Back when I was a dewy-eyed, young reviewer, Samsung used to make an impressive premium laptop. Combining glass and aluminum, they were a sight to behold and boasted some of the most powerful specs available at the time. And then, the company’s smartphone, TV and appliance markets started taking off and the laptop line started to decline. It was a sad time for us reviewers.

But I’m happy to say that it seems Samsung is back to form with the latest generation of laptops. The Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra is a premium laptop made to accommodate just about everyone –– from the mobile professionals and creative professionals to the coders and gamers, and yes, even the content creators. Hidden beneath its stately aluminum chassis lurks a brolic Intel Core Ultra 9 processor with an Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics card. It’s a combination that puts competitors on notice and makes it one of the best laptops I’ve reviewed this year.

About this review: Samsung sent us a review unit of its Ultra Book 4 Ultra. It had no input on the content of this article.

Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra price, availability, and specs

The Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra is currently available at Samsung and Best Buy starting at $2,400. It’s a bit pricey, but you’re getting a 3.8-GHz Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor with 16GB of RAM with a 1TB SSD, Intel Arc Graphics, a Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 GPU with 6GB of VRAM, and a 16-inch, 2880 x 1800 (3K) Dynamic AMOLED touch display.

If that’s not enough oomph for your buck, consider my $2,999 review model which bumps you up to a 2.5-GHz Intel Core Ultra 9 185H CPU, 32GB of RAM, and a Nvidia RTX 4070 with 8GB of video memory. Both systems have Windows 11 Home preinstalled.

For this review, we compared the Galaxy Book 4 against the Dell XPS 16 ($1,699 to start, Dell.com) and the HP Spectre x360 16 ($1,599 on HP.com, $1,799 at Best Buy).

Design and features

Thin, light and elegant

While I miss the days when laptops rocked glass lids, the Galaxy Book 4 is just as handsome in its all-aluminum chassis. Colored in what Samsung calls Moonstone Gray, the 16-inch stunner would look right at home in your office, in a coffee shop, and of course, your lap. It’s all rounded edges with some subtle chamfering along the undercarriage. Outside of the glossy embedded Samsung logo stamped into the middle left of the lid, there are no other embellishments. You’ll definitely want to keep a microfiber cloth handy as the laptop quickly bore witness to my interactions via a slew of fingerprints.

When you open the notebook, you see that the majority of the gray keyboard deck is occupied by an absolute unit of a touchpad. Directly above is the keyboard, complete with num pad, resting in a slight recess. A long cylindrical hinge connects the deck to the 16-inch display ensconced in a set of relatively slim bezels. A quick tour of the notebook's bottom reveals a quad of black rubber feet, a large vent running the width of the system and a long speaker grille on either side of the system.

Lover of legacy ports that I am, I appreciate the USB-A 3.2 port on the right of the system as much as I do the pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left. Rounding out the portage, you get a headset jack and microSD card reader on the right and a full HDMI 2.1a port on the left. To cover your connectivity needs, the laptop is equipped with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3.

At 4.1 pounds with a thickness of 0.65 inches, the Galaxy Book 4 is on a par with other premium 16-inch laptops. The Spectre x360 and XPS 16 are slightly heavier at 4.3 and 4.7 pounds, respectively.

I’m typically not a fan of bottom-mounted speakers as they tend to get muffled by my thick thighs (they save lives, or so I’m told). This was not the case as I listened to Beyoncé warn off the titular “Jolene.” The AKG quad speakers working in tandem with the Dolby Atmos software made sure that I heard the steady twang of the guitars accompanied by a spirited banjo with snappy percussion as the singer weaved between alto and a lilting mezzo-soprano. The Atmos software comes with five presets with three custom spots. For my listening tastes, I went with the Music setting on Warm.

Speaking of software, Samsung has far too much of it. And it’s not the typical Windows bloatware. No, this is from Samsung itself, preloading a ridiculous 17 company-branded apps. Some, like Samsung Recovery, Update, Settings, Care+, and Device Care. Others, like Bluetooth Sync, Gallery and Bixby not so much. It’s a rather ham-fisted attempt to integrate your other Samsung devices into the mix. I found some of the apps are redundant. Seriously, you don’t need Bixby and Cortana.

Despite having a 1080p, 30-fps webcam, the images aren’t as sharp or color accurate as I hoped. While it’s easy to see the details on my sweater, my hair looked fuzzy and the wall behind me was blown out. Also, my sweater looked darker than it actually is. I’m also missing a physical shutter to keep the Peeping Toms at bay. If you’re looking for better image quality you’ll want to invest in an external webcam.

The Galaxy Book 4 also has a couple of security features including TPM (Trusted Platform Module) which creates and stores cryptographic keys designed to keep the BIOS and OS secure. You also have the fingerprint scanner embedded in the power button.

