Microsoft's new Surface Book i7 offers beefier hardware, 16-hour battery

Jos

Posts: 3,073   +97
Staff

Microsoft has announced a new addition to its Surface Book family at its Windows 10 Event in New York City, the Surface Book i7. As the name suggests the device will pack an Intel Core i7 processor as well as an Nvidia GeForce GTX 965M GPU for double the graphics performance, 8GB or 16GB RAM, and a larger battery for up to 16 hours of battery life in laptop mode.

In terms of design the Surface Book i7 is virtually identical to its predecessor — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, we just weren’t big fans of the hinge. On the inside Microsoft has designed a new thermal system with a second fan. The laptop itself still sports the 2-in-1 design with a detachable 13.5-inch PixelSense touchscreen, full keyboard, and Surface Pen.

The Surface Book i7 will be available with 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB configurations for $2,399, $2,799, and $3,299, respectively. You can preorder the 2-in-1, laptop-first hybrid today from Microsoft.com, with shipments and retail availability kicking off on November 10.

The original Surface Book will still be available but now starting at $1,349 — a $150 discount on its previous price. The Surface Pro tablet starts at the same $899.

Permalink to story.

 
Does anyone really need an i7 in this form factor? What market is this targeted for? For producers of any content, you are going to WANT/NEED A DESKTOP, then you can go with an additional portable laptop or surface. Building your own desktop would save you tons, and you can customize it to your specific needs depending on the type of content you are producing.

I'd say an i5 at max for this type of portable form factor.

Dont get me wrong here want and needs are different, and I can totally understand if someone just WANTS an i7 in their computer. Yes, I did for my desktop and some people would still argue that it's not necessary for anything I use it for.

But my real point is, first you'd want an i7 in your desktop, something that is really going to live longer and be more reliable. IMO

But I'm sure there's going to be plenty of you to converse with, that are going to quote my post and reply, if I so desire. lol
 
OK ... I'll admit it, the 'remove the headphone jack' comment was funnier than hell.

Can't wait for Anandtech to review this thing. 16 hour battery sounds like a major exaggeration and as always, these marketing hit-pieces do nothing to explain what efficiency factors make that possible.

"Up to" L M A O
 
Does anyone really need an i7 in this form factor? What market is this targeted for? For producers of any content, you are going to WANT/NEED A DESKTOP, then you can go with an additional portable laptop or surface. Building your own desktop would save you tons, and you can customize it to your specific needs depending on the type of content you are producing.

I'd say an i5 at max for this type of portable form factor.

Dont get me wrong here want and needs are different, and I can totally understand if someone just WANTS an i7 in their computer. Yes, I did for my desktop and some people would still argue that it's not necessary for anything I use it for.

But my real point is, first you'd want an i7 in your desktop, something that is really going to live longer and be more reliable. IMO

But I'm sure there's going to be plenty of you to converse with, that are going to quote my post and reply, if I so desire. lol
I'd love to have an i7 in this form factor if I could afford one. I'm gone for days at a time doing photo and video editing on the go. I still use my laptop with a Core2Duo in it for travel which is getting to be quite the drag. I could probably get away with an i5, but my love my i7 I have at home.

Not to mention a desktop is kind of hard to fit in my car....
 
OK ... I'll admit it, the 'remove the headphone jack' comment was funnier than hell.

Can't wait for Anandtech to review this thing. 16 hour battery sounds like a major exaggeration and as always, these marketing hit-pieces do nothing to explain what efficiency factors make that possible.

"Up to" L M A O
16 hours is under normal use, which is mainly web browsing and email.
 
OK ... I'll admit it, the 'remove the headphone jack' comment was funnier than hell.

Can't wait for Anandtech to review this thing. 16 hour battery sounds like a major exaggeration and as always, these marketing hit-pieces do nothing to explain what efficiency factors make that possible.

"Up to" L M A O
16 hours is under normal use, which is mainly web browsing and email.

I'd kindly disagree that one of these new-gen surface books can achieve 16 hours with 'that' display tech, 'that' processor and 'current' wifi technology. Even an i5 would struggle with that but would probably be more apt to hit 10 to 12 hours. But it's casual. Anandtech will put real numbers to the claims.
 
