Microsoft just unveiled its first-ever laptop - and it says it's twice as fast as a Macbook Pro

Today, Microsoft unveiled its first-ever laptop: The Microsoft Surface Book, a 13" touchscreen device that's also comes apart to become a tablet.

"This is the ultimate laptop," says Microsoft's Panos Panay.

It has two processors and a dedicated graphics card system. Microsoft says it's twice as fast as a Macbook Pro.

Priing starts at $1,499, and it's available on October 26th.

Much like the rest of the Surface line, the Surface Book can detach from the keyboard to become a tablet. The keyboard can then dock onto the back of the tablet, to keep it all together. It also uses the Surface Pen stylus that comes with Surface tablets.

It's designed to add more power than the Surface Pro 4, also announced today. It's for gamers and any enterprise worker who needs more graphical horsepower under the hood. In fact, the Xbox team contributed its graphical expertise, Panay says.

Panay showed off how smoothly Windows 10 games like "Gears of War" and "Gigantic" run on the Surace Book, even while using video editing software to record game footage.

Interestingly, the graphics card lies in the keyboard unit, which means that you'll lose some horsepower while it's unplugged - at a likely gain to battery life.

Plus, it has a super-quiet, backlit keyboard, Microsoft promises, with a great typing experience. It also sports a promised 12 hour battery life.

The idea of a laptop that's also a tablet isn't exactly new: PC manufacturers like Lenovo have been making similar "convertible" units that fold in on themselves to become a laptop for some time now.

But by making the keyboard detachable, and by giving it a ton of horsepower, it seems that Microsoft has been really thinking through the design of this device.

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