If you thought 2024 was the year for AI PCs, that was just the warm-up act. While we saw plenty of Qualcomm-powered AI Copilot+ notebooks, like the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge, it wasn't until later in the year when other CPU manufacturers released CPUs with enough AI TOPS for the advanced features Microsoft promised with Copilot+, like Recall.

These new mobile chips promise to be powering some of the best laptops of the year, and the Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro is going to be one of them. It's got everything we love about Samsung laptops (AMOLED displays, svelte and tough designs, and great audio), and it's powered by a choice of two Intel Lunar Lake CPUs.

Add in battery life that has to be experienced to truly understand how impressive it is, the ability to game at playable framerates on an integrated GPU, and tons of Samsung Galaxy ecosystem touches that are more useful than not, and you've got a winner of a Windows laptop.

About this review: Samsung sent us the Galaxy Book 5 Pro for review. It had no input on the contents of this article.

Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro price and availability

The Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro was launched on January 2, 2025, in South Korea, with availability in the U.S., UK, Canada, France, and Germany. It's currently available from Samsung.com and Best Buy.

The base model comes with an Intel Core Ultra 7 256V, 16GB of soldered RAM, and 512GB of SSD storage for $1,350 with a 14-inch touchscreen, or $1,450 for a 16-inch touchscreen. Increasing storage to 1TB makes the 14-inch model $1,550, and the 16-inch model $1,650. And if you opt for 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, the 14-inch is $1,650, and the 16-inch is $1,750, but you do get a processor upgrade to the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V as well.

This is one gorgeous laptop

Seriously, Samsung might be blatantly copying Apple's homework, but that's fine

Samsung hasn't changed the design of this clamshell much from the Galaxy Book 4, but that's no bad thing. It was already one of the sleekest and best put together laptops we've used, and the Book 5 Pro continues in that vein. It's all aluminum CNC, like a MacBook, but unlike Apple's offerings, you also get a full-sized HDMI 2.1 port, micro SD card slot, and USB-A 3.2 port to go along with the two Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left edge.

It's incredibly thin, feels great in the hand or under it, and is well-weighted so that you can open the lid one-handed without having to hold the base down. I always appreciate that in a laptop, where sturdiness could be the difference between opening your screen and dropping the laptop off the counter. There's a well-spaced chiclet-style keyboard and a huge touchpad, which, sadly, is mechanical instead of a nice, premium haptic model.

The screen is gorgeous

The 14-inch AMOLED touchscreen is beautiful, as you'd expect from a Samsung device. When I tested the Multi Control features, which let you control your Galaxy phone with your laptop's controls as if it were a second screen, it matched up nicely next to a Galaxy Z Flip 5.

It has a 2,880 x 1,800 resolution (16:10) display that covers 120% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, multiple Samsung-designed HDR modes, and a responsive multitouch touchscreen. The screen also has a 120Hz refresh rate, which is dynamic and can adjust to 48Hz for power savings, depending on the task at hand.

The screen does have one minor annoyance, which is PWM flickers at lower brightness levels. This is common for any OLED screen at low brightness levels, as the manufacturers implement PWM to simulate lower brightness levels instead of having the inaccuracy of actual low brightness. I only noticed this under 30% brightness, but I found that somewhere between 50% and 65% was best for all-day working, so it's not an issue at those brightness levels. Plus, it goes away if you use HDR at any brightness.

The controls are pretty great too

I've used more laptops than I can realistically recall, and this is the first time I've used a laptop with a touchscreen that was just as responsive as a modern smartphone. I loved using the touchscreen for secondary controls in image editing software, or for scrolling through documents or web pages. It was more natural than using the touchpad, and that's no slouch either on this laptop.

Although the keyboard travel is very shallow

The keyboard is decent enough for typing, but the shallow key stroke depth requires some adjusting if you're used to any other keyboard. I found this most prominent on the spacebar, where I had to press in certain specific areas or it wouldn't always register the press on the first try. Unfortunately for me, the most unresponsive part was underneath where I rest my right thumb, the one I'm used to hitting the spacebar with. You might have a different experience depending on your typing style.

Lunar Lake continues to impress

Intel's current strengths are in mobile chips, and it shows

We've already covered a few Lunar Lake laptops, and they all impressed us with their blend of performance and battery life. The Samsung Book 5 Pro is no exception, even with the slightly lower-power Core Ultra 7 256V inside. While the CPU power is slightly reduced, the Arc graphics is the same as the other Lunar Lake chips, and it slaps.

Whether it was chewing through image adjustments in Affinity Photo, or some spelunking in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the Galaxy Book 5 Pro never looked like it was going to slow down. I had worried about thermals as the vents are on the bottom at the back, but while it got close to tjmax, it never felt hot to the touch anywhere but one tiny spot next to the hinge.

The other thing about Lunar Lake laptops is that you can leave them on the best performance plan even while on battery. My looped 4K video running at 50% brightness gave me just over 14 hours of playback before the battery died. Some tasks, like rendering video, did drain the battery faster, but general browsing, word processing, and other everyday tasks gave me all the power I needed for a full day and then some before having to plug it back in.

The Galaxy Book 5 Pro also recharges from a 65W power brick that's the same size as the ones you get with smartphones. You won't have to lug huge power bricks around, and if you forget one at home, finding a 65W charger is much easier than finding a higher USB-C one or a proprietary connector.

The Galaxy ecosystem is nearly unmatched

Only Apple has a more seamless way of using multiple devices together

Samsung has long tried to emulate the ecosystem of Apple products, and it has nearly succeeded with the Galaxy Book 5 Pro. You can link your Galaxy phone or tablet to it, control both from the laptop's input devices, and drag and drop files between the two. There's a second Samsung Settings app that also sits on the Quick Settings menu next to the Windows Settings icon, and a whole ton of Samsung-branded apps to make things run a little more smoothly.

On any other laptop, I'd be wiping those out for storage space, because I find manufacturer software often does things that slow down the computer or are riddled with annoying glitches. Everything I tried on the Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro (and believe me, I tried everything, including installing every other app I could find from Samsung) worked well, and enhanced my experience.

The only other place where features like quick pairing, quick sharing, multiple device control, and wireless second screens are part and parcel of the experience? On MacBooks, where Apple can integrate them into the operating system seamlessly. Samsung can't quite do that because of Windows, but it's very, very close.

Should you buy the Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro?

You should buy the Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro if:

• You're already heavily in the Samsung ecosystem
• You want a light and thin PC with a great AMOLED display
• You want a fantastic touchpad

You should NOT buy a Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro if:

• You prefer a wider or taller screen ratio
• You don't like the curved screen corners
• You want a convertible laptop

I tested the 14-inch Galaxy Book 5 Pro, and there's very little difference between it and the 16-inch model, except the larger model has a slightly bigger battery and a numpad on the keyboard. I happen to prefer the smaller screen size, but there's something refreshingly comforting about both screen sizes not losing out on features because you prefer a smaller or larger screen. The only hardware that changes is if you want 32GB of RAM instead of 16GB, in which case you get a slightly more powerful CPU to use.

This is a gorgeous laptop, both to use and to look at, and hits the key performance points that most laptop users need. Even without a dedicated GPU, the Intel Arc iGPU is pretty powerful, and the lower-powered CPU meant it stayed relatively cool even during long work sessions.