Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

*Update Feb 2016* My girlfriend has been using it for over 5 months. For most of the time it is a smooth ride. Fast, quiet, elegant. Everything you expect from a flagship laptop. There are a few issues for which I am going to lower the review to 4-stars. Hopefully these are more of win10 issues and can be resolved by software/firmware updates. 1, Sometimes it refuses to wake up. Had to use force restart, and maybe on several tries. After restart, it sometimes would go to UEFI mode--not really a user-friendly place my girlfriend likes to be in. This is particularly annoying issue since you don't want to be stuck with a black screen right in middle of class/meeting. 2, The solid state drive performs sub-par. I have run a disk speed test and the result is similar to the first generation Apple Flash storage. It is supposed to be the fastest standard on the market--NVME, not the standard of a few years back. The score shows that it is about half to 2/3 the speed of the NVME SSD inside new Dell XPS15 (with same storage). It might be due to the fact that Microsoft had to save some space and cram too many things within Surface Book's slim body, making its NVME SSD not performing up to its potential. Anyway, the real life experience doesn't show any significant difference. So non-tech-savvy people may just skip it. 3, The touchpad is vastly improved, but still lags behind Mac's touchpad. Sometimes it's erratic, and would lose accuracy. Had to rely on touchscreen or mouse. Side-note: My girlfriend is using it as a laptop 100% of the time: No detaching the screen, taking advantage of the pen, etc. So some tablet or pen issues that other reviewers have experienced might not have occurred here. Verdict so far: One star off because of the wake-up issue. I am still gonna say it's the closest a PC can get to a Mac in regards of quality. *ORIGINAL REVIEW Oct 2015* Got this the second day it becomes available at Best Buy. I bought this for my girlfriend, who is currently pursuing an architecture degree. Main use: Office, autoCAD, SketchUp, Photoshop, ArcGIS, etc. The set up was a breeze. Ported everything from her Microsoft account. After installation of a few essential softwares this bad boy is good to go. Looking at the form factor and the build quality of the Surface Book, it is by far the closest laptop on the market compared with a Mac. I am using a Macbook Pro myself so I am able to compare them side-by-syde. Surface book is just as beautiful, and feels just as premium, if not better. The hinge makes it look a little bit thicker than expected, but still very portable. The screen is crystal-clear, but keep in mind it has quite some glare. I haven't tested much on the performance side, but so far everything runs blazing fast including booting and opening - closing apps. Sepcs-wise, it shouldn't disappoint. 6th gen i7 CPU, discrete Nvidia Graphics card, 16G of RAM, and especially the format of solid state drive is NVMe, the latest and fastest on the market. I have installed all the aforementioned softwares so hopefully after my girlfriend gives it some road test I will be able to update on the performance. Regarding the features, I love its 2-in-1 capability, and its laptop-first mentality. By that I mean, if you use it under laptop mode (screen and keyboard together), you will never notice that it can be a tablet. A solid, all-round laptop. The detachable screen gives the Surface Book its unique versatility: it functions by itself as a tablet. Has 1024 pressure sensitive stylus. You can write notes, draw, doodle, do other creative works, read, etc, on the tablet. The writing experience is very very close to true pen-and-paper. If you own a Surface Pro, you probably understand what I'm talking about. What's more, you can even turn the screen around, facing outwards, and still plug it back into the keyboard base, to make it a kiosk. Fold it all the way down, you got a clipboard. Versatility at its finest. There are some Cons that I have noticed, however, that need some attention. But maybe some of them are just personal preference. I will leave you to be the judge. 1, The CPU is ULV, not the normal wattage processor that you see in most high-configuration devices. The 6-gen ULV i7 in the Surface Book only has two cores, whereas a previous generation non ULV i7 has four cores and higher TDP. This means, although Surface Book is fast, it probably won't be up to highly demanding tasks, compared with those workstations. 2, It gets moderately warm, even under light work. I think that's because the i7 cpu is fit in the ultra-thin screen. So if you run CPU intensive tasks, the screen can get hot; if you run GPU intensive tasks, the keyboard gets hot. Normally if a PC runs very hot, it will slow itself down, causing a lot of unresponsiveness and lags. I hope this device won't be too bad on thermal handling. I will update on that. 3, The Graphics card is not the gaming chip that a gamer would expect. From early reviews and tests of this laptop, it shows that the Nvidia custom GPU is close to a GTX 940M in performance. So Don't expect to play a lot of games with high settings with the Surface Book. However, mainstream games with med-to-low settings are most likely to cut it. 4, The hinge does make the Surface Book look a little bit weird. One end is thicker than the other end, and the laptop cannot completely be closed. But aesthetics mainly depend on personal preference. Personally I don't see it as a big deal. 5, The battery life of the tablet alone is short. So you cannot unplug the screen, take only the screen with you and expect it to last all day. The screen has no port except a headphone jack (so no charging). I would say, this laptop is designed to spend only about 25% of the time as a tablet. All in all, it's still a well-designed and great-looking laptop, with mostly all of the latest bells and whistles. I hope this Surface Book can give my girlfriend a good 3 years (or more) of usage.