The "New" Microsoft and it's Surface Book →

So Panay’s team set a different goal: to reinvent the laptop. They spent two years designing, prototyping, and fine-tuning—all to get to the Surface Book that goes on sale today. It’s the product of everything Microsoft has learned from making the first Surface machines, and from watching Apple eat its lunch. It’s a story right out of Cupertino, really: A small group of creatives sits in a room together, passionately slaving over every tiny detail of a product until it’s perfect. To go after Apple, Microsoft learned from Apple—and then found a few places to take right turns toward the future it imagines. It cost Panay much more than one night’s sleep.

This is what sets the course for success. Still at $1,499, makes it a little hard to digest but yes, it's definitely production and hardware plus excitement heading in the right direction.

Just in case you missed the latest shenanigans, PCWorld posted their benchmarks showing it beat the Apple's MacBook Pro 13" laptop not by twice but almost three times in terms of speed. Pretty impressive nonetheless, but 9to5Mac brings to light some of discrepancies. The biggest takeaway points to dedicated graphics cards do help in processing power and frame rate. The Surface Book has one, but the MacBook Pro does not.

Microsoft's Surface Book is Exciting →

Tablet mode becomes possible because the battery and Intel Core processor are built into the screen half of the hybrid laptop, while that high-powered GPU is in the keyboard base. The idea is that you’d use the device in laptop mode, while connected to that graphics processor, when playing games, editing video, or typing. When you want to use it as a less-powerful clipboard-size tablet, it detaches from that GPU-packed base for lighter tasks. You can also re-attach the top half of the device display-side up for “draw mode,” which gives you access to that GPU and screen at the same time, albeit with a little more bulk.

That's one way to upend the new iPad Pro's graphics (or lack there of) capabilities. It's interesting to see the benchmarks coming out in November and December. Where's my Skylake enabled Retina MacBook Pro Apple?