Samsung’s flagship laptop is a Mac Book Pro clone gone horribly wrong | The Verge

Overview

Tech Expand Amazon Apple Facebook Google Microsoft Samsung Business See all tech

Reviews Expand Smart Home Reviews Phone Reviews Tablet Reviews Headphone Reviews See all reviews

Details

Science Expand Space Energy Environment Health See all science

Entertainment Expand TV Shows Movies Audio See all entertainment

Policy Expand Antitrust Politics Law Security See all policy

Gadgets Expand Laptops Phones TVs Headphones Speakers Wearables See all gadgets

Verge Shopping Expand Buying Guides Deals Gift Guides See all shopping

Streaming Expand Disney HBONetflix You Tube Creators See all streaming

Transportation Expand Electric Cars Autonomous Cars Ride-sharing Scooters See all transportation

Tech Close Tech Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Tech

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Gadgets Close Gadgets Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Gadgets

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Apple Close Apple Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Apple

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Samsung’s flagship laptop is a Mac Book Pro clone gone horribly wrong

The Samsung Galaxy Book 6 Ultra is a very expensive Windows laptop with some hard-to-overlook shortcomings.

If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

Samsung really captured the aesthetic of the Mac Book Pro. The feel and performance, not as much.

Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

II know I’m not the only person who wants a Mac Book Pro for Windows: a sleek, ultra powerful, super portable machine with an excellent screen and high-quality build. Samsung’s Galaxy Book 6 Ultra certainly tries. It’s got a beautiful screen and a nice design, and it’s as solidly built as laptops come.

Imitating things people want is understandable. But Samsung also repeats some of Apple’s previous failings, like including a terrible keyboard and a surprisingly bad webcam. And it’s charging high-end Mac Book Pro money for a device that doesn’t perform like one.

“Good artists copy, great artists steal.” But what if they botch the robbery?

Very nice (and very familiar) build and design Bright and contrast-y OLED display Good Intel Panther Lake / Nvidia RTX performance

Bad keyboard with short key travel Poor webcam quality So pricey for such glaring faults

The Galaxy Book 6 Ultra starts at

2,900 with a 16-core Core Ultra X7 358H chip and integrated Intel Arc B390 graphics. Our review configuration has a similar Intel Core Ultra 7 356H chip paired with an Nvidia RTX 5070 Laptop GPU. It also has 32GB of soldered RAM and a 2TB SSD. It cost

3,200 before RAMageddon drove prices up. Now, it’s a whopping

3,800 with a 1TB SSD. At that price, it’s just

100 shy of a 16-inch Mac Book Pro with M5 Max with 36GB of memory and a 2TB SSD. (Let’s keep that figure in the back of our minds.)

Number of ugly stickers to remove: 4 (one underneath)

As expected from a high-end Samsung device, the display is gorgeous. The 16-inch, 2880 x 1800 OLED touchscreen is bright and sharp, rendering vibrant colors and perfect contrast. And the 120 Hz adaptive refresh rate makes motion nice and smooth.

Like a Mac Book Pro, the Galaxy Book 6 Ultra has Thunderbolt and HDMI 2.1 ports and an SD card slot. While the Mac Books have three Thunderbolt 5 ports, the Samsung has two Thunderbolt 4 and an old-fashioned USB-A. Regardless of USB preference, it’s a good port selection that’s fit for demanding users and content creators. It’d be nice if it were Thunderbolt 5, given the price, but Panther Lake doesn’t have native support for Thunderbolt 5.

When it comes to performance, the Book 6 is fast. It’s speedy enough to handle busy multitasking and tackle hefty edits in Lightroom Classic. It slowed down a touch when I made chunky edits using subject and background detection masks, then copied and pasted them across batches of images, but I expect that in most laptops other than high-end Macs with Pro and Max chips.

On the right are the USB-A port, 3.5mm audio jack, and SD card slot.

On the left is an HDMI port, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and a power / battery indicator.

On the keyboard deck is a terrible keyboard and an okay trackpad.

Thanks to the discrete graphics, I could even play games like Battlefield 6 and Marathon reasonably well (two games you can’t run at all on mac OS). In BF6, I typically got a solid 70+ fps by keeping settings modest: medium presets at 2880 x 1800 resolution with DLSS set to Performance. Marathon mustered a passable 50+ fps using Nvidia’s optimized settings. The fans don’t even get super loud, but, in exchange, the underside of the Galaxy Book’s chassis got very hot near the back.

The Intel Panther Lake CPU and Nvidia RTX 5070 GPU combo makes the Book 6 a bit of a sleeper gaming laptop. It’s miles ahead of either Mac Book for that. But for $3,800 you can get much better performance from the more straightforwardly gamer-looking laptops out there. Or you can remain somewhat stealthy with a Razer Blade or Asus ROG Zephyrus, and get similar gaming performance for a lot less money.

Unfortunately, gaming performance isn’t enough for a laptop that costs almost

4,000. In benchmarks the Galaxy Book 6 Ultra is closer to the

1,700 Mac Book Pro with the base M5 chip. Benchmarks aren’t everything, but Samsung is charging so much money for a laptop that gets outpaced by one that’s half the price. Where the Book 6’s discrete GPU gives it an advantage in some graphics-heavy tests, the much cheaper M5 Mac Book Pro isn’t far behind. It even handily beats Samsung’s machine in our 4K video export test.

