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

I know I’m not the only person who wants a MacBook Pro for Windows: a smooth, ultra powerful, super portable machine with an excellent screen and high quality build. Samsung’s Galaxy Book6 Ultra certainly tries. It has a beautiful screen and nice design, and it’s solidly built, just like laptops.

It looks exactly like the MacBook Pro, to the extent that I sometimes use the wrong keyboard shortcuts out of habit. Other Windows laptops sometimes include some MacBook design influences, but the Galaxy is a few words It’s clear what Samsung was going for.

It makes sense to copy what people want. But Samsung has also replicated some of Apple’s past failings, like a terrible keyboard and a surprisingly poor webcam. And it’s charging high-end MacBook Pro money for a device that doesn’t perform like a MacBook Pro.

“good artists copy great artists steal.” But what if they committed a robbery?

The Galaxy Book6 Ultra starts at $2,900 with a 16-core Core Ultra X7 358H chip and integrated Intel Arc B390 graphics. Our review configuration features a similar Intel Core Ultra 7 356H chip paired with an Nvidia RTX 5070 laptop GPU. It also has 32GB solid RAM and 2TB SSD. Before Ramageddon it was priced at $3,200 Raised the prices. Now, this is too much $3,800 With 1TB SSD. At that price, it’s only $100 less than the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Max with 36GB of memory and a 2TB SSD. (Let’s keep that figure in our minds.)

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

Like the MacBook Pro, the Galaxy Book6 Ultra has Thunderbolt and HDMI 2.1 ports, and an SD card slot. While the MacBook has three Thunderbolt 5 ports, the Samsung has two Thunderbolt 4 and one old-fashioned USB-A. Regardless of USB preference, this is a good port selection that’s suitable for demanding users and content creators. It would be nice if it were Thunderbolt 5 considering the price, but Panther Lake does not have native support for Thunderbolt 5.

When it comes to performance, the Book6 is fast. It’s fast enough to handle busy multitasking and tackle heavy editing in Lightroom Classic. When I did mass editing using subject and background detection masks, then copying and pasting them into batches of images, it slowed down a bit, but I expect that in most laptops other than high-end Macs with Pro and Max chips.

Because of the different graphics, I can also play games like battlefield 6 And marathon Reasonably good (two games you can’t run on macOS at all). In BF6I generally get a solid 70+ FPS keeping the settings modest: medium preset at 2880 x 1800 resolution with DLSS set to Performance. marathon A passable 50+ FPS was achieved using Nvidia’s optimized settings. There’s also no loud fan noise, but in exchange, the bottom of the Galaxy Book’s chassis gets Very Hot near the back.

The Intel Panther Lake CPU and Nvidia RTX 5070 GPU combo makes the Book6 a sleeper gaming laptop. It’s miles ahead of the MacBook in that regard. But for $3,800 you can get better performance from a more straightforwardly gamer-looking laptop. Or you can go somewhat stealthier with the Razer Blade or Asus ROG Zephyrus, and get similar gaming performance for a lot less money.

Unfortunately, the gaming performance isn’t good enough for a laptop that costs nearly $4,000. In benchmarks the Galaxy Book6 Ultra comes close to the $1,700 MacBook Pro with the base M5 chip. Benchmarks aren’t everything, but Samsung is charging ahead so much money For a laptop that beats even half its price. While the Book6’s discrete GPU gives it an advantage in some graphics-heavy tests, the much cheaper M5 MacBook Pro isn’t far behind. It also handily beats Samsung’s machine in our 4K video export test.

It’s not 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 are close to Apple’s single-core performance, which is why the multicore performance of a 10-core M5 can beat a 16-core Panther Lake chip.

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

I like discrete graphics for gaming, but Macs have a built-in advantage in battery life stability because they bypass the power dance that goes into having excessive numbers of GPU cores altogether with integrated graphics. The much cheaper 14-inch MacBook Pro is in “eh, who cares if you forgot the charger at home” territory – often lasting me 12 hours or more. (Speaking of the charger, Samsung’s chunky 140W power adapter looks a lot like Apple’s. But its prongs don’t fold down, and the included cable is a bit short at 70 inches/1.8 meters. Who decided that shorter cable is better?)

As far as the speakers are concerned, they are good. But they lack a little depth and bass compared to the equivalent six-speaker setups on MacBook Pros or even the 15-inch MacBook Air.

But the biggest mistake is the keyboard of the Galaxy Book 6 Ultra. The keys are very flat, with minimal separation from the deck. Samsung claims 1mm of key travel, matching current MacBook keyboards, but that’s somehow feels Shallow and very bad. Typing on this keyboard gives me flashbacks old apple butterfly keyboard, And it’s not an experience we should want to revisit. Frankly, I don’t know how Samsung achieved this (expletive). I make more typos and mistakes on this keyboard than usual, and I dislike it so much that I sometimes put a mechanical keyboard over it. I’m sure you’ll get used to it, but it’s not enough on such an expensive laptop.

I wish that were the only problem, but the haptic trackpad can also be frustrating. I generally like haptic pads because you can enter clicks anywhere, and the Galaxy Book offers a generously sized area to click – much like the Force Touch trackpad on a MacBook. But that’s absolutely fine. This is generally fine, but I sometimes experience delayed clicks and repeated inputs when clicking and dragging things or highlighting cells in the spreadsheet.

And then there’s the webcam. I don’t know what processing Samsung is doing, but the 1080p camera somehow makes you look grainy and smooth simultaneously. My best guess is that 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 coworkers ask me in a video call is what laptop I’m using.

Samsung wants its flagship laptop to be the MacBook Pro for Windows. It has a good chassis and screen, and its performance is good for such a thin Windows laptop, but it depends on a number of fundamentals. It costs as much as the M5 Max MacBook Pro, has the same performance as a MacBook at less than half its price, and lacks excellent battery life. Just get the genuine article.

Photography Antonio G. By Di Benedetto/The Verge