Microsoft - Surface Book 3 15" Touch-Screen PixelSense - 2-in-1 Laptop - Intel Core i7 - 16GB Memory - 256GB SSD

While I really like the product in that the screen looks really nice, battery life is good, performance good enough for my needs, the versatility of the screen, and the pen feels great, I am currently dealing with a cracked screen within the first 11 days of purchase. It has only been on my desk and have been opening and closing it carefully. Then, one day of opening it, I heard this crumbling noise and there was a crack in the screen. Microsoft has had issues with other laptops randomly cracking the same way, notably the Surface Laptop 3. However, they don't offer the same free fix and expect the consumer to pay $650 to fix.

I am a case manager/ service coordinator for families with children with special needs. I needed a multi functional laptop that can handle a variety of tasks and run smoothly whether on the go or at the desk. I love that I can use this as a typical laptop but also as a tablet and even a detached tablet. The detached tablet is very light weight and still gives me the option of a keyboard which is nice. Most of my job is basically logging in notes to state portal reporting systems and use of Microsoft Office. I was told I was buying a very high end computer for what I need but it runs so smoothly. Love how office seems to be the best version I've seen on this Book. I was able to link to my phone and printer easily. I'm working on downloading fax app which I really wanted and needed for work, and was excited about rear camera for the purposes of easy scanning. I have loved the ease of doing what I need to do and multitask on a larger screen with ease. I do love the windows 10 on here as well and ability to manipulate documents with the stylus, which is also very easy to get accustomed to from a little use. I've even played around with some of the functions all the artists out there love and have been creative with my records designing my own forms, and have loved using the stylus. The art professionals will love the graphics. The Book 3 was actually recommended to me by a family I work with who are in the arts and have the Book 2 and absolutely have loved transforming their hard copies to digital with beautiful graphics. Something we both found we love about the Books, runs quiet and keeps cool to the touch. Battery life for me has been about a workday; I haven't tested it to the point of completely dead. For the artist with the 2 he remarked about 4-5 hours. I am truly happy with my purchase and feel like I made a great decision. It also helped that I was able to price match and given discount.

Good product. I'm enjoying it each time of the day for school and work. I installed Linux on it for school and work and haven't had any problems. No changes in performance with a second OS installed. I recommend this product to anybody looking for a laptop for everyday work and beyond.

==================================================== I was provided with this Microsoft Surface Book 3 at no cost as part of the Best Buy Tech Insider program. Reviewers in this invitation-only program are provided products for the purpose of writing honest, unbiased reviews and sharing their experiences with the product. ==================================================== The Microsoft Surface Book 3 is an extremely well-engineered, high quality, high performance notebook that literally flew through almost every Adobe Photoshop task I threw at it as part of my daily work regiment. It easily handled all my MS Visual Studio development work with ease and the 15” inch PixelSense display’s 3:2 aspect ratio helped to keep more text on the screen – in addition to also being great for photo editing and long form document viewing. The PixelSense screen produced excellent Adobe RGB color accuracy out the box. Everything from the minimalist industrial looking magnesium alloy case, to the well-spaced and perfectly back lit keyboard screams quality and well thought out engineering…. However, there is significant room for improvement. The main areas I felt needed the most attention was centered around design and performance decisions made by Microsoft to keep the Surface Book 3 “the premier” 2-in-1 notebook in the market. The detachable tablet design results in a lot of sacrifices to maintain that unique form factor. There was a noticeable amount of screen wobble due to the top end heavy design of the display. Audio and sound takes a minor performance hit due to the relatively weak and hollow sounding speakers embedded into the display unit (but not the base unit oddly). More importantly, while I found the unit whisper quiet under normal operation – it got notably noisy, and even a little whiny, under full sustained processing loads, such as encoding in Adobe Premier Pro, or while testing out the graphical processing prowess in some light gaming action in Fortnite. Sadly, all of the currently available configurations are non-user serviceable/ non upgradable which means