Full disclosure, I’m a Mac guy. Mac OS is far better than Windows. I had a virtual machine running windows because a few of my content authoring applications only run on the OS. I am an instructional designer/director at my college. I have a MacBook Pro, i7, 16 GB of Ram. It’s Ok. I have a command center that is a gaming pc desktop. I wanted to be more mobile, so I bought the surface book 3. It’s an i7, 32GB RAM, 500GB hard Drive with a GTX 1650. I like to take notes so the fact that is a touch screen helps out. I am a lefty, so I have the claw when I write. It works extremely well. There is no bloat ware, as it’s a pure Microsoft product. The laptop is VERY fast. I am extremely happy with it. All zoom sessions run so well The only issue I had was the warranty. Best Buy wanted over 200 bucks for one year. I bought two years directly from Microsoft. I like the surfacebook’s keyboard. It’s not the crappy flimsy keyboard. I can recline and work on it, as the keyboard is more like a traditional laptop. You will love this laptop. It’s a bit expensive, but well worth the $$. If you go low end, you’ll be lucky to get one or two years. Spend the extra money. You won’t be disappointed!

tl;dr Overall, this is a great option for those looking for serious desktop power in a laptop sized case with touch screen. There are very few compromises made with this clearly premium 2 in 1 laptop. If you’re heavy into graphics and are tired of being chained to a desk, this should be near the top of your list. A couple of annoyances bring it down a star. The Surface Book 3 is the machine I’ve finally been waiting for. I’m an avid hobbyist photographer who likes to touch up my work from time to time. I’ve been using Photoshop and Lightroom for a number of years to organize my pictures and tweak the ones I really like. Up until now, I’ve accepted that I had to use a desktop to manage some of the more compute intensive tasks such as panorama and blurring, two of my favorite techniques. I’d switch to a laptop with a pen for fine line edits, only my laptop didn’t always have the memory to edit files without them being flattened first. The Surface Book 3 is powerful enough to perform all my edits, with a large, sharp screen. This version also packs 32GB RAM which helps a lot when editing larger files. There’s virtually no lag at all when moving to different areas of a photo. I couldn’t even always say that on my desktop with 12 GB of RAM and a dedicated graphics card! Merging photos was significantly faster than the ultrabook I have, a 2019 HP x360 Spectre. One panorama made up of 25 photos took 2 minutes and 30 seconds to merge on the Surface Book vs. 5:12 for the same image on the HP (8GB RAM). Editing it after the merge on the HP was nearly impossible. While the Surface is a little larger than the HP machine for carrying around, it’s nice that I don’t have to switch back and forth to different machines, depending on the work I’m doing. This will also be great on vacation where I can edit my photos while I’m still in the moment. One of the best features of the Surface is the detachable tablet mode. This makes editing using a pen incredibly comfortable. The tablet portion houses nearly all the compute power (minus the video card). While there’s no keyboard, it’s also half the weight of the overall unit. Detaching is as easy as touching a button. While certain edits were slightly slower, all the RAM is in the tablet. That goes a long way towards making editing practical. It then becomes your choice if you want the convenience of a tablet vs the power of a dedicated video card. The only caveat is you can’t detach if you have a file open from a connected source (i.e. USB drive). All the ports are in the keyboard. The keyboard also quadruples the battery capacity. The tablet can be docked as a laptop or in flipped mode where it will fold to the keyboard with the screen on the outside. Since I have an active pen that came with my HP, I didn’t purchase the MS Surface pen. The HP pen worked very well for all I want to do, including easy photo editing. I could right click to get context sensitive menus. I didn’t have the eraser function that MS touts for its Surface pen. It’s a shame that at this price, MS, unlike its competitors, declined to include such a vital accessory. The keyboard is extremely comfortable to use with great key travel and good feedback. However, the Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys are awkwardly placed as alternates to function keys. (i.e. Fn-F9 = Home). Sound is clear and friends on a video conference had no trouble hearing me. The SSD drive is faster than any other OEM drive I’ve used, clocking transfers at 2.2GBs read speed in my tests. The docked machine should last well over 6 hours in power saving mode. I was disappointed with the lack of Thunderbolt ports. It comes with 1 USB-C port and 2 USB-A ports rated for 3.0 speeds. MS sells its proprietary docking station with all the ports you need. It’s one of your few options if you want to hook up to more than one external monitor. The standard power plug has a proprietary connector which clips on with a magnet. That’s nice to avoid testing gravity with your machine. You can also charge from a friend’s USB-C if you forget your charger. A 65W charger I have for another laptop was nearly as fast as the plug MS includes. As great as this machine is, I feel I have to take off a star for the awkward keyboard, lack of pen and maintaining proprietary ports. Small changes could have made this much better. I received this machine as part of Best Buy’s Tech Insider Network. Reviewers in this invitation-only program are provided products for the purpose of writing honest, unbiased reviews.

