 My Surface Pro 3 video was not one of my most liked videos ever. I bought a Surface Pro 3 with the intention of using it as a daily driver machine, but over the course of creating this review, determined that contrary to Microsoft's assertion, it was not, for me anyway, a suitable replacement for a laptop as a primary portable computer, and that having a stylus included with a product without having considered but not everyone on the planet has a front shirt pocket in which to hold it is absolutely ridiculous. So I eventually gave that machine away in a sweepstakes a couple of months later. But let's see if the Surface Book, Microsoft's clear acknowledgement that I was right, can put a Surface product in my hands permanently. This review is super late. Thanks, Microsoft store. So we'll just do a lightning-fast tour of the device and get into the usability right away. The charger is compact and includes a 1 amp USB charging port. Awesome for travel. The included pen or pencil, depending on who you ask, now has a flattened edge to snap on to the magnetic left side of the screen, and it triggers Cortana when you press the eraser along with some other changes I'll discuss later. And finally, the Surface Book itself comes pre-assembled in its laptop configuration, which means that on the top part of the magnesium clamshell, you'll get the following. A power button and volume controls on the top left there, a headphone jack on the right that I'd really have preferred closer to this bottom corner, and a kind of finicky but thankfully magnetic power input on the bottom. Then on the detachable keyboard slash battery slash IO unit thing, you get an alternate power input, mini display port. Thank you for this. Bye bye, HDMI. It's been nice knowing you. Two USB 3 ports and a full-sized SD card reader. Just right for a mouse, a display, a USB drive, and a way to transfer to and from a portable device even in the wilderness. Microsoft nailed the IO on the Surface Book. Which brings us to how these things go together. Well, from early complaints, not very well, but Microsoft has been surprisingly on the ball about fixing common complaints, like the display glitching out when they're detached and reattached. And at this point, with the click of a button in the system tray, the device prompts you if there are any applications that need to be saved or closed, then disengages with a satisfying click that makes it feel kind of like, you know, opening the airlock or something like that. Which I guess leads us into the piece of voodoo magic that is the keyboard attachment. Much like Asus' famous TF-101 transformer, the Surface Book's base includes a keyboard, a touchpad, and an additional battery pack. But unlike anything I've had my hands on before, unless you count this thing, it's got a PCI Express 3.0 link to a discrete level GPU, a slightly customized GTX 940M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory by the look of things. That gives the Surface Book much more graphics horsepower than onboard graphics would allow when it's attached to the base. It's more for GPU accelerated productivity tasks, though. You won't be playing modern AAA games on it at the full 3000 by 2000 resolution of that 267 pixel per inch, 13.5 inch IPS, pixel sense display that Microsoft has been bragging about. Which doesn't mean they shouldn't be bragging about it. First of all, we can finally add a PC maker to the list of companies that understand that 16 by 9 is not where it's at for productivity, and Microsoft goes even further than we used to enjoy 16 by 10 all the way to 15 by 10. The effect is subtle, but it's just more comfortable if you're trying to read or edit documents. And second, man, I was floored by the way the black taskbar gets lost in the black glass bezel. And if you'd have told me the screen was OLED, I'd have probably believed you for a minute or two. Microsoft says that they're individually calibrating every one of these displays, and that it's got an incredible 1700 to 1 contrast ratio, and I believe them. A few more housekeeping items. The workmanship of my sample is what I can only describe as excellent. The onboard speakers are forward-facing and loud enough for individual use in a quiet environment, but not like some laptops where you can kind of leave them near you on the dining room table while you make dinner in the kitchen. And the hinge, it's neat. It shows really well in marketing videos, but frankly, I think Lenovo's Yoga Series 270 degree hinge is a more elegant way to make a 2 in 1. But let's talk about the 2 in 1 this then. I'm not a huge tablet user in both senses. I own a few tablets because of work, but I almost never use one larger than 7 inches because I find them kind of heavy and redundant. If I'm doing something important enough to need a big screen, I'm probably doing something important enough to need a keyboard. And the Surface Book didn't cause me to have any kind of epiphany about how wrong I was about large tablets before. It's shockingly light for its size, yet strong, and Microsoft has probably nailed the use case where like, mom and dad are sitting on the couch