that you need to seriously calculate the amount of RAM and SSD storage you may need for future application usage and development – or risk having to acquire a whole new unit later on down the line. Detailed Observations after a regular usage: =================================================== My team and I create training photos, video content, coded programs, and virtualized network/server infrastructure to meet our organization’s needs. I am fortunate to regularly work with others that often live on the “bleeding edge” of technology and this results in inevitably swapping machines between team members many times over throughout a project to work through our tasks. This provides for a great opportunity to compare the performance of many different machines essentially running the same tasks over and over. I primarily utilize Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Premier Pro, MS Visual Studio, and VMware Workstation Pro as part of my regular work routine… with a healthy heaping of PC gaming on the side. I wouldn’t say I am a “Artisan” Photoshop/Premiere Pro user, but my team and I utilize the programs enough to be more than well versed in what they have to offer. For reference, I predominately work with 8-16 Megapixel uncompressed JPG images with average bit depths of 8bpc per image. I rarely utilize more than 10 layers in any of the images I work with – and in that regard this 16GB of RAM model is more than enough to tackle any filters or renders that I throw at it in reasonably quick amount of time. I kept a close eye on the RAM and system resource utilization – and it never peaked above 80% under the above circumstances – even with 10-15 Chrome tabs and streaming music services running in the background as well. I added a photo in the gallery for reference. In all honesty, I feel that if you are planning on working with predominately RAW Images or any 16bpc (or greater) JPG images AND/OR rely on more than 10 layers – you should definitely be looking at the Surface Book 3 with 32GB of RAM over this configuration. The battery life was decent and lasted about 5-7 hours with moderate to heavy use in a single day of my type of usage. I imagine this is due in part to the two separate batteries in the in the base and in the Surface Book Display unit along with the low voltage 10th Gen Intel Core i7-1065G7 processor. The keyboard is spacious, has great key travel, and uniform back-lighting...What more can you ask for? I regularly create/maintain VMware virtual machines as part of my development work to test and verify functionality of features I am working on. Interestingly – although this machine has the graphical, and computational horsepower to serve as a dedicated VMware or VirtualBox workstation – it requires a little tinkering out of the box. Due to native Windows 10 Security settings AND the Surface Book 3 default BIOS configuration – resource conflicts occur with the native Level1 Windows hypervisor and the Level2 VMware/VirtualBox virtualization software you are trying to use. “Credential guard” errors resulted every time I tried to load a VMware or VirtualBox VM. Without going into granular technical detail, technical – the Surface Book 3 BIOS lacks the ability/option to easily view or enable/disable “Virtualization” features of the Intel Chipset – even though it is a natively supported feature. I was able to rectify the situation by making edits to the Windows Registry to disable the conflicting services and I also had to modify the Windows 10 OS Security settings to allow the sharing of virtualized privileged system resources/core memory functions. There are a few Microsoft Knowledge base articles that you can search for to address this if you run into this similar issue, and it would have saved me several hours of my time had I known in advance. Interesting things I noted: =========================================== - The Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti is a decent solution for 1080p Gaming with “High” detail settings (and possibly some “very high” depending on the Game) - Its nice to have a full-sized SDXC card read directly in the device - even under heavy load, the keyboard and palm rest stayed nice and cool - the back side of the Display unit got noticeably warm at times when I would pick up or move the unit to another area. - Microsoft really should include a Surface Pen at this price point – it really adds to the capability of the device and helps to strengthen one of its key advantages over other machines - The screen is bright enough to work easily with in direct sunlight – even if it can have touch too much reflections at times - While the 10th Gen Intel Core i7 1065G7 inside of this model is more powerful than its predecessors – it is not the best performing (nor best priced) processor for content creation on the market. Microsoft should really consider offering the latest AMD Ryzen 4000 series processors in this model or in future revisions or at least try to consider using a non "low voltage" based processor to