My list of pros and cons for those thinking about a Surface Book

[Lethal_NFS]

My list is based off the $1,499 model.

Pros:
- The Surface Book boots up very quickly
- The detachable screen works wonderfully
- Decent battery life when left on the dock
- The full Windows 10 experience
- Beautiful looking laptop
- The pen is great and works very well

Cons:
-Low memory warnings - Pops up every time I record footage using the Xbox app on the Surface. Limits me to about 5 mins of recording.
- Desktop icons never stay where you place them
- The lid does not open easily. You must use 2 hands to open the laptop.
- Chrome tends to crash more on the Surface
- Battery life of the screen by itself is not very good
- The price does not really seem worth it. You can get such a better laptop for $1,500
- Can not upgrade any parts
- Still a lot of bugs that you do not get with other laptops.

This is a great laptop for those who do the bare basics. Maybe you use Excel or use PDF's quite often and need something to carry around or travel with for work. This laptop is great for that.
For video recording I find this laptop to be terrible. Maybe it is because I bought the model with 8gb of RAM? But my ASUS laptop also has 8gb of RAM and I have never ran in to a "low memory" issue. And I made sure there were no background programs running. Maybe this isn't a issue with the 16gb model?

For $1,500 I would expect to have no issues with the simple tasks. I do not feel I get enough for my money. You can buy a gaming laptop for this same price.

My overall grade for this Surface Book is a 6.5/10
Lower the price to $999 and the score jumps to an 8/10.

 

[EnemiesInTheEnd]

I can't think of a single laptop that is as strong of a package at $1500 as the Surface Book is.

 

[worwig]

Google chrome loaded.
Low memory issues.

Sounds about right. :grin:

 

[Lethal_NFS]

I can't think of a single laptop that is as strong of a package at $1500 as the Surface Book is.

lol really? I found this one really quickly.

Look up on Newegg the Alienware AW15R2. It blows the Surface Book out of the water for the same price.

Price - $1,569

15.6"
Intel Core i7 2.6Ghz
16gb RAM
1TB HDD
256 SSD
Nvidia 970M 3GB GDDR5

 

[Dush Ku]

If the alienware was half the weight, had a removable touchscreen with included pen for handwriting I'd agree with you

 

[Lethal_NFS]

If the alienware was half the weight, had a removable touchscreen with included pen for handwriting I'd agree with you

A pen and weight does not justify the price of the Surface Book. No way in hell. Microsoft overcharged badly for the hardware you are getting.

 

[Mikegriffin84]

Weight absolutely does make up for the price and battery life. That alienware would be lucky to get 3 hours on battery power. So... battery life plus portability plus the dual duty of being a laptop with a functional tablet more than makes up for the price. I can use my surface book all day long at work and school and not run out of battery. There is no way that you could do that with the alienware. Cutting edge tech like the surface book demands a premium price PERIOD

 

[thatdennis]

lol really? I found this one really quickly.

Look up on Newegg the Alienware AW15R2. It blows the Surface Book out of the water for the same price.

Price - $1,569

15.6"
Intel Core i7 2.6Ghz
16gb RAM
1TB HDD
256 SSD
Nvidia 970M 3GB GDDR5

It's $1300, I bought mine for that much, same exact specs. It actually could last 6-7 hours, 3 hours more than my returned Surface Book.

 

[Lethal_NFS]

Weight absolutely does make up for the price and battery life. That alienware would be lucky to get 3 hours on battery power. So... battery life plus portability plus the dual duty of being a laptop with a functional tablet more than makes up for the price. I can use my surface book all day long at work and school and not run out of battery. There is no way that you could do that with the alienware. Cutting edge tech like the surface book demands a premium price PERIOD

Completely disagree. Weaker cpu, lack of gpu, and less HDD space. The cost does not justify what you get with the Surface Book. There is no reason why Microsoft could not add an i7 cpu and gpu to all the $1499 models. No excuses.

 

[thatdennis]

Weight absolutely does make up for the price and battery life. That alienware would be lucky to get 3 hours on battery power. So... battery life plus portability plus the dual duty of being a laptop with a functional tablet more than makes up for the price. I can use my surface book all day long at work and school and not run out of battery. There is no way that you could do that with the alienware. Cutting edge tech like the surface book demands a premium price PERIOD

Microsoft overcharged the public PERIOD. A premium device? Damn my surface book had so much bugs out of the box I loathed every second of my time with that guy. The alienware (that actually has 6-7 hours battery life) works perfectly right out of the box with no bugs.

Cutting edge tech? Welp if crappy battery life, loud always on fans, and a laptop with a gap is cutting edge tech, then I don't want to see cutting edge tech.

3 hours battery life on a tablet is premium? Ah then I also don't want premium.

I did do a full day with my alienware for school without a hitch other than its weight, not with the Surface Book (died after 3 classes, also ruined my chocolate in my bag).