watching something on the TV, and, you know, junior wants to be nearby, but watch something else on a nice big screen. But that's not a situation that comes up for me very often. As a laptop, the Surface Book is pretty good. My usual Cinebench thermal throttling score showed perfect scaling from run to run, and even a prolonged i-64 stress test at room temperature yielded acceptable acoustics and no thermal throttling. This is the i7 6600U 3 GHz dual core 16 gig model, guys. Well done, Microsoft, on that point. The trackpad is responsive with perfectly tuned sensitivity out of the box, something we don't see enough of. The keyboard is a little bit mushy feeling for my tastes, but the travel distances are good, and the mushiness is not in a way that affected my typing speeds, and it compensated by being very, very quiet, something a lot of people care about. And finally, I think Apple's nonsense about touchscreens not being suitable for laptops is just an excuse to make their devices a hair thinner, because I use the touchscreen on the Surface Book in laptop mode all the time. It's just natural to do it sometimes. To be clear, the Surface Book is not perfect. The onboard Wi-Fi is terrible. There is no excuse for anything but Intel in a device this expensive. It weighs almost as much as my Blade 14 with much less powerful hardware, and this is something I noticed especially when using the pen to make little diagrams while writing scripts and putting together shot lists for videos. There's more screen wobble than I'd have liked, but it is a huge leap forward from my last Surface device, the Pro 3. Well, hold on a second, Linus. Let's just back up. You griped about the pen in the Surface Pro 3 review. What a joke. Why are you talking about how you used it this time? Great question, because this time it's better. There's little changes like really, you know, low latency, more granular pressure detection. It's got one button versus two on the bottom now, and it's powered only by a single quadruple A battery instead of needing those other cells. But the big change for me is that it's actually carryable. The magnetic clip on the side is great. I mean, it's not as good as if you could really put it inside it, but it sticks to it like glue. It's freaking awesome. It makes it something that I can take with me places instead of worrying about losing it and being out 60 bucks every time, which leads us to the conclusion. The Surface Book stands out as a beacon of beautiful, elegant design among PC makers who somehow manage to use, you know, high quality aluminum materials in the construction of their products, but just can't make them feel premium in the hand. Unlike a product like the iPad Pro, the 128 gig model of which is closer in price to an entry-level Surface Book than people probably realize, since that one doesn't include the keyboard or the pencil in the box, the Surface Book actually delivers on its promise of true laptop productivity in addition to being a ginormous tablet. I guess for me though, I just don't have much use for the tablet part of it. So whether it's worth it to you is going to be a matter of personal choice, because what it amounts to for someone like me is a really expensive laptop. But at least that's more than I can say about most first-generation devices, and IMO, Microsoft nailed what they were going after here, and are going to have a lot of really happy customers. And speaking of brands that hope to have a lot of happy customers, Watchable! Whoa, what's Watchable? That's a new sponsor, Linus. I guess I'll stay tuned and listen to what you're going to say about it. Watchable is a new free on-demand video platform that just launched in the US that features daily curated playlists from creators and brands like Vice, Tastemade, GoPro, and actually even some of our content. What's interesting about that? Well, great question. Remember when YouTube used to have, you know, staff picks and stuff like that? Well, it's kind of a return to that instead of relying on just an algorithm. You can view watchable content on your computer through their iOS app and even on your TV through some set-top boxes. They want you to be able to watch more and search less with their curated playlists. So if all that sounds interesting to you, head on over to the link in the video description and check them out today. But just please note, I said US a couple times for a reason as the content on Watchable is currently available only in that region. So thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon. Instructions for what you're up there. By buying a cool shirt like this one. We've actually got a holiday discount. Maybe I can get Nick to put the coupon code down there or something. If nothing else, it's on the WAN show that was from like November, the last one in November. And I'm sure there are other options as well. Anyway, now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next. So click that little button in the top right corner to check out Luke's review of the Radeon R9 380X, a new graphics card from AMD that performs about between the ones that are priced higher and lower.