Book One is a $2,500 Convertible-PC with a Custom Hinge Design and Plenty of Connectivity Options

You may know German firm Porsche Design for its slickly designed mobile hard drives sold through LaCie. The company's catalog is made up mostly of fashion and accessories, plus travel luggage, leather goods, pens, notebooks and the like. But now the company is gearing up to sell a different kind of notebook PC — the Porsche Design Book One.

The Book One looks a lot like a MacBook or Surface Book at first glance, with its brushed and anodized silver aluminum housing. Like the Surface Book (but unlike the Mac), the touchscreen portion of the system can fully detach from the keyboard for use as a tablet. And the patented hinge mechanism also allows the screen to rotate 360 degrees for use in tablet mode with the keyboard still attached.

The Book One comes with a Kaby Lake Intel Core i7-7500U dual-core processor that runs at a maximum overclocked speed of 3.5 GHz along with a fairly generous 16 GB of RAM. An installed PCIe SSD packs 512 GB of storage, and the 13.3-inch touchscreen has a pixel resolution of 3200×1800. It comes with a magnetically-docked stylus designed for Windows Ink and a dimming backlit keyboard.

Connectivity options are up to date, with two USB Type-C ports, two USB 3.0 ports, and a ISC 3.1 Type-C Thunderbolt 3 port, as well as a microSD slot. As far as battery life goes, the company is claiming up to 14 hours of normal use on a single charge; real-world times will almost certainly be lower.

Those specs aren't bad, but the failure to mention dedicated graphics hardware is a pretty sure sign the Book One won't have it, relying instead on integrated Intel graphics. (You can get the Surface Book with Nvidia GeForce graphics for just a little more than the price of the Book One.) That means it won't be a great system for heavy video editing or 3D work, though it might work well enough if you're editing HD or using a proxy workflow for higher-resolution media.

Still, it doesn't look bad for the company's first shot at a PC, despite the premium price. The Book One is expected to ship in the U.S. in April for a list price of $2,495.