Author: Ewan Spence / Source: Forbes
I’ve spent a week getting to know the fifteen inch Microsoft Surface Book 2 (thanks to Redmond’s UK press team) and it is fair to say that the premium experience Microsoft’s Panos Panay promised has delivered. If you’re willing to pay for it, this is a worthy challenger to the dominance of the largest MacBook Pro.
Although the first 15-inch Surface Book was welcomed by the critics, I had some questions about the form factor, design, and how the Surface team would tweak the design for the 13-inch models to accommodate for the larger sizes. Would it still feel like a Surface Book, would it have a unique character, would the ergonomics and the subtle touches from the thirteen-inch model carry over?
The short answers are yes, yes, and mostly.
Let’s start off with my biggest question… how is the keyboard? Delightfully, it’s the same as the smaller Surface Book. And by the same, I mean genuinely the same. The size of the keys, the pitch, the key gap, are all identical. In effect the extra inches are placed either side of the keyboard, and the typing experience that I loved on the original Surface Book remains.
Curiously the trackpad has also retained the same physical size. The obvious and practical answer is that there is some economy of scale from the supply line at play here. It’s an easy argument to retain the same keyboard size, but to not increase the size of the trackpad makes… on the 13-inch it was almost but not quite cramped, here on the 15-inch it feels comical.
The size of the device is noticeable in the design.
There is a little bit more of a taper to the base, so the forward edge retains the same size but there’s a bit more ‘bulk’ as it reaches the hinge. Given the extra CPU and GPU power going on, that extra space no doubt held with the cooling, but it does make a very slight difference in the typing experience.Where the extra girth of the 15-inches does stand out is in the hinge. The Surface Book is rightly noted for its dynamic fulcrum hinge, and it is still present and correct, but it is a little bulkier and awkward with the extra physical demands placed on it. When opened the balance point allows the touch screen to be used with your finger, but closed the gap is still there. Having travelled with the older Surface Book it only ‘popped out’ into the two constituent parts once and I never felt the tablet/base was going to split apart. The same is true for the Book 2.
Where you really notice the fifteen inches of this Book 2 is in ‘easel mode’. This is where the screen is detached from the base, flipped over, and the unit is closed again. Compared to the 13-inch model, the extra real estate on the screen means there is more canvass to work with, your hand covers up less o the screen, and it moves from being ‘tight but usable’ to ‘comfortably small’. It also allows the Surface Dial peripheral to become something that becomes practical.
This is perhaps the key to understanding where the 15-inch version of the Surface Book 2 is targeted. There is a definite trade-off when carrying a larger screened laptop, and that trade-off for me is the easel mode. Those who need to be more ‘creative’ on the move (where creative means the use of the Surface Pen, the touch screen, or…
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