“Reviewers in this invitation-only program are provided products for the purpose of writing honest, unbiased reviews.” The model I’m reviewing is the 13.5” Intel 10th edition i7-1065G7 @130GHz w/ 32GB memory, and the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 4GB w/ Max-Q Design. Opening box: Opening the well-constructed box includes the Surface 3 laptop and the power cable. The charging cable includes a brick, but it’s very small when compared to other current laptops that I own or have looked at. It’s also magnetic, so it’s easy to connect, but also easy to pop off. I do like this option though because it’s not like the connection of old where it’s possible to snap the connector. I’ll gladly reconnect the cord rather than having to buy a replacement or fix the charging port down the road. The brick is fairly light and measures 4 3/8” w x 2 1/8” h x 1 1/8” thick. That said, the laptop itself feels stout and heavy. Stated weight on Microsoft’s webpage is 2.79 lbs. If so, it’s a solid 2.79…not that I’m complaining. It feels well built, so I’m not afraid of using it as it should be used and not having to baby it. The casing is magnesium alloy or is it aluminum? I’ve read both and I’m not sure, but the color is platinum if that helps, lol. Turning it on for the first time is exactly what I expected, except for the lack of bloatware (thank you Microsoft). After going through the initial setup and getting my Wi-Fi network connected, I expect to go to the Apps settings and start the tedious task of removing unwanted programs. But I only removed Office 365 setup because I already have an existing account. I may have removed an anti-virus program, but if I did, it was so quick that I don’t really remember. I immediately installed Bitdefender which I use on my desktop PC, Mac mini, and my Android phone. I had one install left, so I emailed myself a link and setup was uneventful. I also installed Bitdefender’s VPN which I also have an account for. After that, I installed Office 365 and the applications my account is signed up for. Obviously, Microsoft Word was needed to work on this review, and it works as it should. Once I signed into my Microsoft account, all my shared documents were available to me and I was able to work on this review from any of my PCs, which is so handy. Oh, did I mention it has facial recognition software for signing in? It worked well until I installed Bitdefender and clicked to fast to let it control the camera. Now I need to go find out how to disable that, so I don’t need to use my pin or password to log in. Edit: I found the camera/mic settings in Bitdefender and a simple click to allow Windows access and a restart got it working properly. Did I mention it has a camera on each side of the tablet? I’m guessing they are considered front facing since the tablet can be used either way, normal, or in the 2 in 1 mode. So, what to install to test out this Surface Book 3. I’ll start with Photoshop. Installation was simple and it has no issues loading. I added a few filters to the application, but no brushes yet. I clicked on a CR2/raw file and the Surface Book 3 w/ Windows 10 loaded the application and photo into Camera Raw in 15 seconds. To compare, my Ryzen 7 2700 Eight-Core 3.2GHz with 16GB memory and a Radeon RX580 took 78 seconds to load the same raw photo into Camera Raw. I then chose a black and white filter and tried them on both machines. The desktop took 22 seconds to process the filter and the laptop took 27. That’s great considering it’s a laptop vs. a desktop. Also, the Surface is a quad-core and the desktop is eight (4 core plus 4 virtual vs 8 core plus 8 virtual) and it loads faster and almost performs as well! Then I just used the Surface Book 3 and tested what I feel is Photoshop's most demanding included filter, liquify. The Surface Book 3 can process the filter with little to no problem if the strokes aren’t very large. After about 3-4 swirls, the process hesitates as it tries to keep up. The lag is very short and acceptable. As I said, it’s a pretty demanding filter/process. All the user needs to do is watch the cursor. It will stay an arrow as it’s processing and then revert to the Photoshop circle to begin the next task. I wanted to try a game that uses a lot of resources. I chose Civilization VI because my desktop fan whirls when I play a long game. I installed the game on the Surface Book 3 via the Epic Games app and copied my latest save to the My Games folder in Documents. I opened the city which is on the largest map, I already won, and I’m finished with all tech upgrades. I just like playing to see how much of the map I can take once the game is over. The Surface Book 3 had no issues running the game. It appears to have the same wait time between turns, and I didn’t notice any hesitation or stutter in any of the movements such as the light spinning in the lighthouse. Except for the size of the playfield (not the 13.5 screens fault) the game is totally playable. I just prefer it on a larger monitor, yeah, I’m old! Windows Update is amazingly fast installing system updates. Downloading was fast too via my Wi-Fi home network. It took 2 restarts to complete the needed updates including the windows 1909 update. Speakers…well laptops aren’t the best when it comes to speakers