Recently, Microsoft has transcended a fairly big step on their way to Appledom: As part of building and releasing the Surface family of computers, and now their Lumia phones, they hold public events showing off their new wares every once in a while, exactly in the manner that Apple does.
On Last Tuesday, Microsoft had its Windows 10 Devices event, which was interesting. Overall, the event was…. Very fast. It felt like everybody at Microsoft was on some kind of stimulant, and so while they thought they were doing it at about the pace an Apple event goes, everybody just kept saying so many words. Perhaps the only people who came on stage that went at a pretty reasonable pace were Terry Myerson and Satya Nadella. Everybody was super pumped to be there (but none as much as Panos Panay) and it showed in their enthusiasm and delivery, but they all said too many words, and most of them said all of those words far too quickly.
Once the apple-style congratulations about the successes of Microsoft itself and Windows 10 had been finished, there were a few takeaways from the actual core of the event, I'll just list them here:
- New Lumias 950 and 950XL: Computing specs on them are utterly insane. Continuum gives you most of the desktop Windows 10 experience hanging off a phone, including using USB storage devices. This is what RT wanted to be when it grew up.
- Surface Pro 4: Thinner, faster, better cooling system. New Type Cover. New Pen. Accessories work for Surface Pro 3.
- New Surface Dock: works with SP3 and SP4 on the renamed SurfaceConnect port.
- One More Thing, Surface Book: the Ultimate Laptop, think of a slightly larger Surface Pro with a 3000x200 display, attached to a heavy laptop base that can have a discrete GPU in it.
The obvious news here is the Surface Book. Surface Pro 4 is essentially everything everybody predicted, right down to the fact that there are both 4.5-watt (fanless!) Core M3 and 15-watt Core i5/i7 variations available.
Microsoft claims that the Surface Book is the ultimate laptop computer. Whether or not you totally believe that (anything in the "moderately premium 15-inch" category should beat it six ways to Tuesday) the Surface Book is the ultimate laptop, I think that we can agree that the Surface Book is the laptop everybody has wanted Microsoft to build since 2012 when the news dropped that Microsoft would be building some of its own tablets for Windows 10.
The technical details at this moment are scant, but we do know that the Surface Book will be available with i5 and i7 CPUs, and 4, 8, or 16 gigabytes of RAM. Storage will max out at either 512GB or 1TB (unclear) and there is an option to get a discrete GPU, which appears to be some kind of nVidia chip, with a gigabyte of video memory. Microsoft claims the whole thing will run for 12 hours on battery, even when you're using it heavily.
To make the whole thing better, the Surface Book houses most of its computing guts in the display, meaning you can detach the screen and use it as a "clipboard." Microsoft hasn't said if this component works with the other Surface keyboards, but I think the real point here is to take it off and either reverse or hand it to somebody so they can look at your notes, PowerPoint presentation, or a funny comic you found. Microsoft says that (as with the Surface Pro 3 and 4) it's perfect for OneNote.
The Surface Book is very expensive: it starts at $1499 and the pretty obvious choice for the "insane content creation workstation" machine. I think the question is whether or not the market that demands premium 13.3-inch systems and the market that demands systems that are good for content creation and gaming really overlap all that much. The Surface Book is pretty clearly a killer machine, but I question the decision to try to sell it based on its specs. Just as with the Surface Pro family, almost every OEM is going to undercut it on price, and build machines with much higher specs. Dell has a 15-inch laptop with quad-core CPUs paired to 4-gig GeForce 960M graphics cards, which are going to be faster for almost everything.
Regardless of configuration: the thing that will make people want this device is that Microsoft has proven that they can sell a premium machine, for a premium price, to people who want really good hardware, even if it's at the expense of performance or (up to recently) form factor.
As always, I have to frame this in terms of whether or not I'd buy it. The thing I thought when I saw the reveal on The Verge's live-blog was "shut up and take my money." I've said it before: there is a lot of pent-up demand for Microsoft to make a laptop, and most of the people who want this, are the people willing to spend $1499 on the (still very good) "base" configuration of the Surface Book.
Microsoft claims that it's a lot faster than existing 13-inch notebooks. The specific comparison was the 13-inch MacBook Pro. It's not 100% clear what generation they are talking about, but it looked like the old 13-inch machine with Mac OS X 10.9 installed on it. This would be a "technically correct" choice, because Apple still sells that machine (after almost four years) but shameful, because the Haswell-based MacBook Air outperforms it slightly, and the Haswell and Broadwell chips in the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro (which are 28-watt chips) should be even faster than that. Haswell was a small miracle, but I doubt that from Broadwell to Skylake, enough improvement has been made that a Surface Book is going to be much faster than a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro. I think it must be that Microsoft is talking about tasks that are optimized to take advantage of the GPU in the high end models of the Surface Book.
There are a few configurations, and I think Microsoft has some ideas for each.
- $1499: i5/iGPU/8GB/128GB – "I want a Microsoft laptop"
- $1699: i5/iGPU/8GB/256GB – "I want to bring my big design and Visual Studio projects with me."
- $1899 i5/dGPU/8GB/256GB – "I want to play some games or use After Effects."
- $2099 i7/dGPU/8GB/256GB – "Content creation workstation."
- $2699 i7dGPU/16GB/512GB – "I want to bring my 4k video project or my photo library with me. Also, virtualization."
People already do all manner of things on the Surface Pro family machines. Everybody says they run Visual Studio and Creative Cloud well, and Microsoft says that their Surface product design group takes it a step further and runs design and engineering programs on them, to design the next generation of Surface.
One thing I always worry about is how a new portable computer will integrate into a workflow. When I bought my ThinkPad T400, it was my only computer, so I used a docking station to attach it to a monitor I had, and to quickly connect it to Ethernet and some other USB devices I had. When I bought its various successors, the portable computer only specifically needed to be portable, and I used SharePoint (or other technologies) to synchronize my work from one computer to the next.
I suspect that for everything except gaming (which I do not do much of at this point) a Surface Book would be sufficient as my primary desktop computer at home. The best way to make this happen would be to attach monitors, a keyboard, mouse, and some storage (along with Ethernet) to the Surface Dock, which is probably the best "rip and go" docking solution I have seen. One connector charges the machine, provides USB, Ethernet, and DisplayPort outputs, and you don't need to do anything special to release the machine, other than dis-mount drives, if you have any connected. (I do not know if I would, or if I would just store things on network shares.)