compete with AMD. - I have mixed feelings about the “mechanical” button mechanism that detached the tablet from the base. I accidentally engaged it the first day I used it and the mechanism made a weird sound and the tablet sort of wobbled. Nothing broke, but makes me ponder the longevity and fragility of the mechanism over long term repeated use. - The trackpad looks small – and is small - but it was more than adequate in my usage. I think it doesn’t help that there is so much “unused” space in the palm rest area on both side of the base. Maybe place extra Speakers to improve sound while plugged into the base? Closing thoughts: ========================================= As I mentioned – I work in a team, and some my team mates regularly switch out their notebooks in a quest the find “the one” that tries to do everything they need. This is where I think the Surface Book 3 starts to lose some of its luster and appeal. There are faster/more powerful notebooks and 2-in-1’s for content creators and developers out there - for lower MSRP. They are often more customizable, with better performing hardware and equally impressive displays out there – for lower MSRP. I physically witnessed 15” inch AMD 4800U and a 14” AMD 4900HS powered notebook -with similar Nvidia GTX GPUs- perform many of the same tasks in 20%-30% faster time frames, along with more system RAM, SSD storage … for less than half the price of this models MSRP. Even taking all that into consideration – there is still something special about the Surface Book line that can’t be quantified. Thanks to the detachable screen, I found new ways to collaborate and make on the fly edits/adjustments with my team. I was able to gather input that would not have been possible with any other machine thanks to the added flexibility. Using the Surface Book 3 in tablet mode with an optional Surface Pen is where this device really shines. Sadly, there is NOT one included in the box – I borrowed one from my personal Surface Pro 4). As configured with 16GB of RAM, and at retail MSRP – I think the Surface Book 3 is an outstanding machine that can tackle light – to - medium weight content creation tasks and workloads, with the added bonus of lightweight gaming on the side. It looks and feels like a premium device – but it costs significantly more than (mainly AMD) devices that can outperform it on almost every level. In my mind, it boils down to “needing” the tablet functionality for the added cost –or- heavy Photo editing/collaboration with the PixelSense Display and a Surface Pen – which again is oddly optional at this price point given lower priced "Surface Pro" models can be purchased with a pen as part of the configurations.

I have had my eye on the Surface Book 3, since even before it was announced. I have been using a Surface Pro 3 for years now, and while I love the portability and power it provided, it was needing something capable of a bit more heavy lifting. Especially since the current state of the world means I'll be working from home even more frequently. I love taking notes on the Surface Pro 3, so I wanted to be able to continue to do so on a whatever new machine I upgraded to. That's why the Surface Book 3 was so appealing to me. It combines the touchscreen and pen input capabilities with a very capable GTX 1660ti graphics card in the base. It's the best of both worlds for me. In my day-to-day work requirements, I do lots of photo editing and design work in Photoshop, as well as motion graphics in After Effects, video editing in Premiere Pro and vector illustration in Illustrator. I also like to dabble in 3d modeling. When I was offered the chance to test a Surface Book 3 from the Tech Insider program, I jumped at the chance. Reviewers in this invitation-only program are provided products for the purpose of writing honest, unbiased reviews. Over the last few days, I've been putting this machine to through the ringer. It has absolutely handled all that I've thrown at it so far. I'm currently working on some motion graphics and web design assets for an upcoming conference. I had begun the motion graphics work on my current desktop machine and was curious how well the Surface Book would handle it. It has performed very well. I am getting render speeds similar (and in many cases, better) than my workstation PC (with a Xeon processor and a bit older Quadro graphics card). I imagine this is in part due to the newer processor the Surface Book is using. It's very satisfying to be working on a project and disconnect the screen to take some notes from a meeting. Speaking of which, the screen removal is very interesting as well. Windows will tell you when there is software that will be impacted by removing the screen from the base (since you'll be unable to use the discrete graphics card when removed). Very handy. There is a slight delay when you tap the button to remove it before you can actually remove the screen, but it's only around a second or two. While testing with Photoshop, I was able to easily edit large files (the