Last edited:
As an owner of the first gen Surface Book I'm interested in upgrading just the keyboard /base section to get the newer dGPU and larger battery. It does not look like any option on the MS site to do just that, I'm sure someone will try swapping the devices to confirm it is possible, just need MS to sell the base as a stand alone product upgrade.
 
Does anyone really need an i7 in this form factor? What market is this targeted for? For producers of any content, you are going to WANT/NEED A DESKTOP, then you can go with an additional portable laptop or surface. Building your own desktop would save you tons, and you can customize it to your specific needs depending on the type of content you are producing.

I'd say an i5 at max for this type of portable form factor.

Dont get me wrong here want and needs are different, and I can totally understand if someone just WANTS an i7 in their computer. Yes, I did for my desktop and some people would still argue that it's not necessary for anything I use it for.

But my real point is, first you'd want an i7 in your desktop, something that is really going to live longer and be more reliable. IMO

But I'm sure there's going to be plenty of you to converse with, that are going to quote my post and reply, if I so desire. lol

I use an i7 in my laptop to process photos in Lightroom and photoshop when I am on the go. It also comes in handy if I need to fire up SolidWorks or Fusion 360. I've been considering a Surface Book as its replacement when the time comes.
 
Does anyone really need an i7 in this form factor? What market is this targeted for? For producers of any content, you are going to WANT/NEED A DESKTOP, then you can go with an additional portable laptop or surface. Building your own desktop would save you tons, and you can customize it to your specific needs depending on the type of content you are producing.

I'd say an i5 at max for this type of portable form factor.

Dont get me wrong here want and needs are different, and I can totally understand if someone just WANTS an i7 in their computer. Yes, I did for my desktop and some people would still argue that it's not necessary for anything I use it for.

But my real point is, first you'd want an i7 in your desktop, something that is really going to live longer and be more reliable. IMO

But I'm sure there's going to be plenty of you to converse with, that are going to quote my post and reply, if I so desire. lol

Company uses this form factor on an i7 platform. We utilize docks due to excessive traveling, and deal with giant data sets that regularly bog down excel. i7 is a requirement for us
 
Does anyone really need an i7 in this form factor? What market is this targeted for? For producers of any content, you are going to WANT/NEED A DESKTOP, then you can go with an additional portable laptop or surface. Building your own desktop would save you tons, and you can customize it to your specific needs depending on the type of content you are producing.

I'd say an i5 at max for this type of portable form factor.

Dont get me wrong here want and needs are different, and I can totally understand if someone just WANTS an i7 in their computer. Yes, I did for my desktop and some people would still argue that it's not necessary for anything I use it for.

But my real point is, first you'd want an i7 in your desktop, something that is really going to live longer and be more reliable. IMO

But I'm sure there's going to be plenty of you to converse with, that are going to quote my post and reply, if I so desire. lol
Have been using the Surface Book for a year now, the i7 is a must for the software development work I do. I will have a number of applications running and one or two Virtual Machines also spun up. Development happens in the office, at home, on an airplane, a hotel or customer site and so a desktop is not really an option. I would actually like to see the memory raised to 32 GB as an option.
 
Does anyone really need an i7 in this form factor? What market is this targeted for? For producers of any content, you are going to WANT/NEED A DESKTOP, then you can go with an additional portable laptop or surface. Building your own desktop would save you tons, and you can customize it to your specific needs depending on the type of content you are producing.

I'd say an i5 at max for this type of portable form factor.

Dont get me wrong here want and needs are different, and I can totally understand if someone just WANTS an i7 in their computer. Yes, I did for my desktop and some people would still argue that it's not necessary for anything I use it for.

But my real point is, first you'd want an i7 in your desktop, something that is really going to live longer and be more reliable. IMO

But I'm sure there's going to be plenty of you to converse with, that are going to quote my post and reply, if I so desire. lol
Have been using the Surface Book for a year now, the i7 is a must for the software development work I do. I will have a number of applications running and one or two Virtual Machines also spun up. Development happens in the office, at home, on an airplane, a hotel or customer site and so a desktop is not really an option. I would actually like to see the memory raised to 32 GB as an option.

going from 16gb to 32gb of memory shows very little gain - per PC World and Tom's Hardware. Larger SSD or M2 is the way to go. imho
 
I do want one when the prices go down. It's like buying last year's best smartphone for 1 cent.
 