Just because it copies some of its design doesn’t mean it isn’t sleek and nice looking.

This isn’t really Samsung’s fault. Windows laptop makers can’t compete with high-end Macs in raw speed. Intel and AMD don’t have any laptop CPUs that get close to Apple’s single-core performance, which is why a 10-core M5’s multicore performance can beat a 16-core Panther Lake chip.

In related news, battery performance is uneven. I’ve had days of light usage (many Chrome tabs, some stints of music listening, and a bit of photo editing) where it lasted over 10 hours, and then similarly light days where I only got seven. Other Panther Lake laptops I’ve tested have better battery life, but the Nvidia GPU uses more power than integrated graphics. Even though the laptop is supposed to switch to integrated graphics outside of demanding tasks, laptops with both tend to have worse battery life even outside of games.

I love discrete graphics for gaming, but Macs have an inherent advantage in battery life consistency because they sidestep that power dance entirely with integrated graphics going up to a wildly high number of GPU cores. The much cheaper 14-inch Mac Book Pro is in “Eh, who cares if you forgot the charger at home” territory — often lasting me 12 hours or more. (Speaking of chargers, Samsung’s chunky 140W power adapter even looks like Apple’s. But its prongs don’t fold down, and the included cable is a little short at 70 inches / 1.8 meters. Who decided less cable is better?)

As for the speakers, they’re good. But they lack a little depth and bass compared to the equivalent six-speaker setups on the Mac Book Pros or even the 15-inch Mac Book Air.

Here’s the Samsung Galaxy Book 6 Ultra side by side with a 16-inch Mac Book Pro.

But the most egregious misstep is the Galaxy Book 6 Ultra’s keyboard. The keys are very flat, with minimal separation from the deck. Samsung claims there’s 1mm of key travel, matching the current Mac Book keyboards, but it somehow feels shallower and much worse. Typing on this keyboard gives me flashbacks to the old Apple butterfly keyboards, and that’s not an experience we should be revisiting. Frankly, I don’t know how Samsung achieved this (derogatory). I make more typos and mistakes on this keyboard than usual, and I dislike it so much I sometimes place a mechanical keyboard over it. I’m sure you could get used to it, but that’s not good enough on a laptop this expensive.

I wish that was the only problem, but the haptic trackpad can also be frustrating. I usually love haptic pads since you can register a click anywhere, and the Galaxy Book offers a generously sized area for clicking — much like the Force Touch trackpads on a Mac Book. But this one’s just okay. It’s usually fine, but I sometimes experienced delayed clicks and repeated inputs when clicking and dragging things or highlighting cells in a spreadsheet.

Me, wondering what is up with this webcam image quality.

And then there’s the webcam. I have no idea what processing Samsung is doing, but the 1080p camera somehow makes you look simultaneously grainy and smoothed out. My best guess is it’s a noisy image sensor and Samsung has some noise reduction or skin smoothing going on — or both. It’s a bad sign when the first thing my colleagues ask me in a video call is what laptop I’m using.

Samsung wants its flagship laptop to be a Mac Book Pro for Windows so badly. It has a nice chassis and screen, and good performance for a Windows laptop this thin, but it whiffs on too many of the fundamentals. It’s priced like an M5 Max Mac Book Pro, has the performance of a Mac Book less than half its price, and lacks the excellent battery life of either. Just get the genuine article.

Display: 16-inch (2880 x 1800) 120 Hz OLED touchscreen

Ports: 2x Thunderbolt 4 USB-C (Display Port / Power Delivery), 1x USB-A 3.2, HDMI 2.1, full-size SDXC card slot, 3.5mm combo audio jack

Dimensions: 14.05 x 9.76 x 0.61 inches / 356.9 x 248 x 15.4mm

Samsung Galaxy Book 6 Ultra / Intel Core Ultra 7 356H (Panther Lake) / 32GB / 2TB

Asus Zenbook Duo / Intel Core Ultra X9 388H (Panther Lake) / 32GB / 1TB

Razer Blade 16 (2025) / AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 / RTX 5090 / 32GB / 2TB

Asus Zenbook A16 / Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E94100 / 48GB / 1TB

Antonio G. Di Benedetto Close Antonio G. Di Benedetto Reviewer, Laptops Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Antonio G. Di Benedetto

Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Apple Close Apple Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Apple

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Gadgets Close Gadgets Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Gadgets

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Laptop Reviews Close Laptop Reviews Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Laptop Reviews

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Laptops Close Laptops Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Laptops

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Reviews Close Reviews Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Reviews

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Samsung Close Samsung Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Samsung

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Tech Close Tech Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Tech

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Here’s what Microsoft is offering long-serving employees to voluntarily retire

Apple agrees to pay i Phone owners $250 million for not delivering AI Siri

Musk’s biggest loyalist became his biggest liability

Key Takeaways

Tech Expand Amazon Apple Facebook Google Microsoft Samsung Business See all tech
Reviews Expand Smart Home Reviews Phone Reviews Tablet Reviews Headphone Reviews See all reviews
Science Expand Space Energy Environment Health See all science
Entertainment Expand TV Shows Movies Audio See all entertainment
Policy Expand Antitrust Politics Law Security See all policy