The added power makes a difference. For typical CPU-driven tasks, the laptop posted the highest benchmark scores of any Copilot+ PC I’ve tested to date. It beat the Asus by just 1% in Geekbench 6, but beat laptops with lower-end Snapdragon chips (as well as Intel- and AMD-based laptops) by up to 20%. Graphics-based tests produced more murky and mixed results, with the laptop holding up to rival other Copilot+ PCs but, as expected, lagging far behind recent scores from more traditional Intel machines.
In the real world, its power is clear. Microsoft’s real-time Live Captions system is something I often use to stress test the Copilot+ PC, as many PCs struggle to translate fast-paced dialogue. The Book4 Edge did the best job I’ve seen so far of this complex task, handling even heavily accented speech with little to no loss.
Battery life is also excellent, delivering about 14.5 hours of runtime at maximum brightness in our full-screen YouTube playback test (vs. 15 hours and 12 minutes on the Microsoft Surface Pro and 13 hours and 12 minutes on the Asus Vivobook S 15). The screen isn’t inferior either, delivering vibrant colors and exceptional brightness while minimizing glare. Audio, while not particularly powerful, is solid, thanks to a fan that’s nearly inaudible even under load; I had to press my ear to the laptop to hear the slight whirring.
Photo: Christopher Null
What don’t I like? The key travel is a little too short, which impairs typing comfort, and I found the tiny arrow keys particularly hard to use. The keyboard backlighting doesn’t help much with seeing the keys unless the room is pretty dark. And we’ve mentioned the touchpad before, but it’s worth mentioning again here, because it’s so, so, so big. Ultimately, these issues are all relatively minor.
At $1,500, the Book4 Edge is $200 more expensive than the smaller Asus Vivobook, but in terms of price/performance, it’s close to the top of that machine. If you want to take advantage of Microsoft’s new AI features (and we won’t criticize you if you don’t), it’s clear that it’s important to get the most performance out of your hardware. In that sense, Samsung has taken the performance crown while keeping the price reasonable. It’s not the best value for money in the Copilot+ PC world right now, but it does offer the most value.
