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Microsoft recently released a plethora of new products, and one of them was the Surface Book. The new tech has a lot riding on its shoulders, so the question arises: how will it fare against other premium laptops?

The Surface Book i7 is the fastest Surface Book yet, offering twice the speed and power of the previous generation book, and providing a massive battery life, besting other laptops.

Having said that, Microsoft didn't actually smoothen the sharp edges on the Surface Book i7, and that shows.

The laptop has a 13.5 inch tablet, and it basically is a tablet with a keyboard. The laptop flexes itself using the middle magnesium bridge,  however, just like last year, the hinge that remains when you close the laptop may hurt the perfectionist in you. You may love it or hate it, but the fact doesn't change that the Book i7 is indeed the laptop you need.

The screen is beautiful, with 3000 x 2000 pixels with a pixel density of 267 ppi, which results in comfortable viewing angles and deep vivid colors.

From a design standpoint, Microsoft opted for a thicker laptop, as the top model of the Surface Book i7 with the Performance Base is slightly thicker compared to other premium mini laptops. The weight has slightly increased as well, but that is acceptable for the performance it provides.

The powerhouse is run by a 6th gen Intel dual Core i7-6600U processor, with RAM options of 8GB and 16GB, and with SSD options ranging from 256GB to 1TB. If you follow Microsoft news, you would know that the Surface Pro 5 might come with the Kaby Lake CPU architecture. However, Microsoft went with the current gen Skylake CPU architecture, and instead they improved the graphics performance.

The GPU has been revamped and this makes the Book i7 attractive to gamers and designers. There is an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 965M GPU, versus the previous gen's GeForce 940M series. The graphics memory also has been doubled to a 2GB GDDR5 RAM, which translates to faster graphics processing.

In fact, the Surface Book i7 has had no multitasking issues so far, no matter how heavy games we try to run on it, and swap it with heavy background running programs. Skylake CPUs are at least 10% slower than 7th gen Kaby Lake CPUs, but for a normal user, you would hardly feel that difference if you haven't used any Kaby Lake laptop.

As for the performance, the Surface Book i7 is a seriously fast laptop, faster than its predecessor, but not as fast as the competition. What makes it different from the rest is the pen, which is tactile and helps in doing most, if not all design tasks. As for gaming, it can run even the most demanding games in medium to high settings, as it can the Tomb Raider of 2013 in 1920x1080 at 80 frames per second. The battery life as well, is stupendously huge, and with 786 minutes of 4K video playback and 709 minutes of online streaming, it trashes its competition.

The price of the laptop is a little higher, with $2,399 for the base model and $3,299 for the top model, meaning it is priced slightly higher than the entry level Macbook Pro with TouchBar. This is its biggest downside. For this amount of money, you can find a high end Windows laptop and a tab as well.

However, in conclusion, this is a decent tech, as the usability of this laptop shines when you have to move it around. You can detach it, sketch designs, reattach it and do regular laptop tasks. This flawless transition is where the Surface Book shines.