GoKawiilis a reviewer covering laptops and the occasional gadget. He spent over 15 years in the photography industry before joining The Verge as a deals writer in 2021.
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II know I’m not the only person who wants a MacBook Pro for Windows: a sleek, ultra powerful, super portable machine with an excellent screen and high-quality build. Samsung’s Galaxy Book6 Ultra certainly tries. It’s got a beautiful screen and a nice design, and it’s as solidly built as laptops come.
It also looks, well, almost exactly like a MacBook Pro, to the point where I occasionally use the wrong keyboard shortcuts out of habit. Other Windows laptops have at times incorporated some MacBook design influences, but the Galaxy houses so many of them that it’s obvious what Samsung was going for.
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 MacBook Pro money for a device that doesn’t perform like one.
“Good artists copy, great artists steal.” But what if they botch the 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 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 MacBook Pro with M5 Max with 36GB of memory and a 2TB SSD. (Let’s keep that figure in the back of our minds.)
Component report card Screen: A
Webcam: D
Keyboard: D
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