On Monday I got an email from Microsoft telling me that a $2700 Surface Book was waiting for me at my local FedEx. I hurried over to pick it up and then I immediately went to the Apple Store in town to buy (what I thought was) as comparable MacBook Pro.
Before entering the Apple store I opened up the Surface Book and checked the specs; 512GB SSD Intel i7 2.6GHz, 16GB of RAM. I then looked up the actual value of this laptop on Microsoft's website; $2700, wow....
I went in the Apple store and started looking at 13 and 15 inch MacBook Pros. Every 13 inch MacBook Pro had an i5 processor and was significantly cheaper than my $2700 Surface Book. Luckily I found a 15 inch MBP that appeared to have almost identical specs; 512 SSD, 2.5GHz i7, and 16GB RAM. The price was $2500, $200 cheaper than the Surface Book but it was close. Before I swiped my credit card I showed the Apple employee the exact specs of the Surface Book and asked if the processors were comparable, he said they were, but we both ended up being wrong.
I got back to the studio and started filming speed tests in Photoshop, Lightroom, and Premiere. The tests did not go well for the Surface Book. In Photoshop and Lightroom, the MacBook Pro was able to burn through jpeg and raw files at twice the speed of the Surface Book. In Premiere, the MBP was able to render 4k footage with up to 4 effects on the fly while the Surface Book couldn't even play 4k footage smoothly at 1/8 resolution. As one of the last photographers I know using Windows, I left defeated that night.
Later that night one of our writers pointed out that although both processors are Intel i7 chips, the Apple chip is a quad core while the Microsoft chip is only a dual core. This explained why the Apple was twice as fast, it has a processor that is literally twice as fast.
Once I figured this out I felt better because I knew that Apple didn't have some magic software that could make its hardware twice as fast but I also felt worse because the MacBook Pro was actually $200 cheaper and it was still twice as fast as the Surface Book.
If you're deciding which laptop is better based on power alone, the MBP is the clear winner. If, however, you are looking at all aspects including design quality, included accessories, touch capabilities, and of course the fact that the Surface Book is a laptop and tablet in one, the decision isn't so clear.
As someone who appreciates design and craftsmanship, I've always admired Apple products. Every aspect of an Apple laptop feels completely thought-out while my plastic Windows laptops feel cheap and disposable. In the video below I compare the design and craftsmanship of each laptop.
At the end of the day the Surface Book is an amazing achievement. I don't understand how they made that magnetic hinge, it works so well that it's a pleasure every time I detach the screen from the keyboard but the poor battery life of the tablet portion of the Surface Book makes it pretty useless to use without the base. It's also not the power house that I thought it would be. 4k video footage is quickly becoming the new standard and the laptop was unable to edit it without rendering first, that alone would keep me from spending $2700 on it but I realize that the average Surface Book user, and even the average Fstoppers reader, does not edit 4k video footage. For you, the Surface Book may be powerful "enough" but that's up to you to decide.
Because the Surface Book is so expensive, and the tablet portion has such limited battery life, I personally lean toward the Surface Pro 4 myself. You can read my full write up on the Surface Pro 4 here and you can watch my comparison video between the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book below.
Screen size does matter for a laptop, more screen you have more power you can put in simple
Screen size does not effect your computers performance, only battery life, and if you start to hook up multiple displays. a 980 GPU still going to work the same if the screen is 13 inches or 15 images, it will change once it reaches a higher resolution of pixel count.
I wish people wouldn't also say.... They both have SSD's why is this one slower.... Ummm check the specs of the read and write speed of the drives. Its the same thing as an SD card, there are 10mbps cards and 90mbps cards. Same thing with internal flash or SSD.
Are you sure ?
That's a 13ich model XD not this review is a joke and a fail
To be safe and to answer some critics of this post, you should compare it to this MacBook Pro: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1129105-REG/apple_z0qp_mf8417_13_3...
It would be cool to see this dual core, non-dedicated GPU, 13" MacBook Pro best it in performance... or to learn if the Surface Pro can keep up with it.
Id be interested to see how the mbp compares to the MSI g60:
http://m.newegg.com/Product/index?itemnumber=34-152-940
I would love to hear Lee how's the experience when it's used for retouching photos (eg. dodge and burn). Would it be a great alternative to a Wacom?
Quick question.
the surface book you received is the one with a discrete gpu right?
Did you enable gpu processing in your software to let the gpu do the heavy lifting in image processing?
This can't be right.. something is up with this review, here is me editing 4k on surface pro 3 with a little but of frame drop nothing major https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Nv55gTixkY
which format of media has you used ?
I think Lee has used .Mov which has horrible codecs from apple on win but on mac is just great.
I'll have to double check this but 4K footage from the ar72 and the new dji x5 canny play back smooth in premiere but it will play smooth in windows media player.
