertible Surface Book features a 13.five-inch optically bonded PixelSense display with 267 PPI and 6 meg pixels, equally well as Gorilla Glass iv. Calling it "ounce for ounce the fastest 13-inch laptop always made," the Surface Volume volition feature Intel Skylake processors. Plus, there's a discrete Nvidia GPU with GDDR5 retention, and then yous can actually play games on this thing, at least 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 1.6mm of travel, and there'southward a drinking glass touchpad with five contact points for gesture command. The screen besides supports pen and bear upon input, and Microsoft is promising 12 hours of battery life.

Dynamic Fulcrum Swivel

Peradventure the biggest design bespeak of interest is the snake-like Dynamic Fulcrum hinge that connects the screen to the keyboard. You can detach the screen and use it as a self-enclosed laptop, making it a existent convertible design (or detachable hybrid, if you want to telephone call it that). The CPU is in the tablet portion, but the discrete Nvidia GPU is in the base, meaning that there must be full PCIe betwixt the two.

Surface-Book-Hinge

During the event, Microsoft employees compared the Surface Book with the MacBook Pro, not the iPad Pro as we would have expected. The company is serious about taking on Apple directly here, and just catapulted themselves over the very OEMs that have been Microsoft's life blood for decades. This is different than the Surface, which itself was a bit of a shot across the bow to Dell and HP at the time. This is a full-on announcement that Microsoft is serious well-nigh hardware. While it'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 so on, it's never direct pursued a PC-based strategy like this before.

Surface-Book-Tablet

Taking Surface — and Microsoft — to a new level

The Surface Book runs Windows 10, naturally. Information technology starts at $1,499, and volition exist available in configurations with upward to 16GB RAM and 1TB flash storage (!); pre-orders begin October 7th, with shipping boxes hitting retail stores Oct 26th. You could fence that this is what the Surface should accept been all forth; I wouldn't debate that, although the Surface Pro has been a pretty damn skillful product that's simply been truly hobbled by Microsoft'south confused marketing and pricing strategies (and leftover mudded Windows RT-related messaging).

Surface Book Laptop

It'll exist interesting to run into how the Surface Book performs in the real world. Simply first impressions are that it'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 it has worked and then hard to court for so long.