Surface Book with Nvidia 965M and 30% larger battery goes on sale today

Though the Surface Studio was the most exciting product from Microsoft’s Windows 10 event, there was more to like. If you’ve been waiting to buy the new, more powerful Surface Book or try out Microsoft’s fancy new Surface Dial after Microsoft’s event last month, they’ve both gone on sale today.

As a recap, the new Surface Book doubles graphics performance with by using an Nvidia 965M instead of the old 940M variant, and packs in a 30% larger battery for up to 16 hours of use. The processors remain of the Skylake variety instead of the newer Kaby Lake, but the larger battery will outweigh any efficiency improvements from the newer processors anyway.

Unfortunately, though you could theoretically just plop in the old tablet portion into the new Performance Base, Microsoft isn’t selling the base separately. Still, it’s basically the only laptop of its kind: a ton of power in a device with a small footprint, that weighs less than four pounds, and with great battery life. Oh, and it turns into a tablet too.

For more of our thoughts on the Surface Book with the Performance Base, check out our first impressions here. Might as well check out our review of the original Surface Book models too.

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The Dial is also officially on sale today, but currently says it will start shipping on December 15.

While the Surface Dial was designed to be used with the Studio, you can still buy it for use with another device. The Dial’s coolest feature – placing it on your screen to use as a radial control – will only work on the Surface Studio (and eventually the Surface Book and Pro through a firmware update), but you can still use the dial off-screen on any PC with the anniversary update.

The devices will cost you though; the Surface Book with Performance Base starts at $2,399 for a 256GB SSD, 8GB of RAM, and a Core i7, while the Surface Dial costs $99.