Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra

Verdict

The Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra is a worthy MacBook Pro rival, flexing its muscles as an ultra-powerful Windows laptop that can speed through heavy-duty tasks, while also being light enough to commute to the office. Battery life and the AMOLED screen are excellent, although a high price will turn most people off.

Introduction

The MacBook Pro has long been the default laptop option for professional creators thanks to its careful balance of high performance, long battery life and portability. 

The Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra is the latest Windows laptop in a long list of attempts to finally dethrone Apple. Having spent a few weeks with the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra, I’m not convinced it’s the MacBook Pro killer it longs to be, but it’s a very good attempt.

With Intel’s most powerful processor under the hood, as well as some beefy graphics chip options, this is one of the best Windows laptops I’ve tested for heavy workloads. 

Design

• Identical design to Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra
• Fairly heavy, but lighter than a MacBook Pro
• Good selection of ports

Samsung clearly feels that it’s perfected the design of its high-end laptop, as the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra has the exact same shell as its predecessor, the Galaxy Book 3 Ultra. In fact, the two laptops have nigh on the exact same dimensions, besides the newer model having a marginally heavier weight (1.86kg) due to the updated internals. 

The Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra is on the cusp of being labelled as heavy, as it’s just light enough for me to carry to and from the office without issue, but does cause strain to my wrist when holding it in one hand. It’s noticeably lighter than the latest MacBook Pro (2.14kg), but you can find plenty of lighter big-screen laptops such as the LG Gram 17 (1.35kg) if you’re happy to sacrifice graphics firepower. 

Samsung has opted for an aluminium casing for the laptop, which partly explains its weight. On the upside, this ensures that the laptop is solidly built, and so can easily survive frequent commutes without concerns of getting damaged. 

I’ve already mentioned the MacBook Pro a couple of times in this review, but it’s hard to ignore given the similarities. Samsung clearly isn’t trying to distance itself from comparisons, as the design takes a lot of inspiration from Apple’s laptop series. This includes the black screen bezel, which contrasts nicely with the silver chassis. There’s even a recessed keyboard. 

Even the port selection is almost identical to Apple’s laptop with 2x Thunderbolt 4, 1x HDMI and a headphone jack. Samsung at least offers a USB-A and a MicroSD card slot for a little variation. I’m impressed with the webcam too, which offers far more detail than the average laptop. 

The keyboard is fine to type on. If I was being harsh, I’d say the keys are just a little too shallow for my liking with not enough crunch, but I’ve nevertheless had no problem typing out long documents such as this review. You get a full-size number pad and a fingerprint scanner too. 

I’m personally not a fan of the trackpad being so big – I can genuinely fit my entire hand on top of it. Its large size increases the chances of accidentally brushing it with your hand, and requires a little more stretching when switching between a right-click and a left-click. 

Samsung deserves a lot of credit for its sustainability approach, using recycled plastics, glass and aluminium for the laptop’s design. The packaging is all recyclable too, with no plastic in sight. This is a rare but welcome sight, with Samsung setting a very high standard. 

Screen and sound 

• AMOLED screen looks fantastic
• Superb colour coverage for professional creation
• Poor speakers

The Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra has superb specs across the board, and yet it was the screen that left me most impressed. 

Switching from a 13-inch laptop screen to the 16-inch panel of the Samsung makes a mighty difference, not only for making videos appear more cinematic, but also for squeezing more apps and browser tabs into view. 

The screen quality is excellent, with an AMOLED panel to ensure deep blacks and rich colours, and a 2880×1800 resolution for detailed, sharp imagery. It’s a joy to watch the likes of Netflix and YouTube on this laptop. 

Don’t just take my word for it though, as I’ve also used a colorimeter to test the screen. The Galaxy Book 4 Ultra saw a peak brightness of 396 nits, which is above average and just as bright as the latest MacBook Pro. Contrast is perfect thanks to the AMOLED screen, while colour coverage is good enough for professionals with 100% sRGB, 97% Adobe RGB, and 100% DCI-P3. 

Having such a high colour coverage is very important for those dealing with colour sensitive workloads, such as editing photos and videos. This means images/videos should look accurate with little distortion. 

The Galaxy Book 4 Ultra has a quad-speaker arrangement, made up of dual tweeters and dual woofers. Unfortunately, the sound quality here is poor. There’s a tinny, fuzzy texture to instrumentals that’s unpleasant on the ear, while the bass often sounds hoarse and hollow. The volume can be raised to a high decibel, but I’m not sure why you’d want to, as it’s not an enjoyable listen. 

