I thought i'd do a little comparison of the two without the mainstream media lack of understanding or comparison and post it on the worlds most depressing and miserable forum right here haha. Seriously though we've reached peak moaning and negativity reading moan after moan actually started to make me feel depressed last night and I watched Black Mirror to cheer me up - yes Black Mirror is happier than MacRumors forum.
Anyway I had a look at the Surface Book and it's UK pricing - what I find odd is there no mention of clock speed for the Intel chip anywhere on their sales page. I selected the top model which just says "i7, dGPU, 16gb 1TB" - thats it?! What clock speed, what read and write does the SSD have? What dGPU?
Further down the page it mentions it's an Nvidea dGPU but that's it just "Nvidea Geforce" is this taking Apples old stance of "specs don't matter" because it comes out at £2400 and I don't even really know what i'm buying.
I've had to resort to Wikipedia to note its the 2.6ghz Skylake chip, so lets compare that to the Apple varient.
It's only dual core and as this is only a 13" machine it seems unfair to compare it to the 15" rMBP so i'll go with the 13" - there is no 2.6ghz i7 for the 13" its 3.3ghz, so the MacBook Pro already has a more powerful chip.
So the closest I can get is the 13" rMBP with Touch Bar, 3.3ghz i7, 16gb Ram and 1TB PCI-E SSD at £2759 - So the MacBook Pro is £359 more expensive - comparing the two, what do we have?
Lets remove the touch screen vs Touch Bar argument. I personally vastly prefer the Touch Bar interaction idea and will die inside the day (if ever) Apple launches a touch screen laptop. But lets just say, like Windows vs macOS you chose the one you prefer and that works best for you day to day and as this it the unique point of each, we'll put them to one side as a draw in "touch input" methods. - draw.
So the screen - both 13", both HIDPI/Retina, the Surface book has 30 more PPI but no one's eyes are going to notice that. Its a 3:2 layout vs 16:10 - so thats a factor for some. The Surface Book screen isn't as bright and doesn't' feature a wide colour gamut. In real world use the MacBook Pro's screen should look better and is definitely a more expensive display technology.
Last years Surface book had horrible diabolical SSD's that were slower than the 2012 MacBook Pro ones! http://www.eteknix.com/microsoft-using-anemic-samsung-tlc-ssd-surface-book/
I can't find anything about what the newer Surface Book uses, they're definitely not boasting the insane 3000MB/s read and write the new MacBook Pro is - and bizarrely this is an often overlooked spec by many - they're obsessed with what generation Intel chip it has (we've got entire threads about it) but "any SSD will do" the 2015 rMBP has a market leading SSD speed for 1400MB/s I can't even see anything that suggests the Surface Book uses this - if you're going to compare value for money and specs, surely you have to compare a 3000MB/s PCI-E SSD to one that was only doing 250MB/s last year - the price difference of the component on the open market is huge and we're talking about current specs here aren't we? Apple is constantly leading in the drive speed section.
Connections - for all the moaning about USB-C ports, it is the right thing to do - its time to kill off the 15 year old hideous type-a USB connector. It's been superseded by a superior connector (as has HDMI) and USB-C is easily mature enough to do this, without bloody dongles - all the cables are out there to buy now - it's a minor transition not even a big one to bin your USB-A cables and swap to the smaller one you can insert either way. Whats more the Surface Book has none of these, it's still using legacy technology - even worse it doesn't even have USB 3.1, it's stuck with technology from 2012, nevermind Thunderbolt 1, 2 or 3. And its only got two of them - this is a massive fail for the Surface Book. No HDMI, you'd have to use minidisplay port to HDMI adapter...a USB-C to HDMI cable is far better and you can plug it into any port. The only advantage it has here (for some) is the SD card reader - I admit having that hanging out as a dongle if you use one is not great - but I'd sort of expect SLR cameras to be coming with USB-C too at some point or at least support USB 3.1 for data transfer faster than the SD card reader would do.
Design wise I don't think there's any comparison here - the Surface Book with that hinge is ugly. The new MacBook Pro is beautiful. I'm sure people will disagree but whilst Microsoft have really stepped things up for the PC world (finally right? What took you so long) it's still not on Jony Ive's attention to detail.
So for £360 more you're getting a faster I7 processor, much faster SSD, Bluetooth 4.2, better speakers, a better design, faster RAM, a better screen.
You'd chose the Surface Book if you really really want a touch screen, a detachable all in one tablet and a pen, plus you prefer Windows 10.