and the Surface Book 3 lives up to that. The speakers do what they need to do and that’s about it. I listened to a few mp3’s and they sounded clear but lack any kind of bass. I wouldn’t say tinny, but like I forgot to turn on the subwoofer on my 5.1 home theater. Still, for doing daily tasks that require sound, the spoken voice should be above acceptable in my opinion. The Surface Book 3 does include Dolby Atmos for both the speakers and headphones, but it only offers on/off in the sound settings. No other options or app is installed. I did check full-range speaker option, but whether that did anything could be up for debate. I think it helped a bit, so it stays checked for now. Using a good set of headphones (I used a wired Rig set) through the port on the tablet and it sounded much better. Adding that bit of bass worked. I imagine it would be the same for gaming. I’ll add it in once I install and play a game on the laptop. Reading Epub’s and PDFs: Reading Epub’s on the tablet works great. If you have the screen attached, you can use the arrow keys in Calibre to scroll pages back and forth. You get a two-page view like a dead tree version. I tried getting Windows to default to Edge for reading Epub’s, but it wasn’t a listed app and I couldn’t locate the right .exe file in the Windows system app folder, so Calibre it is. It works very well for a 3rd party app. Also, if the screen is attached or detached, you can swipe or touch to turn pages, just like an e-reader. Page turns are nice and fast with no lag. For whatever reason, Edge was still the default PDF reader (I guess I clicked make Calibre the default for Epub’s) and it works. It only shows single page view and I haven’t figured out if I can change that to a two-page view. It is very snappy with page turns and looks great like a PDF should. Edge does give me the option to stretch the PDF to full page width, thus making it easier to read and enjoy the pictures. The detachable tablet has an awesome connection between the keyboard and the tablet. Very sturdy and the release key with the green notice on screen makes it very simple. This is the first detachable tablet/laptop I’ve had, and it works great. I wondered if Windows would work just as if it were docked/attached. Yup, I inserted a USB stick to see if it would show up in explorer and tada, no problem. Windows worked as it should. Edit: I read after typing this that Microsoft engineered everything except the batteries and GPU into the tablet, that’s why Windows 10 can operate with all its functions. It makes a great e-reader also. I have a paperwhite e-reader and several other e-ink readers and using this is nice and big. What else? Well, the unit I was sent has 2 USB-A ports, an SD card reader, a USB-c port, and a headphone jack. It’s a bummer it doesn’t support thunderbolt USB-c, but from what I read, Microsoft feels Thunderbolt has security issues that haven’t been fully fixed or addressed. Battery life seems good. I’ve had this on and off all day doing this review, installing and running apps and it still has 51% life with 77% on battery 1 and 42% on battery 2. My battery setting is leaning towards best battery life, but not all the way to the left. Maybe about 60/40. So overall impression. This 2 in 1 has several pros, including the reversible tablet when attached to the keyboard. Better yet, being able to use the tablet stand-alone with Windows 10 fully operational. The connection between the keyboard and the tablet is solid and doesn’t feel like I need to worry about it falling off. The green disconnect/attached popup is a welcome sight for new convertible tablet users like me. The charging cable is a 2 prong (nice) lightweight cord with a small brick making it nice and portable. The lack of bloatware was an unexpected and welcome surprise. The speakers being hidden behind the bezel and up on the tablet make for a better laptop listening experience, but with no subwoofer, the sound is less than ideal for any type of music. As for watching videos, presentations, or other spoken-word uses, they are up to the task. Nice that they didn’t put the speakers under the keyboard. I guess that wouldn’t work well with the tablet unless the keyboard was in the same area as the user. I do wish it could use Thunderbolt 3 so I could try out some of my adapters, such as additional ports or USB-c to projector, but I get that security issues must take precedence. If left to a short answer, I’d recommend the Surface Book 3 to my friends, especially the creative types, ones who need a touch screen or pen for work or school or those who f

