Choose your weapon, mobile road warriors
Microsoft has long pitched its Surface Pro as a tablet that can replace your laptop and that's still the case with its Surface Pro 4 introduced today. At the same time, for users interested in strictly a notebook form factor, Microsoft also unveiled the Surface Book, its first laptop.
Starting with the Surface Pro 4,it's the thinnest and lightest Surface to date at just 8.4mm thin. It also boasts a 12.3-inch PixelSense display with 6th Generation Intel Core m, Core i5, an Core i7 processor options. Despite the slight increase in screen size, the Surface Pro 4 still features the same overall footprint as the Surface Pro 3 so it's compatible with existing keyboard accessories.
From a performance standpoint, Microsoft says the Surface Pro 4 is 30 percent faster than its predecessor. If you want to compare it to Apple's MacBook Air, which Microsoft's Panos Panay was careful not to disparage, the Surface Pro 4 is supposedly 50 percent faster.
Surface Pro 4 will offer up to 16GB of RAM and up to 1TB of storage space. It will be available to pre-order today starting at $899.
Surface Book
The biggest surprise of Microsoft's hardware event was the introduction of the Surface Book. Pegged as a Surface device in a laptop form factor, the Surface Book is Microsoft's first true laptop built in-house.
It's a little bigger than the Surface Pro 4 with a 13.5-inch optically bonded display with a pixel density of 276ppi. Inside the Surface Book is an Intel Skylake processor, a dedicated Nvidia GeForce GPU with GDDR5 memory, and solid state storage that connects through the PCI Express bus. That's a potent foundation and the reason why Microsoft claims the Surface Book is the "fastest 13-inch laptop anywhere on the planet."
Just as the Surface Pro is a tablet that can replace your laptop, the opposite is true of the Surface Book -- it's a laptop that can replace your tablet (Microsoft isn't pitching it as such). To that end, it sports a detachable keyboard. The Nvidia GPU is actually inside the keyboard dock, so when you detach the display, the Surface Book switches to Intel's integrated graphics.
What if you want the power of a discrete GPU in tablet form? You can keep the keyboard attached and bend the display backwards. Using a "dynamic fulcrum hinge," the Surface Book is able to bend at different points, allowing users to push the screen back 360 degrees.
Some of the of the other features Microsoft mentioned include keyboard backlighting, 5-point multitouch glass trackpad, two USB 3.0 ports, SD card slot, and 12 hours of battery life.
The Surface Book will be available to pre-order today starting at $1,499 and will ship on October 26.
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From maximumpc
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