Surface Book 3

This is the Surface Book 3 which Microsoft updated for 2020 with new and fastercomponents on the inside but left the outside prettymuch exactly the same. Actually, exactly exactly the same. It's the same. The idea here is you're supposed to get a full power pro laptop with a GPU and lots of horsepowerbattery in the base, but if you want, you can detach it and turn thescreen into a tablet. Now, this idea the first timewe saw it was like "whoa" and then the second time we sawit, it was like "okay, yeah" and now I feel like withthis third iteration, we finally understand the trade-offs. The Surface Book 3 isn'ta traditional laptop and that means different trade-offs. You have to ask yourself howimportant this really is.


Alright, first trade-offwith the Surface Book 3, when you're in the standard laptop mode, I just think there's little too much bulk. It's like the volume to powerratio is just a bit off. It's big and it's thick,even this 13.5 inch version. Now, the reason for thatis because there's so many, you know, computer gutsin here behind the screen which does make it justa little bit top-heavy. It's never tippy, but you can really feel it's a little bit oddwhen you carry it around. But, look, it's very well made and the keyboard here is great. The trackpad is a little tinybit on the small side for 2020 but it is super smoothand accurate, precise, I love the trackpad. I do wish that therewere thunderbolt ports, but Microsoft has some evidence that says that thunderboltports are insecure. At least there's usb-c andthere is an sd card slot. Thank you. No, really, seriously, I mean this. Thank you. The screen is great, it's 13.5 inches and a three by two aspect ratio so it actually feels really really big, bigger than other 13 inch laptops even though the bezelshere are substantial. It also feels really really big when you use it as a tablet.


 This is not like your ultraportable tablet thing. This is substantial. Finally, the whole reasonthis entire system works is because of this veryfancy strong snake hinge on the locking mechanism and all that and as neat and cool as it is, I sort of feel like this isn't the final form ofwhat a tablet laptop hybrid is meant to be. When you close it, the hingegap here is just really big, a whole bunch of stuff can get in there, and it makes the whole thing thicker than other modern laptops. It's very very nicely built. Hardware, I really like surface hardware but it just feels likeit's a little bit ungainly. (subtle electronic music) So okay, what's new here? Well, because it's all internal changes, we have to talk about some specs. Here we go. The big thing is Intel's10th gen processors. The basic model of the Surface Book 3 has a Core i5, Intelstandard Iris plus Graphics. Eight gigs of RAM, 256 of storage, and that goes for 1600 bucks. This review unit is $2500 which gets you a Core i7, 32 gigs of RAM, 512 of storage, and the keyboard base here has a basic Nvidia GTX 1650 Max-Q GPU. The 15 inch can have an even better GPU. (sighs) So, you can spec one of these up to be, a bit of a beast, but like, the X-Men live-actionmovies version of the beast. Not the super burly one fromthe comics or the cartoons. It's a smaller, more refined beast. Because the thing aboutthe Intel Core i7 chip that's inside the Surface Book 3 is that on the 13.5 inchand even the bigger 15 inch, it's the 15 watt versionof the Intel chip. The kind that you usuallysee in Ultrabooks. It's not the 45 wattversion that you might see in a Dell XPS 15 or a 16 inch Macbook Pro. Of course, the reason forthat is you can detach this and they need to keep theprocessor with the screen and so, they can't fit, you know, the higher thermals insidethis little tablet here. So, that is the second trade-off. You get a slightly less powerful CPU.


Now even with this separatespecial Nvidia GPU, this is still not like atraditional gaming laptop. I mean look, you coulddefinitely do way more gaming on this thing than youcould on an Ultrabook or a Surface laptop orsomething like that, but a traditional gaminglaptop, like a Razer is gonna give you way morepower for way less money. But if you do a bunch of stuff that leans heavily on the GPU, like I don't know, CADdrawing or something, this will be able totake advantage of that, make your work flow a bit faster when of course, the thing is docked. We are gonna run somebenchmarks for the full review and by we, I mean TomWarren and Monica Chen who are actually reviewing this thing so stay tuned for that, but, tell you what. Here's the Geekbench score and here's the Cinebench. You may now debate in the comments. Bottom line, there's three main downsides to the Surface Book 3. Price, a little bit of power, and bulk. It's pretty big for a 13 inch laptop. But in exchange for that, you get really good quality hardware because it's a Surface. You get a clean, Microsoftsoftware experience without all that extra junk on it. And, of course, you can remove the tablet. That's the whole point of this thing, which means that there'sno clean one-to-one, heads up comparison that I can give you to another laptop, because the extra cost that you pay for a Surface Book 3 doesn'treally fit on a spec sheet. Instead it's about, you know, trade-offs. Hey everybody, thanksso much for watching. Let me know in the comments, are the trade-offs on theSurface Book 3 interesting to you or do you want something more traditional? Also if you missed it, I reviewed the Surface Go 2, an entirely different set of trade-offs and you can click andwatch that somewhere,

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