I have been in the Best Buy Tech Insider program for about a year now and have had the opportunity to field test and review multiple consumer products. Some good, some great and some like the Microsoft Surface Book 3… world class! As a member of the Best Buy Tech Insider program, I did not purchase the Surface Book and it was provided by Best Buy in return for an honest unbiased review. The Best Buy Tech Insider program has never pressured me or suggested that I give anything but an honest and thorough test and review. Nor would I ever do that, as I too heavily rely on honest consumer reviews in my purchasing of items. User reviews are critical to me! The first thing that struck me as I unboxed the unit was how well and sturdy the unit feels. I was curious to see, due to the 2-in-1 nature, that the connection between the screen and the keyboard body portion would feel flimsy and would easily break. It feels a 100% like a laptop when it’s in laptop mode. The connection has a strong magnetic locking mechanism and feels 100% solid and secure! That’s important to me. When I’m using it in the laptop mode, I want it to be a laptop. I don’t want to feel like I have to settle because it’s a 2-1 and a flimsy connection between the tablet and the keyboard is the price you have to pay for a 2-in1. Not so with the Surface 3! I turned the unit on and was pleasantly surprised when Cortana’s voice chimed up and began walking me though her guided set up! I had flash backs to the movie “Her” as Cortana used her friendly and off the cuff and slightly humorous tone to guide me through the set up. One such line that made me actually smile was when Cortana said, “Next up… The legal stuff… You can decline it… but…you know… no Windows.” Really clever. It made other voice assistants seem so 2007. Now to be fair after the set up was complete, Cortana went back to sounding and acting like all the other assistants and her life like and natural tone went back to being as useful as all the other voice assistants we all have. It does show the potential these assistants have and that Microsoft is leading the way to utilize it to make a great set up experience that made this new laptop integration into my digital life seamless and easy. I utilize both windows and MAC OS and the setup was easy cross platforms for things like email and for linking my Microsoft account to my iphone ect. With the Surface 3 , I really love how everything is so intimately integrated with the Windows software and with the Microsoft built Surface hardware. Microsoft OEM software and Microsoft OEM hardware working in perfect harmony!! After getting through the initial setup which was again, easy and fun. I could not wait to get started to see what this hot rod of a 2-in1- could do. The specs are off the chart! First up was to download Adobe Creative Cloud CC 2020. In my vocation, one of the hats I wear is to film, edit and produce training videos and milestone events for our organization. Most of the videos are 10 – 15 minutes but some can get as long as 30-45 minutes and require multiple camera angles, photographs, music and many many short intense action shots. Editing, previewing and rendering, adding filters and transition effects is very computationally demanding! These kinds of projects are the most intense tasks any computer can do. THIS SURFACE Book 3 2-IN-1 DELIEVERS THE GOODS!!! The i7 Intel 10th gen processor is just a powerhouse and when you have the 32mb of ram it’s off the hook. The SSD HD keeps the highspeed info pipeline flowing. I would highly recommend a 1 to 2TB external SSD HD to keep all your working files on and keep your internal HDD clean. With my external SSD, I had zero lag manipulating the videos ect. This unit also has an awesome Nvidia Geforce GTX 1650 Max-Q for the graphics. In addition to the video editing and photo editing, I also tore it up with some of my favorite games as well. So smooth and crisp and the Surface screen looks amazing! So, I got so caught up in this as an incredible laptop that my excitement was reignited as I got ready to take it for a spin as a tablet! I pressed the tablet disconnection button located on the main keyboard and it light up and I felt the magnetic lock disengage. Presto…I had an incredibly beautiful, lightweight, powerful tablet in my hands. Note: when disconnecting it will not save any work in programs you are running so save all your work prior to disconnecting and when you reconnect it, the programs will have been closed. The 2-in- 1 tablet mode is so awesome and versatile, It was so cool because after I put together a video and rendered it, I was able to pop off the tablet and take it into my wife and show her the video in tablet mode. So easy and functional! And the render times are just amazing!!! This Surface has some horsepower under the hood!!!! My boss was also impressed, I foresee more Surface books 3's in our office soon! Another example of just how powerful this Surface is, is in Adobe Premiere CC 2020 the standard quality setting in the preview window is usually 1/8 to ¼ to have smooth playback especially if you have a lot of filters or effects or complex transitions from one seen to another. I cranked the preview quality to full and the Surface just hummed along at light speed….SO MUCH POWER!!! After video editing, I also do a lot of Adobe photoshop CC 2020 and Adobe illustrator in my line of work to fine tune logos, portraits and branding items along with creating hilarious meme’s. The first thing I realized as I began exploring photoshop with this tablet was that a Surface Pen is a must have accessory! Now it’s awesome without one but it is phenomenal with one!!! After a quick trip to my local BestBuy to buy a Surface pen, I was ready to really see what this 2-in-1 could do with Photoshop CC. Note, you could buy an off brand pen but the Surface pen magnetically attaches to the tablet where others will not and the benefits of having a product that was specifically designed