Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Can the Galaxy Book 3 Ultra beat the MacBook Pro?”.
We have just been hanging out with Samsung and they have a whole bunch of new additions to their Galaxy book laptop lines. So there’s a new galaxy book 3 Pro there’s a galaxy book 3 Pro 360, but the most exciting one is called the galaxy book. 3. Ultra I’ve reviewed a number of Samsung Galaxy books over the past few years and generally the deal with these devices that they’re really thin they’re really light and they have really excellent screens, but that’s kind of all.
There is about them. Those are sort of the special traits this laptop the galaxy book 3 Ultra is more of a competitor to Apple’s 16-inch MacBook Pro, and it’s targeting that same sort of audience. The Creator audience maybe some gaming people who really want high power processors and high powered gpus.
So, let’s get into the specs, this device runs Windows: 11. It has a 13th gen Intel Core i7 or core I9 for graphics. You get an Nvidia GeForce, RTX 4050 or a GeForce RTX 4070. It supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1.
You can have 16 gigabytes or 32 gigabytes of memory and that’s LPD gear5. You can get 512 gigabytes or one terabyte of storage and that’s pcie. The camera is fhd 1080p. The battery size is 76 Watt hours and the adapter is a 100 watt USBC.
In terms of ports, there are two Thunderbolt 4 ports, there’s one USB type, A there’s: an HDMI 2.0 there’s a Micro SD and thankfully there’s a headphone jack. This is a 16 inch 2880 by 1800, 16 by 10, 120 hertz AMOLED display and I know that’s a mouthful, but it looks really good, so we were using it in a pretty bright space. There was a lot of glare that can sometimes happen with glossy panels, but it looked really nice. The colors were really bright and, as we watch some YouTube videos, I really got a sense that I was looking at a high quality panel using this doesn’t actually feel that different to using other Galaxy books, it’s really thin. It’S really light. It’S really sturdy and the keyboard is really comfortable.
It has a very nice click. It’S a little bit shallow, but I honestly don’t care that much because it sounds so cool when I’m typing on it. Honestly, the only real issue I had with the chassis in this short testing period was the touchpad. It was a little bit thin and it seemed like it wasn’t always picking up every gesture that I wanted it to. Sometimes it was failing to pick up my two finger clicks that it thought they were one finger clicks. Sometimes it wasn’t picking up my scrolling and my fingers were skidding a little bit and every so often I was like clicking and the click just didn’t register. I hope it sticks by the final release. These were pre-production units, so you always hope that those kinds of flaws will be fixed in the coming weeks. Now one of the cool things about this laptop that will appeal to Samsung fans in particular is that it’s really plugged into the overall Samsung ecosystem. So if you have a Samsung tablet or a Samsung phone, there are various ways that these two work together nicely.
For example, there’s the second screen feature where you can really easily use a Samsung tablet as a secondary, monitor next to your Samsung laptop. Another cool thing is called Quick Share, so this allows you to really quickly share files between a Samsung laptop and a Samsung tablet or a Samsung phone, and this is across the galaxy book line. One other cool thing is this studio mode feature. So this has a number of webcam features that you can use to make yourself look nicer on Google meet or Zoom, or whatever camera app, you’re working with so there’s Auto Framing and that worked really well. It like follows you around, like Apple Center Stage, As you move your head around your area. There’S this background blur, which blurs your background, as you would expect, there’s supposed to be this eye contact feature that makes your eyes look like they’re looking at the camera, even when you’re looking all over the place, we couldn’t get that to work here, but you know, Like I said, these are pre-roduction units, we’re testing, so hopefully those issues will be resolved by the final release and Samsung assured us that they would be, I will say, a core i7 13700h plus an RTX 4050 GPU in a chassis, this thin and light.
That’S ambitious and that’s not to mention the the higher spec models which are supposed to include a core I9 and an RTX 4070, which are even more powerful and power hungry chips. I’M a little worried about the cooling. It’S not impossible for a chassis, this thin to cool chips that powerful, but it is ambitious and that’s before we even talk about battery life, because this thing, as we said before, has a very high resolution. Oled screen when laptops that are thin and Light, have tried putting super powerful chips and discrete gpus and high resolution OLED screens together in the past few years. It hasn’t often gone super well, for example the Dell XPS 15.. So I’m really curious whether this device will actually even be able to hold up to the battery life and the efficiency that Apple can provide.
If this laptop is anything other than a giant Fireball that dies after five hours, that’ll be a huge achievement for Samsung and frankly, I really hope they can pull it off. Those were my first impressions from 45-ish minutes using the Galaxy book 3 Ultra. Should this thing cost twenty three hundred dollars, would you buy it over a MacBook Pro 16.? Do we expect this thing to have any battery life at all? Let me know in the comments I hope I can answer some of these questions in my full review, where we’ll have benchmarks, we’ll have more extended Impressions and we will hopefully have a lot of fun. .