Note this is coming from a Microsoft fan, who usually defends and advocates the Surface line.

I can't simply see how great the Surface Book is after false promises from panay, a bad product that the team had to issue an apology for, and bugs that will be fixed months after the product launch, months.

I know no product is perfect, and I'm a realist about that, but this "premium device" is not premium at all and far far from perfect, let alone it shouldn't have been launched.

 

[orlbuckeye]

A different category of machine

 

[EnemiesInTheEnd]

lol really? I found this one really quickly.

Look up on Newegg the Alienware AW15R2. It blows the Surface Book out of the water for the same price.

Price - $1,569

15.6"
Intel Core i7 2.6Ghz
16gb RAM
1TB HDD
256 SSD
Nvidia 970M 3GB GDDR5

It's also larger and double the weight, only a 1080p screen, has half the battery life, no Windows Hello, and no pen support. It's more powerful, but that doesn't mean anything.

 

[savagelizards]

For whatever reason, I am always at the upgrade cycle when Microsoft is introducing a new 1st gen device.

I have a first gen Surface Pro, Microsoft Band, and now Surface Book. I was fully expecting to upgrade to the Surface Pro 4 and was just waiting for it to be announced when Microsoft blew everyone away with the Surface Book. I agonized over the choice and the price, but after I started to read about how folks problems went away with the newer drivers, I decided to bite the bullet. After all, my experience with the first gen pro has been a good one. It's pretty long in the tooth now, and I have been really starting to need to incorporate video into my workflow, so I closed my eyes to the really expensive price tag and got the $2099 model with the GPU, 256gb SSD and 8gb ram. I also got the surface dock. With tax I dropped $2500 at the store.

What I have, after 5 days, is heartache, and a lot of these:

It's really undependable. It's BSOD'd me 5 times in the last 36 hours. It randomly stops responding to keyboard commands in Photoshop and Illustrator, doesn't find printers I can find with my 5 year old HP running Windows 10, and keeps losing sync with my one drive folders. It's constantly dropping my Wi-Fi connection. My external hard drives, connected through the surface dock, pop on and off randomly. And the video I was so excited to start working on? Not capable. At all. I brought in one 3 minute clip and it dropped almost 2,000 frames the first time I ran the sequence. And it crashed out of Premiere Pro several times.

I went back and watched Panos Panay render in real time with no frame drops, (1:23:45 in the Product Launch event stream) and I have to wonder if I am holding the same piece of equipment. Don't get me wrong. It's a beautifully crafted device. It's lightweight, well-built, and the screen is amazing. But it struggles to run a half-dozen tabs of Edge browser without problems.

Cortana is also less reliable than ever, so it could be that the version of W10 shipping on the book is less reliable than the current fast ring build I am used to on my HP. But that's the operating system it's shipping with, and if it wasn't ready they should not have shipped the product. My daughter recently switched to a MacBook Pro and she loved it. I want to be able to tell her that Microsoft has answered with a great product of their own, but at this point this product is not even an Acer killer. It's too unreliable to count on, and that's a sad thing to say after all the coin I dropped on it.

I think I am going to head back to the Microsoft store and swap it for another Book. Or just return it, and get an XPS 15 (It's a DELL, I know). I just don't know what to do atm, to be quite honest. But I could not be more disappointed, and all I can do at this point is to advise anyone to stay away from this product, at least until these problems are resolved. Judging from my experience, it could be a while.

 

[EnemiesInTheEnd]

For whatever reason, I am always at the upgrade cycle when Microsoft is introducing a new 1st gen device.

I have a first gen Surface Pro, Microsoft Band, and now Surface Book. I was fully expecting to upgrade to the Surface Pro 4 and was just waiting for it to be announced when Microsoft blew everyone away with the Surface Book. I agonized over the choice and the price, but after I started to read about how folks problems went away with the newer drivers, I decided to bite the bullet. After all, my experience with the first gen pro has been a good one. It's pretty long in the tooth now, and I have been really starting to need to incorporate video into my workflow, so I closed my eyes to the really expensive price tag and got the $2099 model with the GPU, 256gb SSD and 8gb ram. I also got the surface dock. With tax I dropped $2500 at the store.

What I have, after 5 days, is heartache, and a lot of these: View attachment 119472

It's really undependable. It's BSOD'd me 5 times in the last 36 hours. It randomly stops responding to keyboard commands in Photoshop and Illustrator, doesn't find printers I can find with my 5 year old HP running Windows 10, and keeps losing sync with my one drive folders. It's constantly dropping my Wi-Fi connection. My external hard drives, connected through the surface dock, pop on and off randomly. And the video I was so excited to start working on? Not capable. At all. I brought in one 3 minute clip and it dropped almost 2,000 frames the first time I ran the sequence. And it crashed out of Premiere Pro several times.

