The Surface Book is a laptop with a detachable keyboard, not a tablet which can be connected to a Type Cover, likewise, the Surface Pro 4, while the MacBook Pro is a notebook with a Retina display and it’s the smaller version that has been released few years ago. So, which one will win this battle? The Surface Book, which is more expensive and supports pen functions, or the MacBook Pro, with a Force Touch trackpad?
Designs
The exterior of the Surface Book is very sleek and made of a silver magnesium alloy. The display is removable and it’s attached to the keyboard using a special hinge, which is flexible and maintains the balance between the two units. However, when it’s used as a tablet, the Surface book measures 312.4 x 220.2 x 7.6 mm and weighs 730 grams, while with the keyboard it’s almost 15 mm thicker and weights in total one kilogram and a half, which is kind of heavy, in our opinion.
The latest MacBook Pro is similar to the previous models, in terms of design, measuring 314 x 219 x 18mm, while it weights 1.58 kg. The exterior was made of aluminium, as usual, the edges are slim and the corners are curved, but we believe that this design needs to be improved, because it’s becoming boring and obsolete.
Ports
The Surface Book has two USB 3.0 ports, a Mini DisplayPort, an SD card slot and a Surface Connect port which is used for connecting the optional Surface Dock. In addition to the two USB 3.0 ports and SD Card slot, the MacBook Pro has also an HDMI port and two Thunderbolt 2 ports through which the users can connect storage drives and HD displays.
Displays
The Surface Book has a 13.5-inch LCD display with a 3000 x 2000 pixels resolution (267ppi) and it reached 387 nits on the light meter. The MacBook Pro, with its 13.3-inch Retina screen, supports 2560 x 1600 pixels (227ppi) and it supports 389 nits, offering more true to life colors and more accurate skin tones. In terms of color representation, the Surface Book managed to reproduce 98.5 per cent of the sRGB color gamut and notched a Delta E of 0.57, beating the MacBook, which reproduced 91.2 per cent of the sRGB color gamut and obtained 1.2 in the Delta E test.
Hardware
The Surface Book is powered by the sixth generation Intel Core i5 processor (2.4 up to 3.0 GHz) or Intel Core i7 processor (2.6 up to 3.4 GHz), which is backed by Intel HD Graphics 520 and the keyboard houses an optional custom variant of Nvidia GeForce 940M GPU with 1 GB of memory. The Surface Book houses 8 or 16 GB LPDDR3 RAM and 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB or 1 TB of internal storage.
The MacBook Pro uses the fifth generation Intel Core i5 processor (2.7GHz up to 3.1GHz or 2.9GHz up to 3.3GHz), which is backed by Intel Iris Graphics 6100 and 8GB of RAM, but which is configurable to 16GB. The internal memory is available in three variants of 128, 256 and 512GB, but it’s configurable to 1TB of flash storage.
On the Geekbench 3 performance test, the MacBook Pro scored 7,113, beating the Surface Book, whose score was 6,814.
Battery Life
The Surface Book can last 12 hours and a half when it’s in laptop mode and you continuously web surf over WiFi, while in tablet mode, it doesn’t withstand two hours. The MacBook Pro lasts up to 12 hours in similar conditions.
Well, I’d love to get the Surface Book, but for now I think I will keep on chugging with my Surface Pro 3. It’s not quite two years old and still going strong. However, I suppose the Surface Book 2 ought to be pretty nice. Perhaps that would work out well next fall. As far as a MacBook goes, I just can’t go back to a non touch-screen laptop. I would go nuts.