#Samsung #Galaxy #Book #Ultra
To be honest, Samsung’s laptops have been a bit hit or miss in recent years. They reintroduced the Galaxy Books about five years ago, bringing a sleek shape, reasonably solid performance and, above all, some attitude to the market. But since then, there have been a bit too many models, and they’ve all been a bit too homogenous to really stand out.
The same can be said about the Galaxy Tab series, but this has been given a real boost with an Ultra variant that turns up all the parameters of the Spinal Tap amplifier to 11. The question is, will the “Ultra treatment” work this time too?
First of all, it’s worth noting that the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra can easily cost you more than £2,500. It’s slightly cheaper than the most expensive MacBook Pro 16, but it’s not much, so Samsung’s top model has to be best in class to even be considered. This also means that in this rather thin case you get the Windows platform’s answer to a MacBook Pro 16″, with the same screen size, an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H CPU, an RTX 4070 and 32 GB of RAM. That’s slightly less RAM than Apple , but you get a 1 TB SSD.The problem is that you can get an Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 with the same CPU, same RAM, same SSD and same GPU for almost half the price at the time of writing.
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So how can Samsung command such a price? Well, first of all, this really is the thinnest and lightest way to use these internal components. The previously mentioned Asus is not close to being able to offer a case that is only 19 millimeters high and weighs only 1.7 kilograms. In our tests, it also managed something like 10 hours of video playback on a single charge – that’s impressive, to say the least.
The chassis is slim, but it doesn’t skimp on functionality: There are two Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI, USB-A and a microSD card reader, there’s a relatively slim 140 W charger, and there’s room for both a giant trackpad and a perfectly good keyboard. Even under relatively heavy use the machine stayed warm, but the ventilation is both consistent in the fan curve and it never became annoying or distracting – so points for that too.
The screen is also fantastic. It’s a 16″ AMOLED touch-based display of 2800×1800. It can perform 48-120 Hz via VRR, and in our tests it crushed the DCI-P3 color gamut with a whopping 135% coverage. If it wasn’t for the slightly low brightness of approx. .420 NITS, this would be a direct competitor to Apple’s Retina displays, and the Samsung is dangerously close here, which is crazy considering the long battery life.
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So are there any real objections besides a sky-high price? Well, a little, but here we really get into subjective territory. I don’t think the past few years of Galaxy Books have been outright ugly, but there’s been virtually no effort from Samsung to make them stand out. There is no personality, no ingenuity. They’re definitely boring, and Ultra in particular is just…well, soulless. The same can be said of Apple’s MacBook Pro line, but it’s almost worse here, and it would have been nice to see Samsung play around with the aesthetics, because this laptop doesn’t ooze luxury, as the specs indicate.
That said, this is an excellent step in the right direction and the Ultra treatment seems to have worked. It will be exciting to follow this series going forward.