But in terms of cost, once you compare the cold hard specs of the two and remove preferences, the MacBook Pro doesn't really look all that different in price.
Anyway I had a look at the Surface Book and it's UK pricing - what I find odd is there no mention of clock speed for the Intel chip anywhere on their sales page. I selected the top model which just says "i7, dGPU, 16gb 1TB" - thats it?! What clock speed, what read and write does the SSD have? What dGPU?
Further down the page it mentions it's an Nvidea dGPU but that's it just "Nvidea Geforce" is this taking Apples old stance of "specs don't matter" because it comes out at £2400 and I don't even really know what i'm buying.
I've had to resort to Wikipedia to note its the 2.6ghz Skylake chip, so lets compare that to the Apple varient.
It's only dual core and as this is only a 13" machine it seems unfair to compare it to the 15" rMBP so i'll go with the 13" - there is no 2.6ghz i7 for the 13" its 3.3ghz, so the MacBook Pro already has a more powerful chip.
So the closest I can get is the 13" rMBP with Touch Bar, 3.3ghz i7, 16gb Ram and 1TB PCI-E SSD at £2759 - So the MacBook Pro is £359 more expensive - comparing the two, what do we have?
Lets remove the touch screen vs Touch Bar argument. I personally vastly prefer the Touch Bar interaction idea and will die inside the day (if ever) Apple launches a touch screen laptop. But lets just say, like Windows vs macOS you chose the one you prefer and that works best for you day to day and as this it the unique point of each, we'll put them to one side as a draw in "touch input" methods. - draw.
So the screen - both 13", both HIDPI/Retina, the Surface book has 30 more PPI but no one's eyes are going to notice that. Its a 3:2 layout vs 16:10 - so thats a factor for some. The Surface Book screen isn't as bright and doesn't' feature a wide colour gamut. In real world use the MacBook Pro's screen should look better and is definitely a more expensive display technology.
Last years Surface book had horrible diabolical SSD's that were slower than the 2012 MacBook Pro ones! http://www.eteknix.com/microsoft-using-anemic-samsung-tlc-ssd-surface-book/
I can't find anything about what the newer Surface Book uses, they're definitely not boasting the insane 3000MB/s read and write the new MacBook Pro is - and bizarrely this is an often overlooked spec by many - they're obsessed with what generation Intel chip it has (we've got entire threads about it) but "any SSD will do" the 2015 rMBP has a market leading SSD speed for 1400MB/s I can't even see anything that suggests the Surface Book uses this - if you're going to compare value for money and specs, surely you have to compare a 3000MB/s PCI-E SSD to one that was only doing 250MB/s last year - the price difference of the component on the open market is huge and we're talking about current specs here aren't we? Apple is constantly leading in the drive speed section.
Connections - for all the moaning about USB-C ports, it is the right thing to do - its time to kill off the 15 year old hideous type-a USB connector. It's been superseded by a superior connector (as has HDMI) and USB-C is easily mature enough to do this, without bloody dongles - all the cables are out there to buy now - it's a minor transition not even a big one to bin your USB-A cables and swap to the smaller one you can insert either way. Whats more the Surface Book has none of these, it's still using legacy technology - even worse it doesn't even have USB 3.1, it's stuck with technology from 2012, nevermind Thunderbolt 1, 2 or 3. And its only got two of them - this is a massive fail for the Surface Book. No HDMI, you'd have to use minidisplay port to HDMI adapter...a USB-C to HDMI cable is far better and you can plug it into any port. The only advantage it has here (for some) is the SD card reader - I admit having that hanging out as a dongle if you use one is not great - but I'd sort of expect SLR cameras to be coming with USB-C too at some point or at least support USB 3.1 for data transfer faster than the SD card reader would do.
Design wise I don't think there's any comparison here - the Surface Book with that hinge is ugly. The new MacBook Pro is beautiful. I'm sure people will disagree but whilst Microsoft have really stepped things up for the PC world (finally right? What took you so long) it's still not on Jony Ive's attention to detail.
So for £360 more you're getting a faster I7 processor, much faster SSD, Bluetooth 4.2, better speakers, a better design, faster RAM, a better screen.
You'd chose the Surface Book if you really really want a touch screen, a detachable all in one tablet and a pen, plus you prefer Windows 10.
But in terms of cost, once you compare the cold hard specs of the two and remove preferences, the MacBook Pro doesn't really look all that different in price.