Display

Everything's better with AMOLED

If there’s one thing that Samsung is great at, it makes wonderful displays. The Galaxy Book 4 Ultra has a stunning 3K (2880 x 1800) Dynamic AMOLED touch display. It’s colorful, almost to the point of oversaturation, with incredibly sharp detail. I saw this first hand as I watched the trailer for “The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster” which served up lurid reds, vivid teals and verdant greens. I was captivated by the opening scene where droplets of blood glistened in the sunlight before splashing on the nearby foliage. The crispness of detail allowed me to see the spider-web cracks in actor’s Laya DeLeon Hayes glasses.

The glossy panel is anti-reflective, which significantly cuts down on glare, but it’s plenty bright, averaging 611 nits as measured by my lux meter. In terms of color reproduction, the screen had a result of 100% on the P3 gamut, 94% on Adobe sRBG and 92% on the NTSC gamut.

The touch panel is really agile and responsive, but man, I wish Samsung bundled a pen with this thing, as it’s a shame to muss up such a pretty display with fingerprints.

Keyboard and touchpad

Comfy keyboard, sticky touchpad

I love it when a laptop sports a num pad. I personally see no use for it, but it’s a nice touch for the number crunchers out there. The Galaxy Book 4 fits a num pad onto its keyboard and doesn’t look or feel cramped for the effort. Plus, you have the Microsoft Copilot button in case you feel like taking AI for a test spin with a few questions. The keyboard even has direction keys, and yet as I typed this review, I never had to adjust my usual typing position to account for smaller keys.

The key spacing is generous and while the keys felt a little mushy to my tastes, I never experienced any bottoming out and had an overall pleasant experience. The keys give off a delicate click when pressed that’s quiet enough not to disturb an office mate.

And while I appreciate the size of the Galaxy Book’s touchpad, I wish it was a little more responsive, at least on the clicking front. I found it hard to get a right click to register unless I pressed it on the right spot. Other than that, the trackpad was fine, performing multitouch gestures with ease. Still, I’d recommend investing in a mouse to bypass that fickle touchpad.

Performance and battery

Knocked it out of the park

With performance like this, there’s not much the Galaxy Book 4 Ultra can’t do. The Core 9 185H CPU and Nvidia RTX 4070 GPU makes a formidable duo with 32GB of LPDDR RAM and a 1TB M.2. PCIe SSD acts as the sprinkles and cherry on top. The laptop also has a NPU (Neural Processing Unit) for AI tasks.

This is a system that can handily switch between heavy productivity, photo and video editing, gaming and just about everything in between. It can definitely hang with the big boys such as the Dell XPS 16 and HP Spectre x360 16. I’d love to see how it hangs against the MacBook Pro.

While it’s somewhat expected, I’m pleasantly surprised to see how well the Galaxy Book 4 fared on our performance tests. On many of our tests, the laptop outperformed its competitors or at least matched them. For instance, the Samsung dominated PCMark 10 scoring 7,609 compared to the XPS 16’s 6,830 and the HP Spectre x360’s 6,668. We saw similar results on the graphics front with the Galaxy Book 4 crushing both the 3DMark Time Spy and Time Spy Extreme benchmarks.

Typically, laptops with discrete graphics tend to take a hit in battery life. That’s not so with the Samsung where it lasted 12 hours and 16 minutes on the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery test with the display set to approximately 200 nits and the power setting on Balanced. We reran the test with the power settings maxed out and the notebook tapped out after 692 minutes or 11 hours and 32 minutes. I personally squeezed 10 hours and 27 minutes out of the Samsung which was a mix of writing the review, browsing websites, watching a couple of episodes of “3 Body Problem,” and attending a few video meetings.

Should you buy the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra?

You should buy the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra if:

• You don’t want to sacrifice power over portability
• You a content creator or a undercover gamer
• You want a large display
• You want to work a full work day unplugged

You should not buy the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra if:

• You don’t care for superfluous software
• You want a less finicky touchpad
• You want a better webcam

Now this is a premium laptop, one worthy of Samsung’s past laptop greatness. The Galaxy Book 4 Ultra is a beast in a thin-and-light’s chassis. The notebook is easily one of the best 16-inch laptops of the year. First things first, it’s a stately looking system with an eye-catching display. The keyboard, despite packing in a num pad, direction keys, and a Copilot button, is seriously comfortable and the speakers are surprisingly full and balanced.

But don’t sleep, this laptop has just as much brawn as it is beauty. Its beefy Intel Core 9 Ultra processor absolutely dominated the competition and ensures that you can multitask with the best of them. Throw in the discrete Nvidia RTX 4070 GPU and content creation and all the editing that comes with it are fair game as well as gaming at a high frame rate. And despite its powerful specs, it can go the distance with over 11 hours of battery life.

That’s not to say the Galaxy Book 4 Ultra is perfect as there’s a finicky touchpad to contend with and Samsung glut of pre-installed software. But if you can overlook those minor issues, the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra is the notebook du jour for your varied ways of work and play.