I received a Surface Book 2 review unit yesterday, in the larger 15-inch size. It has a Core i7, 16 gigs of RAM, a 256 GB SSD, and an NVIDIA GTX 1060, which is more than sufficient for many. Unfortunately, I won’t be doing a full review here but I am very impressed with this machine (if you can read Polish, make sure to take a look over here, for my daily diary).
Marco Arment:
The Surface Book 2 is also the real deal. Massive 15” 3:2 screen, detachable to a great-feeling tablet with a great pen that stows easily.
Touch/tablet-hybrid laptops aren’t just the future — they’re the present. Apple’s either being coy about future products or is in denial.
Owen Williams, on his blog Charged:
I’m back to say I was wrong, and I’ve found a machine that not only matches Apple’s standard of hardware quality, but goes far beyond it to demonstrate how a laptop of the future should work.
That machine is the 15-inch Surface Book 2 and somehow Microsoft has made the 2-in-1 that Apple should’ve been building all along, to the same level of quality I’d expect from anyone other than Microsoft.
I’ve used the Surface Book 2 as my daily computer for three months now and it’s consistently blown me away with how well considered it is across the board, how great the software works and has completely converted me into the touchscreen laptop camp.
Unless Apple gets their act together, start innovating, post regular CPU/GPU updates, my next notebook will most probably be a Surface Book. It’s not perfect by any means, and I’d miss macOS a lot, but I’d manage. What’s tempting me most is the removable screen which can be used with the full Adobe Lightroom experience. I wouldn’t mind a Surface Studio too, on the condition that it had a replaceable M.2 SSD instead of a hybrid drive and an upgradeable GPU.
Brad Sams, for Petri IT Knowledgebase:
When the Surface Book 2 was announced late last year, I had high hopes that this was going to be among my favorite laptops, ever. All Microsoft had to do was take the original Book and address the few issues with the hardware and voila, a hero device for the category.
It’s a bit hard to believe but the device was released six months ago and since that time, I have taken the high-end 15in Surface Book 2 on the road to Vegas, NYC, Seattle, Chicago and a few other locations and after all that time with the hardware, here is my long term update.
This is one of the notebooks currently on the market which pose an interesting alternative to the MacBook Pro. I am especially interested in using it for retouching photos in Lightroom, using just the 15” screen in detached mode.
It’s hard to come by extended reviews such as Brad’s, but he conveys his pros and cons succinctly. The Surface Book’s biggest issue is the power button, which sometimes fails to turn the machine on. While this seems serious, the workaround (which shouldn’t be necessary) is extremely simple.
Just the simple fact that I am looking at alternatives to MacBooks, which I have been using for over 10 years now, should be worrying for Apple. While the Surface Book 2 could potentially be an excellent Lightroom hardware platform, I would miss macOS for everything else. Oh — the keyboard supposedly doesn’t die from dust specks. Ultimately the Surface Book 2 would be a compromise, like everything in life, but Microsoft is really trying to tempt users, and is probably succeeding in some cases.
Tom Warren, writing for The Verge:
One issue I did run into with the Surface Book 2 is the power supply. Microsoft has only supplied a 102-watt charger with a machine that has an Nvidia GTX 1060 inside. Most similar laptops are gaming ones that have 150-watt or even 200-watt power supplies. There are two batteries inside the Surface Book 2, one in the base and one in the tablet portion (screen) itself. The base battery discharges too quickly with the supplied charger, meaning the Nvidia card (located in the base) will disconnect in the middle of a long gaming session at maximum performance even if you’re plugged in.
Microsoft is currently investigating this issue, and believes I have a faulty power supply. The company says the “Surface Book 2 is designed to supply enough power to maintain and charge, even under heavy load (including gaming).” I didn’t notice the discharge with apps that rely on the GPU, but most productivity apps simply use graphics power in short bursts rather than long periods like in games. I suspect the 102-watt charger isn’t enough for full performance gaming sessions, which will disappoint many who were hoping to use this as a gaming laptop alongside work tasks. I’ll update this review if the replacement charger makes a difference.
I have also tested with an old 65-watt Surface Book charger and the base still drains too quickly during gaming. I’ve also tested with a Surface Dock, rated at around 90 watts, and this still doesn’t hold the base charge to keep up while gaming. In all scenarios I also tested with the recommended “best battery life” setting, but the base still failed to charge properly during heavy gaming loads. If a replacement charger doesn’t work, Microsoft could potentially fix this in software by reducing the GTX 1060 clock speeds further and slowing the machine down.
Or… you know… they could just supply a more powerful charger.