to work flawlessly and seamlessly with this particular Surface unit created by the same people that made the pen…well it’s worth the little extra for the Microsoft pen. I also have had a pencil for another pad that was not attached and guess what… whenever I needed my pencil it was at home in my desk or not charged ect. With the Surface pen… it’s always with the tablet 2-in-1 and ready to go. The Magnet is strong enough that I am able to place the laptop in my case and retrieve and the pen stays put!! I really like that. Although you don’t have to have the pen and the touch sensitivity with a finger when it’s in laptop or tablet mode is phenomenal, the pen really takes it to another level for working on the tablet! So easy to remove flaws in Photoshop ect! I also love that I can open word and just start handwriting! You can also hold the cap of the surface pen down and bam sticky notes!!! One click gets you the whiteboard program instantly and two clicks gets you snip and sketch which is super cool! Literally world class laptop and tablet that stand alone in their respective modes but when you put them together, well the magic really happens!!!! I also love that such a powerful multimedia studio 2-in-1 is available to handle the most system intense programs and it’s Windows based! Windows is so dominant in corporate America and it felt to me that you had to choose Microsoft for business and MAC for multimedia… I don’t have to anymore! This Surface will do it all! That’s a real eye opener for me and I love it. Frankly, I love this laptop. The fact I can do big league multi-media projects and still seamlessly integrate with my organizations Windows dominant world is huge! From tech support to utilizing Microsoft TEAMS. I have it all with this Surface 2-in-1. So all this tremendous processing power and it tears through the toughest projects so what about the battery life? Well the specs say 15.5 hours. I worked 10 hours today and here I sit after work (so 11 hours) of hard use and the battery is at 51%. Granted I had a meeting and it was in sleep mode some throughout the day here and there. But I was working…all day. Emails, video project, word docs, excel, a little social media and Youtube ect. Just incredible in such a small form factor You cannot go wrong with this Surface 3, so versatile and powerful, well-built and ultimately work enhancing unit. Then there is the fun side as well. If it can blow through high-end video editing, it is also great at high end gaming as well! 5 stars all the way. I will still keep my skills up on other platforms but no longer just consider Microsoft as a “word and excel” platform. Microsoft has truly crushed it with the Surface 3 platform and then the versatility of the 2-in-1! INCREDIBLE!!! I can’t recommend it enough. The Surface Book 3 is now my go to platform for all my work and play!!!

I am a member of the Best Buy Tech Insider Network Program. Reviewers in this invitation-only program are provided products to write honest, unbiased reviews. I received a 13.5” Microsoft Surface Book 3 with the following configuration. 10th Generation Intel Core i7 Processor, 512GB SDD, 32GB Ram, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 4GB GPU. This unit can be configured as a traditional laptop, or the screen portion can be removed to use it as a tablet or mounted in reverse on the base to use it for presentations. Per the specs, the battery life in tablet mode is about 6 to 8 hours and 10 to 12 hours in laptop mode. There are batteries in the base and the display, so the battery life is longer when the units are combined. The device uses a quick-connect magnetic charge port, and the included 102-watt power supply also has an auxiliary USB charging port. The power button, volume toggle, and standard headphone jack are in the tablet portion of the unit, and the base has 2 USB 3.0, USB-C, and an SD Card port. The tablet portion is held in place by an electromagnet, so it will not release if the unit is not connected to power and has a dead battery. The backlit keyboard is very responsive along with the touchpad, and the speaker volume and sound quality are above par for a portable unit. A USB-C docking attachment is available that so you can connect additional monitors and accessories and use it as a desktop unit. The Surface Book 3 is a portable tool that is more than capable of serious photo editing. I was able to run full-powered editing software such as Lightroom and Photoshop CS. Photoshop recommends 8GB of RAM to properly execute the program and its effects, so the unit’s 32GB RAM far exceeded all expectations. Combine that with the improved processors I was certainly able to see a faster performance all around. The program is quick to launch and I was able to import over 10GB of my photos, post-process, and export RAW files in about half the time of my previous 16GB laptop. Being out and about I was impressed with the battery life under my heavy rendering load. Overall, I was very impressed with the display. The colors were very vibrant while still feeling natural. There is a great depth to the tones. A real richness. Retouching is a breeze. The faster processor certainly shows in the rendering time. I did not hit any hiccups or lags regardless of how many layers my files had.