 This is the Surface Book 3, which Microsoft updated for 2020 with new and faster components on the inside, but left the outside pretty much exactly the same. Actually exactly, exactly the same. It's the same. The idea here is you're supposed to get a full-powered Pro laptop with a GPU and lots of horsepower battery in the base, but if you want, you can detach it and turn the screen into a tablet. Now this idea the first time we saw it was like, whoa, and then the second time we saw it was like, okay, yeah. And now I feel like with this third iteration, we finally understand the trade-offs. The Surface Book 3 isn't a traditional laptop, and that means different trade-offs. You have to ask yourself how important this really is. All right, first trade-off with the Surface Book 3, when you're in the standard laptop mode, I just think there's a little too much bulk. It's like the volume to power ratio is just a bit off. It's big and it's thick, even this 13.5-inch version. Now the reason for that is because there's so many computer guts in here behind the screen, which does make it just a little bit top-heavy. It's never tippy, but you can really feel it's a little bit odd when you carry it around. But look, it's very well made, and the keyboard here is great. The trackpad is a little tiny bit on the small side for 2020, but it is super smooth and accurate, precise. I love the trackpad. I do wish that there were Thunderbolt ports, but Microsoft has some evidence that says that Thunderbolt ports are insecure. At least there's USB-C and there's an SD card slot. Thank you. No, really, seriously, I mean this. Thank you. The screen is great. It's 13.5 inches and a three-by-two aspect ratio, so it actually feels really, really big, bigger than other 13-inch laptops, even though the bezels here are substantial. It also feels really, really big when you use it as a tablet. This is not like your ultra-portable tablet thing. This is substantial. Finally, the whole reason this entire system works is because of this very fancy, strong snake hinge and the locking mechanism and all that. As neat and cool as it is, I sort of feel like this isn't the final form of what a tablet-laptop hybrid is meant to be. When you close it, the hinge gap here is just really big. A whole bunch of stuff can get in there, and it makes the whole thing thicker than other modern laptops. It's very, very nicely built hardware. I really like Surface hardware, but it just feels like it's a little bit ungainly. Okay, what's new here? Well, because it's all internal changes, we've got to talk about some specs. Here we go. The big thing is Intel's 10th-gen processors. The basic model of the Surface Book 3 has a Core i5, Intel's standard Iris Plus graphics, 8 gigs of RAM, 256 of storage, and that goes for $1,600. This review unit is $2,500, which gets you a Core i7, 32 gigs of RAM, 512 of storage, and the keyboard base here has a basic NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q GPU. The 15-inch can have an even better GPU. You can spec one of these up to be a bit of a beast, but like the X-Men live-action movies version of the beast, not the super burly one from the comics or the cartoons. It's a smaller, more refined beast, because the thing about the Intel Core i7 chip that's inside the Surface Book 3 is that on the 13.5-inch and even the bigger 15-inch, it's the 15-watt version of the Intel chip, the kind that you usually see in ultrabooks. It's not the 45-watt version that you might see in a Dell XPS 15 or a 16-inch MacBook Pro. Of course, the reason for that is you can detach this, and they need to keep the processor with the screen, and so they can't fit the higher thermals inside this little tablet here. So that is the second trade-off. You get a slightly less powerful CPU. Now, even with this separate special NVIDIA GPU, this is still not like a traditional gaming laptop. I mean, look, you could definitely do way more gaming on this thing than you could on an Ultrabook or a Surface laptop or something like that, but a traditional gaming laptop like a Razer is gonna give you way more power for way less money. But if you do a bunch of stuff that leans heavily on the GPU, like, I don't know, CAD drawing or something, this will be able to take advantage of that, make your workflow a bit faster, when, of course, the thing is docked. We are gonna run some benchmarks for the full review, and by we, I mean Tom Warren and Monica Chin who are actually reviewing this thing, so stay tuned for that, but tell you what, here's a Geekbench score, and here's a Cinebench. You may now debate in the comments. Bottom line, there's three main downsides to the Surface Book 3. Price, a little bit of power, and bulk. It's pretty big for a 13-inch laptop, but in exchange for that, you get really good quality hardware because it's a Surface. You get a clean Microsoft software experience without a whole lot of extra junk on it, and, of course, you can remove the tablet. That's the whole point of this thing, which means that there's no clean one-to-one heads-up comparison that I can give you to another laptop because the extra cost that you pay for a Surface Book 3 doesn't really fit on a spec sheet. Instead, it's about, you know, trade-offs. Hey, everybody, thanks so much for watching. Let me know in the comments, are the trade-offs on the Surface Book 3 interesting to you, or do you want something more traditional? Also, if you missed it, I reviewed the Surface Go 2, an entirely different set of trade-offs, and you can click and watch that somewhere here.