Robert can't remember sorry, far to long ago and not go the footage anymore to check. and lee It might be something to do with windows 10, never know, its very new OS and still is not fully complete
Can you verify that the SB wasn't using the built in graphics adapter?
And also, does Adobe on Windows use DX12 yet?
nothing we tested in this video used the gpu
Oh, well isn't the price comparison a little off? If you had bought a model with out the GPU it would have performed the tasks just as fast, but it would have cost about $600 less.
gpu is $200 i think. plus not an option at this level
This was a very good review. Although I am saddened with it because I am a very strict Windows User and a fan. I didn't know about this site, first time I saw Lee's face on this. Not too Techy too. My friend - an Apple Fanatic - tried ridiculing me by pasting this link to my Facebook profile saying: HA HA Windows USER!!
I am a Windows user from Phone to Desktop to Tablet.
I have much to say on this; agreeing with Lee here, since I don't have the product with me to compare. It disappoints me to know it's Dual Core with the same price ($200 is not a mentionable price difference for me). For ONCE I thought Okay I can mock the Apple Users for once. Guess I was wrong. (I did though with the SP3 and how apple copied the hell out of it)
Yes, I would like to - like always - defend Windows, and here I go: Seeing how terrible SP and SP2 were, MS got it right after the third time; SP3 (Hurray! Surface Team!!). This was the FIRST Surface Book. And yes I can see how direly they wanted to sell it with comparing a disproportionate device in the October 26th Press Conference. I am sure they will get it much more right next year. This seems like a public beta test for this device standing against the rest; evidently fails - Thank You FStoppers for the reviews, and Yes I do believe this was Honest and Non-Bias.
Thank You for the review, I have an SP3 at the moment. Will just buy the attachable keyboard of the SP4 to get Windows Hello, perhaps the new docking station too and wait another year.
Lumia 950 is good, but going to wait for Surface Phones for my next Windows phone.
Keep it up,
Godspeed!
The first reasonable comment from a Windows fanboy! Thanks for being cool
Alright, I can see that we're right back where we started again. To quote what I said BEFORE THIS EVEN CAME OUT:
"The difference between Mac and Windows isn't in the price or specs. It's very similar to the arguments between cars; some people simply like how a Mac works, others might like Windows more. It might take a hell of a lot to get a Ford driver to go over to a Honda. In the same way, this probably won't win over the Mac users, because it simply isn't a Mac."
Yup I'm a hardcore Windows User and am always prone to leaning towards Windows. Just cant help it.
Shame on all of you giving the author a hard time. As far as I'm concerned, the biggest apples to apple comparison is the damn price! The fact that he was able to get a Mbp for 200 bucks less should immediately put this argument to rest. It may not have the fancy features but the area where I hope it should matter to anyone should be productivity, and the MacBook kills it. Microsoft brought the fight forward first. If they want to charge apple prices, they better damn well beat Apple products. I'm not a Apple fan boy, in fact I hate Apple, but Microsoft is playing the same game and it seems a lot of people are just plain delusional.
Why dont you try Vaio Canvas Z its a true quad core i7. The surface series is a new type of pc experince with mobility and productivity performance is still limited because it is efficiency cost and power vs design. We need to conceder its a PC all in one a new bread of pc. There different kind of cores out there but cannot be put in a mobile device just like that, heat and battery life are needed to be conceder to call this a very good device. To be honest MBP cannot be compared to MSP4 because they are different devices. Put in there true power house machine like Alienware then lets talk. Searching for the best unit for the job. There is no perfect device. But the future is bright as new type of PC will change how we use them or see them.
Oh dear, religious discussion. This won't end well.
I'm actually surprised that photographers of all people, the same ones who look and discuss mtf charts and other physical properties don't do as much research or information search on their computational gear. Do most photographers don't care? I mean I'm a hobbyist on both fronts so I know the difference even WITHOUT testing. but I would expect the same data seeking people who look at lens data mtf and such to do the same.
Both companies (Microsoft and Apple) have made it difficult to actually determine the specs of their processor. I do believe in this case the onus is on the buyer to do careful research and analysis. let's not kid ourselves.
You be surprised about how many photographers don't care about the actual hardware they use many will use a 'Apple' because it's 'better' without actually being able to quantify why it's better. I have no issue recommending Windows or Apple machines, but I always ask what they intend to do and for photographers that often means a Windows box for the upgrade-ability and life-span. Many photographers are computer illiterate at the end of the day, you can see this by the lack of back ups or understanding how systems work.
Downside Apple has done a great job of brainwashing the masses into believing OS X is invulnerable and Windows is a security ridden mess. Both statements are false.
i still do not think it is about processor it self ....... when i`m doing batch the processor runs on 25-40 % multi-core but what is most important is how fast is the ssd or hdd in most cases.