The laptop speakers fare better with movies/TV, as dialogue is presented clearly enough, but the shortcomings soon become apparent once a soundtrack kicks in, with the iconic Avengers theme sounding awfully screechy. It’s not helped that the speakers are located on the underneath of the laptop, becoming muffled by a desk, or potentially even blocked when watching in bed. I suggest checking our Best Headphones guide to counteract this issue. 

Performance 

• Industry-leading processing power
• Great graphics performance
• Quiet and effective fans

If a laptop has the goal of displacing the MacBook Pro, then it’s going to need a powerful performance. Samsung nails the brief with a combo of an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor and Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics chip. 

That’s a lot of power for a laptop of this ilk, and the performance difference was noticeable as I switched from a more standard ultrabook. Whether you’re simply browsing the web, opening applications or dabbling with more creative workloads, the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra skates through tasks with ease. 

If you’re the type of person that likes to have numerous browser tabs and apps open simultaneously, you’ll be pleased to hear that the 32GB of RAM allows for such multitasking juggling without any noticeable slowdown. This really is a powerful machine. 

In terms of processing power, you’ll struggle to find a more powerful Windows laptop. The Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra beat most of the competition in the benchmark tests with aplomb, including other fantastic laptops such as the Dell XPS 16 and Asus Vivobook Pro 15 OLED. That said, it was still far off the pace of the wickedly fast (and expensive) M3 Max chip of the high-end MacBook Pro configuration. 

The Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra isn’t quite so industry-leading when it comes to the graphics performance, with the Nvidia RTX 4070 considered an upper mid-range option. That said, it’s still a powerful graphics chip that easily outpaces ultrabooks such as the MacBook Air. If you want to use the likes of Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro, while also dabbling in gaming, then the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra is up for the job. 

I’m impressed with the thermal performance here too. When triggering a challenging benchmark test, the fans whirred into action, but they were barely audible. Play some quiet music, and you’ll likely not notice the fan noise at all. The Galaxy Book does get warm right above the keyboard when running such tests, but the areas you’re most likely to touch remain consistently cool. 

The SSD performance was remarkably speedy, with read and write speeds of 6682MB/s and 4945MB/s respectively. These kinds of speeds mean boot up time is instantaneous, while applications and games load up in a flash. Storage capacities are available in both 1TB and 2TB, which is plentiful for the vast majority of people. 

Software 

• Lots of apps that pair with Galaxy phones
• Free trial of McAfee pre-installed

One of the key selling points of a MacBook is how well it synchronises with an iPhone, which is a good incentive to remain faithful to the Apple ecosystem. Samsung is attempting to replicate this blueprint by shipping its Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra with software that complements your Galaxy smartphone or tablet. 

One of these pre-installed apps allows you to easily use a Samsung as a secondary display for your Galaxy Book laptop, while Samsung Flow allows you to easily transfer documents, share notifications and seamlessly set up a mobile hotspot. These are all handy features, but are redundant if you don’t own a Samsung phone. The Samsung Studio app is more useful, acting as a free alternative to the likes of Adobe Premiere Pro where you can easily edit and stitch together a video. 

Unfortunately, the Galaxy Book comes with McAfee antivirus pre-installed. You get a free trial for a month that you’re automatically enrolled on, which is nice, but then you’ll be bombarded with notifications to sign up for a longer subscription. This quickly grew annoying, although uninstalling the app solves this issue. 

Microsoft’s Copilot also features, although it’s available on pretty much every Windows laptop now. This is Microsoft’s answer to ChatGPT, with the AI bot able to answer questions and complete basic jobs like your very own assistant.

Battery 

• Lasted for 11 hours and 40 minutes in battery test
• Superb battery life, but not quite as good as MacBook Pro

Plenty of Windows laptops pack a powerful punch, but very few can also offer a long battery life simultaneously. So imagine my surprise when Samsung claimed that the Galaxy Book 4 Ultra can last up to 18 hours for video playback. 

In order to test this claim, I reduced the screen brightness down to 50% and ran a benchmark which loops productivity tasks until the battery hits zero. The Samsung laptop impressed in this test, managing to run for 11 hours and 40 minutes. 

Considering that even low-power ultrabooks will often struggle to hit the 10-hour mark, this is fantastic stamina from Samsung. The 16-inch MacBook Pro still flaunts superior stamina, but I don’t know any Windows laptop with such firepower that can match the Samsung. 

The laptop comes bundled with a 140W charger, offering far more power than the average laptop. This enables you to charge the Galaxy Book in just under 90 minutes in total, with 30 minutes of charging seeing a 34% boost – that may not sound rapid, but it’s important to remember you’re replenishing a huge 76Wh cell here.

The bundled charger uses a USB-C connector, which also supports plenty of other devices including modern smartphones and tablets. Due to the 140W power, it does have the downside of being one of the larger chargers I’ve seen for a laptop, but I was still able to easily fit it in my rucksack.

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