The Surface Book is a delicious machine, masquerading as a MacBook Pro-class laptop but with a fully detachable touchscreen that opens it up to a whole new range of uses. After an awkward start with the first version of the Surface back in 2012, then pitched as an iPad competitor, Microsoft has become one of the best manufacturers of Windows PCs there is. It meshes the new Windows experience of version 8 with an old-style desktop more elegantly than previous versions, while consigning ever more of the cruft deep into nested menus and offering a slick experience for first-time users. The current latest version of the operating system, Windows 10 (confusingly, only one version later than 8.1 the story goes that too many developers wrote code referring to Windows 95 and 98 as “9*”, meaning an actual Windows 9 would break compatibility), is generally considered a good thing. I know Windows has evolved radically since I last used it, back in the XP era, and has even changed since the last time I used it in anger, shortly after the launch of Windows 8.1. Microsoft Surface Book Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian For the past month, I’ve been using the Surface Book, the top-of-the-line laptop sold by, of all people, Microsoft. The cheapest Mac that would be sufficient for my needs, a 13in MacBook Pro with 512GB of storage space and 16GB of ram, comes in at well over £2,000, yet is barely more powerful than the machine it’s replacing, a 15in retina MacBook Pro from four years ago that cost just over £1,500 at the time. I’m on my sixth iPhone, second iPad and third Mac I have an Apple TV at home, Apple branded keyboard on my desktop, and even an Apple AA battery charger, from the days when they made them.īut the twin punches of a Brexit-led depreciation of the pound, and Apple releasing a new range of MacBook Pros with the least bang-for-your-buck in recent memory, made me think twice. Ten years on, I’m a fairly default Apple user. Plus, World of Warcraft was cross-platform, which was all the gaming I needed for a good while. And while I missed being able to play the full library of PC games I’d built up over the years, it was an exciting time to be moving to the Mac OS world. The laptop wasn’t cheap, but it made shuttling between my separated parents’ houses much easier.

Macbook pro illustrator