ZDNET’s key takeaways
- The Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge is available now for a starting price of $1,349. I tested the $1,749 configuration, with a 16-inch display and 1TB of storage.
- It’s one of the most impressive Copilot+ PCs to hit the market this year, with a stunning display, marathon battery, and boundary-breaking performance.
- It’s pricey, has some design quirks, and finds its full potential in the Samsung ecosystem.
Samsung has carved out a seat at the table with the big boys with the Galaxy Book 4 Edge<!–>, a Copilot+ PC with the new Snapdragon X Elite processor that’s nothing short of a statement-making machine. The laptop feels as good as it looks and nails the features consumers care about the most: a brilliant display, a thin and light form factor, and a marathon battery.
I recently had a chance to go hands-on with the Edge, using it as my primary driver for a week as I commuted to and from the office and worked remotely, and I really enjoyed it. This thing is a banger; It’s light, it has lightning-fast performance, a fantastic battery, a gorgeous display, and surprisingly good speakers.
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Of all the new Snapdragon Copilot+ PCs released this year, this laptop has one of the clearest use cases. It really shines when paired with other Samsung products, particularly a Galaxy phone, which can be remotely controlled on the laptop in Samsung’s Plug-in app – something Apple is still developing – as well as a host of other features.
In order to make the most of the Galaxy Book 4 Edge, however, a few things have to fall into place. More on that in a bit; first let’s take a look at the specs.
The first thing you notice about the Edge is its thin, light form factor. It weighs just 3.4 pounds, yet still feels solid, with minimal screen wobble compared to some other ultraportable 16-inch laptops.
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And what a screen it is. The 16-inch AMOLED 2x (2800 x 1800) display features a gorgeous 3K resolution with a 16:10 aspect ratio and 120Hz refresh rate for silky-smooth visuals. It’s also sufficiently bright at 400 nits for standard content, and up to 500 nits on HDR video. Additionally, the display features some crazy-good anti-glare technology with impressive light mitigation.
Earlier this year, my colleague Kerry Wan reviewed the predecessor of this machine, the Galaxy Book 4 Ultra with the Intel Core Ultra 7 or 9 chip, and was equally impressed with its OLED display. Samsung upped the ante with the AMOLED display in the Edge, which offers both better power efficiency and better resolution (but comes with an increased cost).
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This display is also a touchscreen, but doesn’t come with a stylus, nor does it fold back flat or into a tablet. However, a few useful applications of the touch include the ability to pinch-to-zoom or scroll, two functions that are intimately familiar to all of us on our smartphones.
Regarding the rest of the physical form factor, the keyboard on the Edge feels fine; it’s tactile and features a satisfying key travel distance, and I appreciate the full-sized format with the number pad on the right.
The trackpad on the Edge, however, is nothing short of massive. Just like on the Book 4 Ultra, this thing has a football field-sized trackpad that some people will love, but might be more trouble than it’s worth for others.
During my testing, I registered my fair share of false inputs with the trackpad from typing or wrist placement, although these lessened over time as I got used to it. I don’t love it, but it’s not a dealbreaker because the trackpad itself is well-optimized.
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In our review of the Edge’s predecessor earlier this year, we noted that the trackpad was not the laptop’s strong suit: it would oscillate between being too sensitive and not sensitive enough. Samsung seems to have optimized the technology on the Edge, as I didn’t have any notable issues with its responsiveness this time around.
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The Galaxy Book 4 Edge doesn’t just come with the new Snapdragon X Elite processor; it comes with the most powerful version of it. The 3.8GHz, 12-core processor with dual-core boost is only available in the 1TB configuration of the Edge, something of a bit of a power move by Samsung.
After benchmarking the processor in Geekbench, I got a single-core score of 2953, and a multi-core score of 15672, an impressive number that puts the Galaxy Book 4 Edge at the top of the Copilot+ PCs, and beats some of the MacBook numbers, though Apple’s Silicon still gets higher scores with single-core performance and its GPU.
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The Qualcomm Adreno GPU on board is not going to beat Apple’s M3 integrated graphics head-to-head, but in tandem with the Snapdragon’s NPU and lightning-fast CPU, it puts up a fight. Video editing in DaVinci Resolve on the Galaxy Book 4 Edge was smooth, especially with AI-related tasks, and I expect performance in this area to continue to improve over time.
Also keep in mind that this machine, during all of this heavy lifting, remained silent and cool, with barely any noticeable heat generation and virtually zero noise (even though it does have fans on board).
Benchmarking numbers are technical indicators that aren’t always useful for the everyday consumer, but they are significant in vindicating the Snapdragon X Elite chips as real competition for Apple’s Silicon processors. We’re looking at consumer machines – available for purchase today – beating the MacBook Pro in real-time, not in a controlled demo environment. This is it; they’re here.
The other big thing that sets the Galaxy Book 4 Edge apart is its use of universal flash storage (eUFS) instead of a solid state drive (SSD). eUFS is the type of storage technology used in smartphones, so it tracks that Samsung would bridge this technology into their laptop product line, but there are some caveats that come with this.
First, this means that the storage in this laptop is a solid unit that is not alterable or upgradeable in any way: it’s embedded into the machine as-is. For that reason, I strongly suggest opting for the 1TB configuration if you’re interested in buying the Edge, since what you choose at the time of purchase will be what you’re stuck with for the rest of the laptop’s life cycle.
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Second, the 3.8GHz processor only comes with the 1TB configuration of the Edge. And since the 1TB version only comes as a 16-inch, this is one laptop where the gap between the 14- and 16-inch versions is so much greater than simply the screen size.
I would only consider buying this laptop if you’re ready to commit to the 14-inch, 1TB storage version. Any other configuration is too much of a step-down. In that vein, the 16-inch version goes for $1,750, which certainly is not cheap, but is still under $2,000, the cutoff for what the average consumer would consider “practical.”
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Lastly, the battery on the Edge is indeed impressive. I recently tested out HP’s Omnibook X 14, another Copilot+ PC with the Snapdragon X Elite processor, and noted its outstanding battery performance. The Galaxy Book 4 Edge is even better, considering the massive AMOLED display and more powerful processor.
During the standard ZDNET benchmark testing of running a 4K YouTube livestream streamed over Wi-Fi at 50% brightness, I got over 13 hours of playback, way over what is considered “good” for a laptop, and more than enough for a few days worth of standard work. Even better, while this laptop is idle, its battery life decay drops down to a trickle.
ZDNET’s buying advice
The Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge<!–> is a powerful laptop that is worth the cost if you’re willing to commit to the 16-inch, 1TB version with the top-tier Snapdragon processor. The deal is even sweeter if you have a Samsung smartphone and appreciate the integration this laptop brings to the Samsung ecosystem of devices.
If neither of these apply to you, the Galaxy Book 4 Edge is still a phenomenal choice for its sheer star power and impressive performance alone. However, if you’re on the fence about the price but still want a Copilot+ PC, you might consider the Microsoft Surface Pro or the Asus Vivobook S15, both Snapdragon laptops with OLED displays for quite a bit less.
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