screenshot I've shown is me editing a 265mb file) without any performance issues whatsoever, including zooming/panning around the image and applying effects to smart objects and with many layers. Photoshop performs VERY well on this machine. Testing with the ever-demanding After Effects, performance was also very good. In the screenshot I've shown, I am in the middle of an intro video for the conference project I spoke about. I was deliberately trying to tax the machine by using multiple instances of some demanding effects and expressions (After Effects' scripting language), since After Effects is very taxing to the CPU. Render times were equal to, or better than my desktop machine. All while running off battery! Very impressive. I also wanted to test the rendering speed of a complex scene in Blender. I downloaded one of the demo scenes that Blender makes available on their website, since it would be much more advanced than anything I've created. This one titled "Spring". It's some beautiful work, and the final render took approximately one hour for a 1000x2000 image. Again, very impressive for a portable machine, all while working on battery power. Speaking of the battery- the battery life has been pretty great. Since I've been working the machine very hard, it's battery life has been about 7 hours. Again, this is when I'm doing very demanding tasks, like creating or rendering in After Effects, or that Blender rendering. During less demanding use (web browsing, word processing, coding), I'm getting very good battery life, much better than I anticipated. I'd say around 12 hours. That's sort of tough for me to estimate, since I'm not using it non-stop for those times. Also, a nice little side-effect of the processor being in the screen, rather than the base like most laptops, there is little to no heat on your lap. Even during demanding tasks, since most of the heat is generated at the screen/tablet area of the machine and quietly sent out from it. Another nice feature for video editing and motion graphics, is the aspect ratio of the screen. It's a little taller than other laptops, which is actually very helpful. This gives you additional room for your audio/video tracks and feels less cramped that standard 16:9 displays. It also has excellent and accurate color reproduction. Overall, I'm extremely impressed with this machine. It is exactly what I was hoping it would be. If I had any complaints, it would be that this particular model I am testing is only a 256gb SSD. It's fine for most things, but I just need to make sure and offload any large projects once I'm done. The bright side of that, is that it will make me better about backing up my projects. :) I also wouldn't have minded getting one with a more RAM. The 16gb performs VERY well, but I imagine I could squeeze out even more performance with the 32gb model. If you're looking for a machine that can perform any creative tasks, I'm not sure there's a better form factor out there. The ability to use high end full-featured editing software, while also being able to use a pen input is absolutely great. Especially when you have the screen removed, or reversed to create a slightly elevated canvas. Pros: Beautiful looking machine, great productivity features, love the removable screen to use as a tablet along with the pen input, taller aspect ratio, excellent performance in Photoshop, After Effects, Blender and FreeCAD, excellent battery life, very color-accurate screen, pretty decent as a gaming machine too (I didn't want to get too much into this, since I think most people are probably looking for productivity, but the GTX 1660ti is a pretty capable graphics card for gaming as well. I played some recent games, like Gears Tactics and it was performing very well in it) Cons: I would like to have a larger SSD, as the model I was offered is only 256gb, I wouldn’t mind the trackpad being a bit larger (though, I can't completely say this is a con just yet, since my hands do rest nicely to the sides of it while typing, so I think I'll just have to see after more prolonged use if I would really prefer it to be larger)

It is worth for the money. You gonna love it. Display solution is so nice. I like the design also, just 1 thing , it’s hard to find the accessories for 15” version

Ok, for $2494.74 (with tax) I was expecting a high-quality product, however, here are some issues I faced in only 2 days before I returned back: 1. On a 4k video both the laptop and the book 3 wifi were slow (I'm using AT&T fiber high speed) "No problem with my MacBook pro." 2. Sound quality is absolutely poor and not even close to the iPhone 5. 3. On the second day of purchasing I notice some oil leak?!! Seriously Microsoft?? (Picture attached) 4. The laptop was slow in general until I updated windows then it started to operate less than expected. Finally, I returned it after 2 days of purchasing and not planning to buy it with this cost. This is a personal opinion but if book 3 (15" 16GB memory i7) costs around $1,400 I would consider buying it again.

