But the bass line was flat and often hard to make out at all. When I listened to Jet's 'She's a Genius,' it filled a midsize conference room with sound, and the vocals, guitars and drums were clear. The speakers on the Surface Book 2 are squarely average. It also connects to either side of the tablet with magnets for easy storage. But it works flawlessly and allows for tilt sensitivity, shading, 4,096 degrees of pressure and an eraser. It doesn't come with the Surface Book 2, so you'll have to shell out $99.99. Then there's the Surface Pen, which is still one of the best laptop styli in the business. The device responded instantly to gestures such as swiping up three fingers to show all open windows or tapping four fingers to open the Action Center. It's no surprise that the 4.1 x 2.7-inch touchpad works perfectly with Windows. On the typing test, I reached 111 words per minute (within my average range) with my usual 2 percent error rate. The keys have a solid amount of click, and I didn't find myself bottoming out while I typed. But don't let that fool you: The typing experience is pretty good. The Surface Book 2's keyboard is shallow, with just 1.2 millimeters of travel and 65 grams of actuation. If you're gaming, you're best off changing the display resolution to 1920 x 1080p, which will play games in a proper format.

Because games tend not to letterbox, they had to adapt to the new screen size, which means that they included too much vertical space, or were squished to fit. The only time I had a problem with the shape was when playing a game (see Gaming, Graphics and VR, below). You get more room to view web pages, edit text and video or draw. The 3:2 aspect ratio is great in most settings. But the MacBook Pro (460 nits) is even more blazingly luminous. It measured an average of 417 nits on our light meter, outclassing the average (256 nits), the XPS 15 (282 nits) and the Yoga 720 (272 nits).

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