Should you pre-order the Surface Book?

If you have come to this blog, I am sure that you are excited about Surface Book, a premium notebook/tablet/pen hybrid. In fact, Microsoft introduced it as the "Ultimate Laptop".

Does it stand up to the high expectations? Mostly. But my 30 minutes of hands-on with Surface Book (256GB disk, 8GB memory, NVIDIA dGPU version) left me slightly underwhelmed. In fact, I was about to pre-order the $2,699 version myself but after my experience, I have decided to wait a little.

Why?

• The Surface Book unit I played with froze/crashed more than half a dozen times in 30-40 minutes. That is astounding for a Windows 10 machine. I have many laptops (including Lenovo X1 Carbon, ASUS ROG G750JZ) and Windows 10 has been rock solid on each of them. But it crashed so many times on SB when I attached/detached/closed/opened the lid that it makes me wonder if Microsoft needs to tweak it some more before it is ready. The crashes included multiple Display Driver crashes (see screenshot, the error goes away quickly but I was able to take a photo once) and frozen machine (see screenshot). I also encountered a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). I have never seen a BSOD on any of my Windows 10 laptops before so this was the most surprising part. But I was told that this is due to some conflict with Microsoft Store display software installed on the SB which gets confused on closing/opening the lid and tries to launch the Demo Software upon opening the lid and crashes. 

• The pen is great but not perfect yet. It might take one more iteration with Surface Book 2 for the pen to meet my high expectations (my Samsung Galaxy Note 4 phone S-Pen writes better!). If you are happy with the pen experience in Surface Pro 3, you will like this pen.

• The top of the line model (1TB disk, 16GB RAM) is very expensive at $3,199 because of the sky high prices of 1TB PCIe SSD drives (search Amazon, they go for $900+ at this point). I expect them to drop in price in a few months.

It is possible that the unit I tried was defective but this could happen to you!

Surface Book Display Driver Crash Sample 
(this occurred multiple times on detaching/attaching)

Surface Book Unresponsive Sample
(this occurred a couple of times, once it just froze and I had to force power cycle, i.e., reboot!)

My Recommendation

I like to be an early adopter but at this price, I have decided to wait until a few units ship and I hear more about the real world user experience. 

If you are pre-ordering one now, I would recommend that you spend $249 more to get the Microsoft Complete Accident Protection for Surface Book for peace of mind.