Microsoft’s Surface Book is the most exciting Windows laptop in years. Actually, aside from a few hot-rod gaming rigs, it may be the only exciting Windows laptop in years. That’s great news for people who’ve longed to long for a PC again. And it could be a nightmare for every other PC manufacturer.

If you missed the Surface Book announcement, you’ll want to get acquainted. It’s a 13.5-inch laptop with a killer display, maxed-out guts, a funky cool hinge, and a top half that detaches, like the saucer of the USS Enterprise, to become a thick, powerful tablet.

The Ultimate performance

Surface Book is built to be a creative workhorse, combining a 6th Gen Intel® Core™ i5 or i7 processor with up to 16GB of memory and an optional discrete graphics chip.

Microsoft says the Surface Book is for someone who wants a bigger screen and “the perfect typing experience” of a laptop. For one, that includes a backlit keyboard. There are also deeper keys, with 1.6mm of travel. Microsoft is kind of freaking out about this keyboard. It’s calling it “perfect” and saying it’ll type almost silently. Beneath all that, the Surface Book includes a glass track pad with five points of touch sensitivity.

Portable Clipboard

The 13.5” PixelSense™ display detaches easily from the keyboard to become a thin, light tablet that works perfectly with OneNote and Surface Pen.

Creative Canvas

Turn the screen around and reattach it to use Surface Book like a creative canvas. By reconnecting it to the keyboard, you unlock its full creative power in a pen first mode.

Graphic Horsepower
With an optional discrete graphics chip, Surface Book is built for even the most intensive creative tasks like photo and video editing.

Serious Creativity

Use the multi-touch PixelSense™ screen and Surface Pen to create with all the desktop software you already use, like Adobe® Photoshop® and Illustrator.

Mobile Studio

Surface Book is the creative professional’s laptop designed to power through professional grade photo and video editing.

Naturally, the Surface Book will work with Microsoft’s Surface Pen stylus as well. As for why you’d want to use this device as a tablet, Microsoft is talking about it as a “digital clipboard.” That’s not the most compelling phrase, but it’s really everything that the Surface line has always been: a very powerful tablet that runs desktop Windows. This one just happens to do a much better job of transforming into the laptop that it really wants to be.

Full Office

Surface Book works perfectly with the full suite of Office products, driving your productivity to new heights.

Markup Webpages

Write directly on webpages with Surface Pen in the all-new Microsoft Edge browser and share your notes easily.

Limitless Apps

Surface Book has all the power you’ll need for even the most demanding creative apps. Use Adobe® software 3 with a pen or mouse.

With these exhilarating features in tow, Microsoft is bringing the game to Apple.

More information and preorder now available at Microsoft.

Visit the Helios Media Design page to find out more about Lydia’s work.