Microsoft didn’t completely forget their other products with their event. While the Surface Pro series hasn’t been updated, they slightly updated in the internal specs of the Surface Book.
Surface Book gets marginally faster today
The “new” Surface Book will receive the latest in Intel’s processor tech with i5 and i7 Kaby Lake CPUs inside. Also upgraded is the semi-custom NVIDIA 940M, which they swapped out for a slightly higher-wattage 965M instead. It’s curious why they decided not to go with a mobile Pascal GPU in this iteration, considering it would offer more power and consume even less power. Along with all that power, though Kaby Lake is a bit more efficient this time, they’ve added 30% more battery capacity. They quote around 16-hours of battery life, which is realistic given the 12-13 the original Surface Book was capable of.
The exterior hasn’t been updated, which means it still sports USB 3.0 and mini-DisplayPort and hasn’t doesn’t have Thunderbolt 3 or even USB 3.1 Type-C. The Surface Book with i7 and dGPU will cost $2399 and will ship on November 10th. The maximum configuration, with an i7, 1TB of PCIe storage, 16GB RAM and, of course, the NVIDIA GTX 965M will cost $3299. To differentiate they’re calling this new iteration the Surface Book with Performance Base, a fitting epithet. This still continues to be the flagship mobile device from Microsoft to show precisely the standard by which others should be at least physically built.