Over at its New York press event, Microsoft has unveiled a revamped Core i7 Surface Book which considerably bolsters performance and ups battery longevity – and it will set you back $2,399 (around £1,960, AU$3,130).
The new Surface Book Core i7 – officially called the Surface Book with Performance Base – boasts no less than 16 hours of battery life, and it’s twice as fast as the original hybrid was in terms of graphics performance – and when compared to the top-end 13-inch MacBook Pro, it boasts three times more graphics performance.
The actual GPU used is a GeForce GTX 965M with 2GB of GDDR5 memory, so no Pascal graphics here, sadly (just like the Surface Studio). In the base model of this machine, you get 8GB of RAM, along with 256GB of storage.
Pre-orders for the device go live today over in the US, and it’s expected to ship on November 10.
Thermal trickery
Panos Panay, who gave the presentation on the refreshed hybrid, noted that Microsoft engineers had to redesign the device in terms of thermal considerations, in order to keep the new Surface Book cool with all its extra pep (apparently, new cooling fins have been added, along with a second fan).
Panay called it “pound for pound the most performant laptop on the market” (yes, ‘performant’). Interestingly, he also claimed that the Surface Book has the highest user satisfaction rating among current Windows 10 and MacBook users.
- You might also want to read our roundup of Surface Book 2 rumors