Try please do a copy plenty of files from one folder to another on the same disc...... i do not now if this is possible on mac but this will give you maybe answer why is my Notebook (not laptop) I5 2 cores 2.3 Ghz faster then my desktop i7 4 cores 2.8 Ghz.....
"Later that night one of our writers pointed out that although both processors are Intel i7 chips, the Apple chip is a quad core while the Microsoft chip is only a dual core. This explained why the Apple was twice as fast, it has a processor that is literally twice as fast."
Do your research you twat. That's not how it works.
You don't know much about computers, do you?
Cracked up reading this, "Later that night one of our writers pointed out that although both processors are Intel i7 chips, the Apple chip is a quad core while the Microsoft chip is only a dual core."
You caught that huh? Real pros! Didn't watch the video because, "duh".
For reference, someone who ran the a test with the computer MS was *actually* putting itself up against and found that the claims hold up. Specifically in Premiere which is what I care about. Perfectly happy to pay a small premium for the flexibility of the SB.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2995599/laptop-computers/surface-book-vs-...
People keep pointing to this article but the mbp wins almost every test. I think people believe the gpu will be super useful when in reality most programs do not take advantage of it.
People refer to this because that's the claim ms was making.
/but the mbp wins almost every test.
What are you talking about? The only thing the mbp wins in is the synthetic cpu tests which the author says is basically a wash given that the sb cpu uses half the power of the mbp cpu. He found the sb crushing the mbp in real world tests gaming and encoding. Apparently you aren't much for reading comprehension either.
I am a bit confused by the premiere test. I was under the impression that premiere encoding didn't use gpu but it seemed much better than mbp when they claim processor speed is slower.
I guess I'm confused with the point of this article. I think I understand the original intent: to test the claims MS made that the Surface Book was 50% faster than the 13" MBP. But that's not what was actually tested.
I agree that it seems silly to compare the Surface Book to the MBP because they are different form factors and serve different purposes in my mind. It is no surprise that if you take two similarly priced computers but with drastically different form factors, you will get very different test results. (Most of the time, a similarly priced 2-in-1 will be slower than a similarly priced laptop which will be slower than a similarly priced desktop. $2700 buys A LOT of desktop power.) So the only fair reason to compare the Surface Book and MBP is based on Microsoft's claim. Otherwise, does anyone really think the two machines will compete?
But the real problem I have with this article is that I'm not sure I can trust your testing methods. At around the 8 minute point in the video, you talk about having tried the same test on your desktops which you portrayed as being very fast, and yet had bizarrely unexpected results. You said, "I have no idea why [our newest three-thousand-dollar desktop is almost twice as slow]." I don't quote you to be a jerk, but simply to highlight the point: why should we trust your testing methods? By your assessment, your $3k top-of-the-line desktop was slower than the 15" MBP in batch-processing in PS. But then your "older desktop" was faster. How do we know that similar discrepancies don't exist in your primary test?
I'm okay with having a non-technical approach to benchmarking the two machines, the "Does this work for the average photographer" test can be really useful...until you get bizarre results that don't make any sense and try to stumble through possible explanations. That's probably the point when you need to consult experts in the field. For instance, quad-core versus dual-core does make a big difference, but there is no way it accounts for all of your test results. (At least according to the links you provided for the two computers, there are quite a few more differences between the two computers than just number of processor cores.)
I get that you spent a lot of time putting these articles together. Planning, executing, filming, writing. I respect you guys and the vast majority of the content you produce. I agree with your overall assessment that the current-gen 15" MBP provides superior performance over the current-gen Surface Book. But I would humbly suggest that this article should have never ran. Your inability to demonstrate the objective results of your test is a major flaw. Whereas Fstoppers normally brings information and clarity to the issues it covers, this article just seems to muddy the waters.
My 2 cents. I hope they are helpful.
Our desktops have a million apps running on them at once and I wasn't going to troubleshoot the issue. The mbp and surface book were literally opened and used for these tests only.
i understand that the sb is a different machine than the 15inch mbp but it was ms who compared it to the 13 inch model, not me. It's bigger than a 13 inch mbp just like its smaller than a 15 so no test will be "fair".
I will try to get my hands on a 13 inch for tests next week though.
Hey! Something you and I can totally relate on! Woo hoo!
Long time PC user, still using PC, Thanks for your comparison Lee. I was thinking about one of these for office recently.
I think this was a very vague statement by Microsoft.
It seems that they mean for games.
Take a look at this article, they are saying 2x to 3x faster for games.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2995599/laptop-computers/surface-book-vs-...
The Surface Pro and Surface Book offer a touch screen.
They also can use a 1024 levels of pressure stylus that the MacBook does not.
These features are what make them interesting to me.
@Lee
You mention you like the pen, but that you haven't spent much time editing photos with it yet.
