Microsoft Surface Book
Price: $1,500-$3,200Website: www.microsoft.com/surface
In the years since the iPhone kickstarted the touchscreen revolution, companies have tried time and again to create hybrid devices that bridge the intuitive interaction of a smartphone or tablet with the productivity of a traditional laptop.
Most have fallen well short of that ideal, but software giant Microsoft’s first foray into a self-produced laptop, the Surface Book, is being touted as the closest yet to achieving technological Frankenstein perfection.
When attached to its keyboard dock, the Surface Book is a full-fledged, 3.34-pound laptop with top-end specs, including a glass touchpad, Intel Core i5 or i7 processor, full-size keyboard, optional dedicated graphics card, up to 16 gigabytes of RAM and up to a terrabyte of internal storage.
But in cases where purely touch-based interaction is preferable, users can use it as a digital clipboard by flipping the screen over or detach it entirely, at which point it becomes a tablet that is 0.6 inches larger, less than 0.1 pounds heavier and higher resolution than Apple’s recently released iPad Pro.