Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 14-inch review: Intel’s Core Ultra spearheads Samsung’s MacBook rival

Published On: April 4, 2024

Samsung is one of the few manufacturers in India that have started shipping fresh laptops with Intel’s new Core Ultra processors based on the Meteor Lake architecture. The latest Galaxy Book4 range is available in clamshell and 2-in-1 form factors spread across the Galaxy Book4, Book4 360, Book4 Pro and the Book4 Ultra segments.

We had a chance to check out the Galaxy Book3 360 and the top-of-the-line Galaxy Book3 Ultra last year. Now we have the Galaxy Book4 Pro. Available in 14-inch and 16-inch sizes, both offer nearly identical specifications. Here’s an in-depth look at the 14-inch model.

Table of Contents

Design and build

Samsung hasn’t made any significant changes when it comes to the aesthetics. The laptop is identical to the last-gen Galaxy Book3 Pro featuring a MacBook-inspired all-aluminium chassis with a clean and minimalistic approach. It’s very well crafted with no signs of imperfections along with a rock-solid build. I specifically like how the hinge offers a certain amount of resistance, making the display stay in one place instead of wobbling.

If we compare the numbers, the Galaxy Book4 Pro is similar to the 13-inch MacBook Air M2/M3 in terms of dimensions and weight. They both weigh around 1.24kg and offer a thickness of under 12mm. However, Samsung’s offering features larger screen real estate and a wider selection of ports.

On the left, there are two Thunderbolt 4 ports and a full-size HDMI 2.1 port, while on the right you get a headphone and mic combo jack, a USB 3.2 Type-A and a microSD card slot. I do wish Samsung would consider adding a full-size SD card slot instead of micro, especially when they are targeting creative professionals. For wireless connectivity there’s Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3, while other notable features include a 1080p webcam, quad speakers, dual array digital microphones and an ambient light sensor.

The bottom cover has four rubber feet and a section with perforations for ventilation. You also have two strips of fine mesh covering the bottom-firing speakers on each side. Removing the cover was fairly easy. Just pry open the rubber feet to unveil four standard Philips head screws. Once they are removed, a plastic prying tool can help undo the clips on the inside. The thermal system includes two heat pipes and cooling fans, along with a vapour chamber. The memory is soldered, so the only thing you can upgrade is the M.2 SSD.

Display

Having a strong expertise in displays, Samsung continues to offer its bright and vivid “Dynamic AMOLED 2X” panel on the Galaxy Book4 Pro. It’s the same one from last year offering a 3K resolution of 2,880 x 1,800, and a dynamic refresh rate of 60Hz and 120Hz. You do get touchscreen functionality though, which is a good addition, but it makes more sense on the Galaxy Book4 360 model.

Additionally, the panel comes with an anti-reflective coating, which isn’t super effective, but offers a better experience compared to older-gen laptops with OLED displays. Even though the display doesn’t spread out right to the edges, the thin bezels with rounded corners feel elegant and don’t hamper the experience.

As with OLED panels, it offers excellent contrast and colour reproduction. There’s support for up to 120 percemt of the DCI-P3 colour gamut, with 400 nits brightness in SDR and up to 500 nits in HDR. It isn’t super bright like mini-LED, but there wasn’t any point during my testing where I felt it was dim. Speaking of which, Samsung claims that the display brightness can be lowered below 0.0005-nits. While that’s something I cannot confirm accurately, I did find this capability handy while working late at night.

Using the Samsung Settings app you can switch between different colour profiles, including presets for DCI-P3, sRGB and Adobe RGB. This feature is useful for content creators and designers who work with photo editing and videos. These profiles can also be accessed via the default Windows 11 settings under the Display tab.

Overall, the display looks brilliant. It is sharp, offers deep saturated colours and feels smooth with excellent response times.

Keyboard and trackpad

The keyboard sits flush with the body and has similar scissor-style switches that Apple uses for its MacBook range. It is comfortable to type on and even offers three levels of white backlighting. The power button on the top right corner includes a built-in TPM fingerprint scanner that works fast and accurately with Windows Hello.

The trackpad is large and suitable for most tasks with support for all Windows gestures. I feel that Samsung can improve on the trackpad clicks, but otherwise it feels snappy and responsive.

Software and performance

Available with Windows 11 Home or Pro, the Galaxy Book4 Pro is preloaded with an extensive list of apps from Samsung. While some of them are useful, others require you to have a Samsung smartphone or tablet. For instance, there’s a screen mirroring feature that lets you use a Samsung tablet as a secondary display for the laptop. Then there are features that let you quickly drag and drop files between your smartphone and laptop, control smart devices, share notes, and so on. Additionally, the Samsung Settings app lets you control various aspects of the laptop including performance modes, display colour profile presets, keyboard backlight, battery protection, and more.

