A beckoning Surface Book i7: Are Apple users beginning to cheat on their MacBooks?
Microsoft has turned up the heat on its competition, last November, by upgrading its flagship Surface Book, to an i7 Skylake processor, a larger battery, and an improved graphic chipset. While the Surface Book i7 is not yet the Surface Book 2 we have been waiting for, the difference is visible, compared to its precursor.
Much like the older version, this new Surface Book i7 is decisively targeting the creative field, just as its desktop counterpart, the Surface Studio.
The upgrade couldn’t have come at a better time, with features and processing power officially rivaling the MacBook, and in some cases, even going beyond it, especially concerning graphic capabilities.
Apple users, especially those in the creative field, such as design firms, are beginning to consider switching to the Surface Book, which was described by TechRadar as “The New Ultimate Creative Laptop”, especially when comparing the pricing on both the Surface Book and Apple MacBook Pro. Both machines can cost well over the $3000 mark, but the battery life, provided by a larger battery, is one of those elements that makes the Surface Book especially desirable, not to mention the ability to detach the display and use it as a tablet, with its own graphic processor and battery.
The display on the Surface Book is also another blow to Apple’s flagship laptop, the latter of which does offer a bigger display, the pixel count falls short of the Surface Book’s 3000 x 2000 pixels, which is also sized to perfectly match a letter-size sheet of paper.
The only slight downside, if we could call it that, is that a larger battery did add to the overall weight of the device, bringing it up to 3.63lb from its former version, which weighs at 3.48lb. With that said, unless one is a particularly hardcore Mac user, Windows 10 is simply the perfect operating system for this device, designed in such way as to provide such tight synergy with the Surface Book’s hardware, to almost match the way Mac OS X and macOS Sierra are to MacBooks.
By this token, could we say that Surface Book is a better laptop than the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar? It depends. MacBooks may not be known for their graphic performance, but they are indeed optimized for productivity within a wide array of work environments and school settings. Graphic performance is something that not everyone lusts after, especially students, and office workers, but if you are the kind of user who spends a lot of time editing images in Photoshop, or processing video in AfterEffects of Premiere, the Surface Book i7 is indeed comparably better, with a price tag that couldn’t be more transparent, considering the quality and power of its internals.
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