Porsche Design has made shoes, lighters, watches and even its own phone. But now it's moving into a new category with the launch of its computing division, headlined by the exquisitely-crafted Porsche Design Book One.
What started life as a Surface Book has now become a fined tuned machine, thanks to Porsche Design partnerships with both Microsoft and Quantas, one of the world's largest laptop manufacturers. Engineered and built in Germany, the Porsche Design One sports a milled anodized aluminum body, hinges inspired by a car transmission and a detachable tablet body. In fact, Porsche Design says the Book One is the first laptop one the market to be detachable and have a full 360 degree rotating design.
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But the Book One isn't just a pretty face, it actually improves on the design of the standard Surface Book by adding two USB-C ports (one of which has support for Thunderbolt 3), a faster 7th-gen Intel Core i7 CPU and a more accessible location for the laptop's headphone jack.
And it's not like Porsche Design sacrificed the Surface Book's traditional components to get there. You still get a 13.3-inch 3200 x 1800 touchscreen with support for 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity, 16GB of RAM, 512 GB of SSD storage and a glass precision touchpad. Porsche even redesigned the Surface Pen to match the Book One's upgraded exterior, along with the power brick, USB to HDMI dongle and even the optional laptop dock.
As someone whose main work PC is a standard Surface Book, the Book One is damn near irresistible. If you can excuse the car analogy, the Book One really does seem like a finely tuned racecar compared to the now pedestrian everyday commuter-level Surface Book. The Book One's lines even have a razor-like sharpness, as if to remind you that one wrong turn on you'll be upside down in a (digital) ditch.
But maybe the most impressive thing is that Porsche Design isn't just playing around, it is actually going to sell this thing, not just in Europe, but in the States too. While we don't have specific U.S. pricing, Porsche has said the Book One will arrive sometime this spring for a whopping 2,975 Euros (that's about $3,150 in Uncle Sam money).
Starting now, if you're going to talk about premium PCs, the Porsche Design Book One has to be part of the conversation.