Before I dive into the performance, I wanted to touch upon some of the multimedia capabilities. The webcam on the laptop is pretty decent and produces good enough image quality for video calls. It also supports background blur as well as subject focus features where it tries to keep your face in the centre of the frame. The quad-speaker system is a bit underwhelming and is not comparable to the ones on the MacBook Air. It just isn’t loud enough and lacks a bit of thump. However, I do appreciate the overall sound clarity and reduced distortion which is a common issue on thin and light laptops.

As mentioned before, the Galaxy Book4 series has been upgraded with the newest Intel Core Ultra processors. This marks a notable enhancement compared to the 13th-gen Core processors as they not only offer increased graphical performance through Intel Arc but also introduce a new tile architecture that includes a dedicated neural processing unit designed to manage generative AI tasks and new low-power E-cores that help in improving the battery life.

The Core Ultra 7 155H CPU on the Galaxy Book4 Pro 14-inch includes six performance cores, eight efficiency cores, and two low-power (LP) efficiency cores. The chip offers a max turbo frequency 4.8GHz on the P-cores and 3.8GHz on the E-cores. With a base power ranging between 20-28W, the CPU has the capability of drawing up to 115W. The LP-cores can range from 700MHz to 2.5GHz and help in reducing loads and conserving battery when you are doing light tasks like browsing the web.

Now in terms of power consumption and thermal performance, the CPU can go up to 56W. It only peaks for a small period after which it gradually drops due to thermal throttling. Speaking of which, temperatures can peak over 100 degrees if you push the CPU to its limits, which is predictable considering the sheer thinness of the laptop chassis.

The newly updated Intel Arc graphics bring a slight boost to handle graphic-intensive loads, and are capable of running some games like Forza Horizon 5 and Counter Strike 2 with over 60fps at low to medium settings at 1200p resolution. Essentially it should be able to handle retro game emulation, and a few modern PC games at lower quality settings.

Here’s a look at the synthetic benchmark tests that we usually perform for our laptop tests:

Compared to the Core i7-1360P from last year, the new Core Ultra 7 155H more or less offers similar scores. However, the chip does have some new tricks.

The inclusion of a dedicated neural processor on the Intel Core Ultra processors brings up a whole new category of AI performance to the table. While it is quite early to judge, software manufacturers are working on adding new features that can harness the power of AI to achieve faster and more accurate results. For creators, apps like Adobe Photoshop, Premiere and Lightroom offer AI-powered features like AI denoising, content-aware fill, background removal, auto captioning, auto reframing, and more. You may require some fine adjustments, but the results are actually quite good.

Additionally, the new Core Ultra processors support AI software frameworks including OpenVINO, WindowsML, and ONNX RT. Audacity is one of the first apps that can make use of a suite of AI tools from Intel thanks to OpenVINO plugins. For podcasts, there is noise suppression and transcription tools while AI tools for music include Music Generation and Music Style Remix which use Stable Diffusion (and Riffusion) to generate new music from a prompt, or based on pre-existing music, respectively. There’s also Music Separation that allows you to split a song into either it’s vocal and instrumental parts, or into vocals, drums, bass and a combined “anything else” part.

It’s a good start, but there’s a limit to what extent AI can go and actually do tasks for you. Expect more apps and software developers to utilise and harness that power and bring forward more capabilities in the coming months.

Battery

Thanks to the dedicated LP-cores on the Intel Core Ultra CPU, the Galaxy Book4 Pro offers a big improvement when it comes to battery life. The notebook uses the same 63Whr unit from the outgoing model and comes bundled with a portable 65W charger. I was getting anywhere upwards of eight hours in day-to-day usage which mostly included light workloads including multiple Chrome tabs, editing some photos, typing a lot of text and watching a few videos on YouTube.

In PCMark 10’s Modern Office battery benchmark test, I recorded a score of 12 hours and 19 minutes. While that’s impressive for a Windows laptop, it is still far behind the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M3 or even the M2.

Verdict

The Galaxy Book4 Pro is a solid Windows offering that manages to rival Apple, at least when it comes to the looks. The base model with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD is priced at Rs 1,39,990 and for Rs 1,71,990 you can double the memory and storage. Considering the RAM is soldered, it would be wise to choose the appropriate model according to your needs.

Intel’s new Core Ultra series brings notable improvements including better battery life thanks to its low-power cores, and some AI magic in a variety of apps and software. It’s not a power horse, but considering the form factor it is clear that Intel is on the right path. Buy this if you want a sleek, high-quality Windows notebook that doesn’t compromise on build quality. Additionally, the Galaxy Book4 Pro is suitable for content creators and, if you are into the Samsung ecosystem, the dedicated suite of apps can be quite useful.