Name: Surface Book 2 Review - The Most Powerful 2 in 1 Laptop!
Uploaded: 2017-12-14T13:26:51.000Z
Duration: 7 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So this is the Surface Book 2, the 13 inch version

Now, when the original Surface Book launched in 2015

I thought it was some of the coolest pieces
of tech available at the time

No one else was making something quite like it. Two years later, we're still there

No one else is making something quite like this

It's removable and it's a fully functional tablet by itself

And then the GPU is in the keyboard so when
they connect, it becomes a full-fledged

I mean a lot of people want something like this

This thing, this unit here, starts at $2000 US

But the cheaper version does not have
the dedicated graphics card

in the keyboard so that makes it not as cool

So I'm going to focus just the experience
on this one, the $2000 version

Now, there's a 15 inch version that's
significantly more expensive

I may do video in the future on that
but, 13-inch for this video

I want to talk about the hinge first. This is a hinge that, when it first was announced

I had mixed feelings about it because I felt like there's so many moving parts

There's places that dust can get into, there's
just a lot of things that could go wrong,

People still don't have any major issues with the hinge

Now the design isn't for everyone.
It can look a little bit weird

But functionally and mechanically, it's really well made. When you open it up

You'll notice that very little has changed aesthetically

The screen is still the 3 by 2 aspect ratio
with good color accuracy. It's bright

It's high-res. There's no complaints here.
There's no pen in the box this year

It's an extra 100 bucks if you want to buy one, which I thought was a little bit weird

But I guess not everyone uses a
pen so it's understandable

The one I'm using is actually from the
Eve and it works perfectly fine

It's a noticeably better typing experience than the original Surface Book

It's a little bit quieter, and it just feels more responsive

than the original Surface Book keyboard,
not that that one was bad

It was already good. This is just a little bit better.
The trackpad has also improved

It's obviously still running Windows Precision drivers

The button mechanism feels a little
more deliberate when you press it

And it's a little bit louder than I remember
the Surface Book 1 to be

but it feels awesome, so keyboard,
trackpad, both excellent

Performance is good. It's the quad core Kaby Lake-R

It's a 15 watt CPU, but it's fast in short bursts. Multi-core
performance is really strong now

But the question is whether this extra speed really makes a big difference for what you do

The truth is for the majority of people that are using a device like this it won't make their workflow

You need specific apps that can
handle multi-core processing

Some computational stuff will really benefit
from it and same with video editing

But at the end of the day, it is a 15 watt U processor

So it's not gonna be the fastest laptop in the world. One thing to keep in mind, the 13 inch version

does not have a fan in the tablet component.

The 15 inch version of this device like the Surface Book 2, 15 inch screen

does have the same processor as this, but there is a fan in there

So it's able to run at a higher clock speed for
longer periods of time. It also pulls

I think 20 watts instead of the 15 watt at max

There is some CPU throttling when
you push it hard enough

But most people won't notice it because this is
not the device that people would choose

for really heavy CPU activity. In terms of gaming performance,

It's actually pretty good. The GTX 1050 pushes
out some decent performance

You have to run it at a lower-than-native resolution

But light-to-moderately demanding titles are very playable on this device

There are reports that the 15 inch
version with the GTX 1060

is actually pulling more power than
the AC adapter can supply

So it's actually draining batteries while you're using it

That doesn't happen on the 13 inch version
because this is running a 1050

Slightly less power drain, so yeah. If you want to play games on this device

I mean, neither of them are a good choice

But the issue doesn't happen on the 13 inch version

The speakers. Surprisingly, these
have been improved this year

They're not as good as the 13 inch MacBook Pro speakers, but they sound pretty good

And they're positioned well, you get really nice stereo separation

- The webcam is really good. It's actually
one of the best webcams

I've seen on a laptop. The mic quality
sounds pretty good as well

I'm getting around 10 hours of use
with the screen at 250 nits

Now, this is with it in laptop mode. With the screen removed and just using it as a clipboard,

This has a 23 watt hour battery inside the screen, and I think 67 watt hour battery inside the base

It'll easily last you the full day, and for people that aren't familiar with how the charging works

You can charge the tablet by itself or you
can connect the tablet to the keyboard

and just charge the base and everything
will charge up altogether

The read speeds are fast but the
write speeds are a little bit slow

The temperatures are comfortable
both in tablet and laptop mode

The fan noise under max load is a little bit loud

But it's kind of expected considering the size of the chassis, so there's a lot of stuff

I like about the Surface Book 2, but the big things are not so much the CPU and the GPU upgrades

It's the little things, like the things like the
speakers, the keyboard, the trackpad

Things that they didn't have to change but they tweaked it anyways

because they're just trying to make a better product overall and I really like that

That being said, there are things
that I dislike about this thing

And the first one, the big one, is the price. Now the price

When you first look at this thing seems very expensive