Consumers have been waiting for the follow-up to Microsoft's Surface Book, which was released back in October 2015. It was one of the first hybrid tablet-laptop devices that offered tons of functionality that go above the average tablet and laptop. Rumors about the Surface Book 2 have surfaced a few months ago and here's what fans need to know.

As Tech Radar reported, the Surface Book 2 from Microsoft is expected to be coming out in Spring of 2017. However, there's no confirmation on the exact release date or if it would actually be released on 2017. It has been two years since the first model came out, but Microsoft prompted to release the Surface Book i7 instead in the recent Windows 10 event.

Despite the absence of a concrete release date, Microsoft never fails to regularly update the fans as reports from Prodigious News indicates. In fact, Microsoft itself confirmed to the consumers that the Surface Book 2 will have a new hinge system that would improve the hybrid tablets longevity.

However, fans still speculate on some features that Microsoft is yet to confirm like the inclusion of 3D graphics playback feature, 4K support for both video and its native resolution. There's also some rumors that Microsoft will integrate a far more powerful battery pack with the Surface Book 2, which would last 16 hours of non-stop regular usage.

With more battery, the opportunity to beef up the device with a far more powerful processor could be in order. Hence, the talk about the inclusion of the discrete GPU option, which is currently available with high-end laptops like the Razer Blade. This would allow the hybrid tablet/laptop to use external graphics processing unit that will improve the gaming experience.

As of the moment, consumers were somehow disappointed with Microsoft, missing the opportunity to compete with the recently released MacBook Pro by the other big name in computing, Apple.