I use an i7 in my laptop to process photos in Lightroom and photoshop when I am on the go. It also comes in handy if I need to fire up SolidWorks or Fusion 360. I've been considering a Surface Book as its replacement when the time comes.

I'd love to have an i7 in this form factor if I could afford one. I'm gone for days at a time doing photo and video editing on the go. I still use my laptop with a Core2Duo in it for travel which is getting to be quite the drag. I could probably get away with an i5, but my love my i7 I have at home.

Not to mention a desktop is kind of hard to fit in my car....

I am curious to see facts about Adobe's software, (or others, if you guys use others) about how they utilize hyper-threading and how much it actually benefits/decreases processing times of functions in Photoshop or video editing. I've read some stuff in forums, that it can be benefitial if it speeds up the process, but then some people say that it wouldnt speed up the process in some aspects, only certain parts of the software use hyper-threading. I guess this confuses me a little in this aspect. I DO KNOW that if I am burning a DVD or something, that each thread (virtual or not) can process a video (converting its format) At least, last time I remember doing it, it was taxing each core... I could be wrong though, it's been awhile.

Edit: At least on my surface with an i5, it seems to use all the cores when I do some simple drawing in photoshop with a brush. Kind of looks like it just uses them evenly. IDK
 
Last edited:
Price is still too high and I know for a fact they mass produce these for peanuts so why the high price
 
Price is still too high and I know for a fact they mass produce these for peanuts so why the high price

In usually right there with you. But, Research and development, customer support, just a couple that come to mind.

And of course money hungry corporations.
 
I am curious to see facts about Adobe's software, (or others, if you guys use others) about how they utilize hyper-threading and how much it actually benefits/decreases processing times of functions in Photoshop or video editing.

Look for articles about build "supercomputers" out of old Xeon processors. They usually cover running photo and video editing software on it for benchmarking.

But the long and short of it is that video editing can make use of multiple physical cores and Hyperthreading, photo editing software and CAD software cannot. This comes to the algorithms involved, and the way certain things need to be calculated. Video processing lends itself to multiple processing threads because there are so many images to process, and all the images are having roughly the same calculation performed on each one (per operation). But photo editing only has the one image to process. Lightroom might leverage multiple threads during an import or a batch edit, but really no other time. Photoshop almost never uses more than one core, let alone multiple threads. CAD software, aside from some simulations, runs almost exclusively on a single thread because you only performs one operation at a time. The exception for CAD is when you are doing something like fluids or dynamics simulation, where you are faced with n-equations and n-unkowns that need to be solved simultaneously - but these are almost always solved using the GPU, since it is better able to handle a large number of simple and identical calculations to solve simultaneous problems.

tl;dr - CAD and photo processing can only use one core, if not only one thread, and needs something like an i7, or at least an i5, to run smoothly.
 
In usually right there with you. But, Research and development, customer support, just a couple that come to mind.

And of course money hungry corporations.
corporations are always hungry. the question is if they will be sated or devour endlessly
 
Does anyone really need an i7 in this form factor? What market is this targeted for? For producers of any content, you are going to WANT/NEED A DESKTOP, then you can go with an additional portable laptop or surface. Building your own desktop would save you tons, and you can customize it to your specific needs depending on the type of content you are producing.

I'd say an i5 at max for this type of portable form factor.

Dont get me wrong here want and needs are different, and I can totally understand if someone just WANTS an i7 in their computer. Yes, I did for my desktop and some people would still argue that it's not necessary for anything I use it for.

But my real point is, first you'd want an i7 in your desktop, something that is really going to live longer and be more reliable. IMO

But I'm sure there's going to be plenty of you to converse with, that are going to quote my post and reply, if I so desire. lol
Have an HP Core i7 Elitebook that would be overpowered with a Core i5 for what it gets used for .

This Haswell Core i5 Desktop never sweats either ,it's not a game biuld or digital content creator .
 
Back