I went back and watched Panos Panay render in real time with no frame drops, (1:23:45 in the Product Launch event stream) and I have to wonder if I am holding the same piece of equipment. Don't get me wrong. It's a beautifully crafted device. It's lightweight, well-built, and the screen is amazing. But it struggles to run a half-dozen tabs of Edge browser without problems.

Cortana is also less reliable than ever, so it could be that the version of W10 shipping on the book is less reliable than the current fast ring build I am used to on my HP. But that's the operating system it's shipping with, and if it wasn't ready they should not have shipped the product. My daughter recently switched to a MacBook Pro and she loved it. I want to be able to tell her that Microsoft has answered with a great product of their own, but at this point this product is not even an Acer killer. It's too unreliable to count on, and that's a sad thing to say after all the coin I dropped on it.

I think I am going to head back to the Microsoft store and swap it for another Book. Or just return it, and get an XPS 15 (It's a DELL, I know). I just don't know what to do atm, to be quite honest. But I could not be more disappointed, and all I can do at this point is to advise anyone to stay away from this product, at least until these problems are resolved. Judging from my experience, it could be a while.

Swap it for a new Surface Book. That's not normal.

 

[Hardcore1973]

I love my Surface Book but I am now leaning more and more towards the Dell XPS 15. $2,299 at Bestbuy.com. Quad Core i7/1TB/16GB RAM/4k Video. Looks like a beast. Only reason I am going this directions is that now 95% of my job will be with my laptop where before it was only 5% so I just liked the fun of the tablet experience. Now I need a full blown beast to do everything from video and photo editing, web development, and need tons of storage.
For the $1500 I think the Surface Book is an excellent product and Microsoft got it right the first time.

 

[savagelizards]

Swap it for a new Surface Book. That's not normal.

Agreed. I probably would have done that already if it wasn't for Christmas and the 10-15 hours I already spent copying files and installing apps. I am headed to the Microsoft store today. I will keep this thread posted with my results.

As an aside, I tried posting this from my surface book, and couldn't even type the post without delays, so I switched to my 5 year old HP running build 11082, which seems less buggy. Undoubtedly, some of my problem was how poorly Windows Central performs with the Edge browser - but that's a problem for another day.

 

[Lethal_NFS]

It's also larger and double the weight, only a 1080p screen, has half the battery life, no Windows Hello, and no pen support. It's more powerful, but that doesn't mean anything.

That was just one laptop of the many I could have posted though. The hardware in the Surface Book does not justify the price. Surface Book has more bugs, inferior hardware, and inability to upgrade anything internally.

If the $1,499 model came with a real gpu like the other models, then I would probably be a little happier with the price. But this quite bare bones for the price.

 

[EnemiesInTheEnd]

That was just one laptop of the many I could have posted though. The hardware in the Surface Book does not justify the price. Surface Book has more bugs, inferior hardware, and inability to upgrade anything internally.

If the $1,499 model came with a real gpu like the other models, then I would probably be a little happier with the price. But this quite bare bones for the price.

There aren't any better packages. Show me some of these supposedly better laptops for the price and I'll show you laptops with bad keyboards, mediocre battery life, mediocre displays or lower resolution displays, bad keyboards/track pads, worse specs, higher weight, missing features, etc.

 

[Lethal_NFS]

There aren't any better packages. Show me some of these supposedly better laptops for the price and I'll show you laptops with bad keyboards, mediocre battery life, mediocre displays or lower resolution displays, bad keyboards/track pads, worse specs, higher weight, missing features, etc.

You are trying to tell me the Surface Book is the best laptop on the market and no matter what I show you, you will tell me why the Surface Book is better.

I will pass on that one as I know what a good product is on my own. I know what hardware costs, and I know when something is overpriced. I can show you right now a laptop that is buggy as hell, lacks the ability to upgrade, missing the number pad, and crashes frequently. Hint.....it is the Surface Book.

I am happy for you that you feel like it is money well spent. I know better, and I know this is not worth this price tag. And I am clearly not alone on this one. This is why I made this thread. So I can help people from making an expensive mistake if they are looking for something more than what the Surface Book can offer.

 

[astell]

Lethal, it is hard to take you seriously when you ignore many of the Book's features for the sake of making your point. The Book wasn't designed to be a gaming laptop and Microsoft hasn't marketed it as one, yet you are comparing it to one.

For my purposes, the Book is one of the best options on the market - one of the others being the SP4 (and SP3). Does that mean it is right for everyone? No.

I'm not even going to get into the fact that some of your cons aren't problems specific to the Surface Book. This thread just reads as you trying to appear as a neutral party giving a unbias pro/con of the Book, but fails at doing so. It is clear you don't like the device. Nothing wrong with that. Just don't pretend to be unbias - you're not very good at it.