Full disclosure: Reviewers for in this invitation-only program (Tech Insider Network) are provided products for the purpose of writing an honest, unbiased review. When I first saw this laptop, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Is it a laptop or a tablet? My concern was if it’s both, does it do either functions well? I’ve seen many other laptops that claim it can be used as a tablet. There are many laptops where the keyboard folds behind the screen and they call it tablet mode, but it weighs much more then what we consider tablet weight. But with the Windows Surface Book 3, the keyboard detaches, to me, this is a game changer! For comparison, the weight of the Surface book (tablet only) is 1lb 13 ounces (29 ounces), for comparison an iPad 10.2” weighs 17 ounces and the iPad Pro 12.9” weighs 1lb 6.6 ounces (22.6 ounces). Unboxing and appearance: The laptop comes very nicely packaged, open the box and you will find the laptop, charger and cord neatly packaged. The charging block has a USB port also, nice touch as I use it to charge my phone. No need to take up a USB port on the laptop. I wish the charger had some sort of wire management on it though (i.e. plastic tabs to wrap wire around, Velcro strap). The magnetic charger is a nice touch, it connects to the laptop parallel, so it doesn’t protrude out from the laptop. It’s made out of black plastic, so feels a bit cheap. A Surface pen is not included, at this price point, it would’ve been nice if it were included. If you have a pen, it doesn’t appear to have a spot to store it on the laptop. Initially I wasn’t crazy about the hinge design, when it folds up, it doesn’t fold flat, there’s a quarter inch gap near the hinge area. I think we’re all used to laptops folding flat when the lid is down. After a week of usage, I’m getting more used to it and it doesn’t bother me as much. The front lip has a magnet that keeps the lid shut tight. The magnet is evident as my watchband keeps sticking to it. I end up taking off my watch when I use the laptop, which is probably better anyway as I don’t want to scratch up the laptop. Overall the design is very clean and nice, the shiny silver Windows logo gives it a premium look. I’ve seen many 2 in 1 laptops where the screen is very heavy, making it easy to topple over, but this laptop is very well balanced. Pushing gently on the screen doesn’t cause the keyboard to lift up. Instead, the hinge responds by opening more. This is where I start to appreciate the Surface book hinge design. I have 4 laptops in my home, all of them, if I push the top without holding the base down, will lift up. Traditional laptop hinges are stiffer. The keyboard lights up nicely, there are 3 settings that you can toggle between. Usage: Initial setup was a breeze, follow the instructions, log into your Windows account it pretty much does the rest. I love the Windows “Hello” login (facial recognition) feature. I have that on one of my other laptops, but not in my work laptop. It’s definitely nice to have and works well. I found the picture quality of the PixelSense display to be very good. I used this laptop with Adobe Lightroom to organize, edit and print my large library of photos. The colors and clarity of the photos look very good (I have not calibrated the display yet). I’ve used Lightroom on my iMac that’s approximately 7 years old, it’s been painfully slow opening catalog, editing etc. The Surface Book was able to do all these tasks much, much faster. The benefit of being able to disconnect the tablet is that I can show photos to my family without carrying around the laptop. Much friendlier to hold and swipe through vacation photos. I enlisted my son’s help, an Engineering student in HS, to test the laptop with Autodesk Inventor Professional. The Surface Book performed perfectly and comparable to the desktops he uses in school. He created a sword using Inventor. I also used the laptop for general applications such as Microsoft Office and Ameritrade Think or Swim, no issues running any applications of course. I didn’t even hear a fan kick off while running these programs. Conclusion: Overall this is a beautiful, capable laptop that is light weight, the tablet mode was executed very nicely by the engineers at Microsoft. I can wholeheartedly say it’s a great laptop and a great tablet! Just getting the weight down to something I wouldn’t mind carrying but has the computing power to work flawlessly with Adobe and Autodesk applications is amazing to me. There are some minor issues, as I’ve mentioned in my review, but nothing that’s a deal breaker. The price is on the high side, I would say this is the biggest negative.