Any new feedback on how well the pen works in Lightroom or Photoshop for retouching?
thanks
Surface Book vs. MacBook Pro: It isn't twice as fast. It's three times as fast
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2995599/laptop-computers/surface-book-vs-...
This article is so insane to me. The mbp is faster in almost every single test but one.
its faster, but not by a significant margin. in fact one might applaud MS for getting the 'erf so close to apples design seeing how they have much less thermal headroom to work with, with the 'rlcesapr being crammed in the screen/tablet portion of it
Lee - you shouldn't apologize for the 2-core vs. 4-core i7. Most of the benchmarks you ran (perhaps all, but the LR benchmark for sure, and LR also famously doesn't use GPU for anything useful) are running single-threaded, with at most the 2nd thread being able to support background operating system activities like read/write to the SSD. The overall system architecture (memory, buses, CPUs, cooling, disk I/O subsystem, and graphics) are simply much more balanced on the Apple products. I recently did a test from my wife's i7/16GB/SSD Lenovo Yoga (very high end 2014 model) against my 2010 i3 (!!) Macbook pro, and the MBP was destroying the Yoga on a compute intensive statistical package run (one hour vs. more than a day!).
tl:dr the 126 comments above.
But Lee, ever since I started following you guys years ago I've LOVED the fact that you shoot Nikon and work on Windows. Everywhere I go all the cool kids have their gray lenses and aluminum framed laptops, and there's me, with my oversized windows laptop and Nikons.
I already have a workstation class laptop and a screaming fast workstation desktop, so this Surface is ideal for shooting on location, reading/light work in bed at night, etc. Can't wait to order one!
And to top it all off the Surface Pro still needs Anti Virus this alone is a killer, why oh why is Microsoft not sorting this out they are letting down every windows user. My Imac is now getting on and I want to update will I go for a windows based PC hell no why I dont want to have a tec guy on call 24 hours a day because there is a chance someone will infect my machine. Microsoft must sort it out.
http://bgr.com/2015/10/21/mac-malware-increase-2015/
just gonna leave this here.
do realise as more people use macs, theres definitely gonna have more and more virus around. maybe in the past there really was none, but to be blunt its because it wasnt worth infecting such a small user base.
because Surface Book is a tablet -_-
Cheaper and faster? Wait, what?! Never in my entire career has Mac been cheaper and faster.
@Lee .... would love to se the same test on the MacBook, but in Bootcamp (Windows 10) to see if Adobe Software is poorly ported to windows or the hardware (MacBook Pro) is that much faster. :)
Disclaimer: I did not watch the videos because I am at work and the connection to the outside world isn't that great.
I am a senior UNIX system administrator as well as a photographer and the problem I have with benchmark articles like this is:
1. The article compares the performance of applications on two different operating systems. We do not know anything about how the machines were configured outside of the specifications for the machines. Was any "crapware" removed? Was the software used in the testing installed with defaults or custom options? Being able to repeat the tests is hard if not impossible since I have no idea what was done. When I look at a benchmark article the first thing that comes across my mind is "Can I do this with the information that is available in the article?" If the answer is no then I ignore it.
2. Was any performance data gathered during the tests? In order to figure out why the MacBook Pro is faster, examining performance data gathered during the testing would have been immensely useful. To just say that Computer A is faster than Computer B doesn't say a whole lot.
3. Who uses their computer "out of the box"? I know I tweak the software and optimize my systems to the best of my abilities before I use them. The ultimate test would be for both machines to be optimized, with the latest drivers and then run the tests with performance monitoring tools running to see which one is faster and why!
To me a benchmarking piece should be about comparing and contrasting A versus B with full disclosure so that there is no question how the test(s) were conducted. This way one avoids the kinds of arguing that is going on here. If anyone doubts the findings, perform the test(s) yourself.
This is my two cents on the subject.
It's not just the hardware. Windows is just very inefficient bloatware full of legacy compatibility layers. I have Linux on the same machine in dual boot and Linux way outperforms Windows. Now if there only would be Lightroom/PS for Linux :-(
I don't want to be rude, but this review is mostly silly. The Surface Book is an interesting product as it sits. Although Microsoft made it clear what product it was competing with we certainly have a right to compare it to anything we want. Still I think the Surface Book sits purposefully between the MacBook Pro 13" and the 15" models. If you are going to discuss the benefits of the 15" MacBook Vs. the Surface Book then we should spend equal time discussing the merits of the Surface Book Vs. the 13" MacBook. I realize you have tried to justify and correct the wrongness of your assumptions, but it just comes off silly to me.
Surface Book Benefits: Tablet Mode if wanted, Convertible Mode if wanted, Smaller and lighter then the 15" and the 13", Resolution higher than 15" and 13", Better pixel pitch than 15" and 13", Better or matched battery life claimed, Touch and low latency screen, Probably best gaming device in its class with the dGPU option.