The extra power makes a difference: In general CPU-intensive tasks, the laptop turned in the best benchmark results of any Copilot+ PC I’ve tested to date, beating out the Asus by a scant 1 percent in Geekbench 6 but more impressively pulling away from laptops with lower-end Snapdragon chips (and Intel- and AMD-based laptops) by as much as 20 percent. Graphics-based tests turned up more mixed and confusing results, but the laptop still held its own against other Copilot+ PCs—though unsurprisingly it fell far behind the results that more traditional Intel machines have been turning in recently.
In the real world, the power is noticeable. Microsoft’s real-time Live Captions system has become my go-to stress test for Copilot+ PCs, as many struggle to keep up while translating fast-paced dialogue. The Book4 Edge did the best job I’ve seen to date at this complex task, even handling heavily accented speech without missing much.
Battery life is also excellent, with a runtime of nearly 14 and a half hours in a full-screen YouTube playback test with the brightness maxed out (compared to 15 hours and 12 minutes on the Microsoft Surface Pro and 13 hours and 12 minutes on the Asus Vivobook S 15). The display is no slouch either, offering vivid colors and exceptional brightness while minimizing glare. Audio is solid, though not exactly powerful, helped by a fan that’s barely audible even under load—I had to hold my ear close to the laptop to hear even the slightest whir.
Photography: Christopher Null
What’s wrong with it? The typing experience is marred by keys with a bit too short of travel, and I found the tiny arrow keys exceptionally difficult to use. The keyboard’s backlighting doesn’t do much to make the keys visible unless the room is fairly dark. And I’ve already talked about the touchpad before, which is so incredibly large that it’s worth mentioning here again. All in all, these are all relatively minor issues.
At $1,500, the Book4 Edge is $200 more expensive than the smaller Asus Vivobook, but in terms of price and performance, it’s approaching the high end of that machine. If you want to take advantage of Microsoft’s new AI features (and I won’t judge you if you don’t), it’s becoming clear that it’s important to get as much performance out of your hardware as possible. In that regard, the Samsung takes the crown for performance while keeping the price reasonably in check. While it’s not exactly the best value in the Copilot+ PC world right now, it does offer the most performance.
