So Surface Book officially started shipping on Monday, the 26th, and I finally got my hands on one at the Microsoft Store out at the mall on Wednesday instead of just watching more review videos like a coward. Been curious about this thing since Microsoft's event earlier in the month where they unveiled it alongside the Surface Pro 4 and the two new Lumia phones, and I wanted to see the "detachable laptop" pitch in person before deciding whether to be annoyed by it or not.
Short version: I'm annoyed by it, but not for the reason I expected.
The hinge is the thing everyone's talking about, and fair enough, it does look cool, all those layered metal segments folding into a curve so the lid doesn't sit flush when it's closed. Fine. Whatever. What actually got me was the release button. You press it to pop the screen off the keyboard base and turn it into a fat little tablet, and instead of just releasing, there's a pause. A second or two where nothing happens and a little icon pops up telling you it's "preparing to detach." Apparently it's checking whether any app is actively using the discrete GPU that lives down in the base, so it can shut things down cleanly before you pull the screen off. Smart, technically. But it makes the whole gesture feel like asking your car for permission before it lets you open the door.
I get why it exists. There's a real GPU in the keyboard part on some configurations, sitting there next to the extra battery, and I guess yanking the tablet off mid-render could genuinely cause a problem. Still, it's the kind of engineering-first decision that makes a product feel less magical than the marketing wants it to. Apple's whole thing for a decade has been hiding the plumbing so you never have to think about why something works. This is the opposite of that, and I'm not convinced it's a compliment.
Price is the other sticking point for me, and I know I say this about basically everything Microsoft ships now, but $1,499 for the base Surface Book (Core i5, 8 gigs of RAM, 128GB of storage, no discrete graphics) is not a casual buy. Go up to the model with the GPU and more storage and you're pushing past two grand, and the fully loaded one is $3,199, which is more than my car cost when I bought it used. That's flagship-MacBook territory, except you're also paying for a hinge mechanism and a detach sensor and a second battery pack, none of which I'm convinced most people asked for. The screen itself is genuinely lovely, 3000x2000, sharper than anything else I've seen on a laptop, and the keyboard might be the best I've typed on in years. So it's not like Microsoft phoned in the fundamentals.
Meanwhile, everyone's still talking about Apple
Apple posted their quarterly numbers on Tuesday, another record quarter, over 48 million iPhones sold in three months, and the stock still wobbled because Wall Street apparently wanted even more. I don't have much to add beyond finding it funny that "only" selling 48 million phones in a quarter counts as a letdown to anyone. Perspective is a strange thing in this industry, and I say that as someone who once got mildly excited about a router firmware update.
Anyway, back to the Surface Book. I didn't buy one. I stood in the store for about twenty minutes, detached the screen four or five times just to feel that little delay again, and decided I'd rather wait and see if Microsoft irons this out on the next version once people have actually lived with it for a few months. The Surface Pro 4 sitting right next to it, which hit shelves the same day, honestly seemed like the more sensible purchase for anyone who doesn't specifically need the extra battery and the keyboard-based graphics card. But sensible has never really been what these launch-week gadgets are selling. What they're selling is the twenty minutes I just spent detaching a screen over and over in a mall, grinning like an idiot every single time.