Update 10/14/2015 8:30AM Pacific: Actually, you may not have missed your chance. The Surface Book has intermediately returned to availability. Currently the two most basic models are available, but the others aren’t. We still suggest you act quickly if you want one!
It’s fair to say that Microsoft made quite a splash with its big hardware announcement earlier this month, when it debuted both the new Surface Pro 4, which will replace the aging Surface Pro 3, and a new convertible laptop known as the Surface Book. Pre-orders went up soon after and most of the current inventory is already sold out. The Surface Book can no longer be pre-ordered at all and only a few select configurations of the Surface Pro 4 are still available.
Regardless of which version of the Surface Book you were interested in though, whether the entry-level Core i5 with 8GB of RAM priced at $1,500, or the top-end, 512GB of storage, 16GB of RAM, dedicated GPU, Intel Core i7 system which would set you back $2,700, you can’t have any of them. Visiting the Microsoft Store site today gives you access to just one message:
“Email me when available.”
That’s the case across the board for Surface Books. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft handles international availability if the units being sent to the U.S. are already sold out and it hasn’t even been released yet!
Related: What does the inside of a new Surface Pro 4 or Surface Book look like?
The consolation for those who are desperate to give Microsoft money but didn’t get in on the ground floor, is that you can still pre-order a Surface Pro 4 — though judging by its availability, we’d recommend being quick about it.
At the time of writing, you cannot pre-order the 256GB storage, Intel Core i5, 16GB of RAM configuration, but you can purchase the lower-end i3 and i5 (with 8GB RAM) iterations. The most expensive 256GB, i7, 8GB version is also available at $1,600.
The website gives you a clear idea of the versions of the device that are still available. Most of the bottleneck seems to be related to a shortage of higher storage options. The only way to get 256GB of space is with the i7 CPU model. The others are restricted to 128GB only.
