Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsSamsung did an excellent job
Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2015
Another great Samsung Laptop.
3 years ago, I purchased a Samsung Series 7 Laptop and I loved it. I bought a squaretrade warranty for it, and when I accidentally destroyed my beloved laptop, I got a full reimbursement and bought this laptop as a replacement.
For context, I'm a college student studying engineering so I do a lot of coding, emails, word processing, and I'm pretty good at tech so I use my laptop for pretty much everything, even gaming.
Overall, this laptop is superb. The form factor and the build quality are just beautiful, it's the most beautiful laptop that I've ever seen. The keyboard is comfortable to type with, and although I had trouble for the first couple of hours dealing with touching the trackpad while typing, there is a fix (go to PC settings, go to trackpad, and make the deal to 'short', and that fixed all of my problems). The trackpad itself is pretty good, they actually dumbed it down from previous Samsung computers so it's more simple to use, but lost some functionality that I don't think many customers used (4 handed swipe, etc).
I'm not a huge fan of touch screens but this one is pretty good, and the nice part is that it folds to 180 degrees, so that when I sit on my bed I can rest my laptop flat on my bent legs and just touch the screen comfortably, so that's convenient.
The screen: this resolution is bonkers. The amount of pixels is staggering. Currently, the Windows apps that are released aren't generally made to work with Ultra HD (UHD) screens, so some programs look a little bizarre, but it's not too bad and while it's a nuisance sometimes, I'd rather have the ridiculously beautiful screen with the problems than just a 1080p screen. Also, 350 nits of brightness, It's bright everywhere, and even if it's not matte, I can see it in the sunlight really well.
The processor is low voltage Intel's 5500U, which is powerful enough to fit all of my needs. If anything, the restricting factor in this laptop is the integrated graphics, which might prevent you from playing your games, especially at the max resolutions of the laptop. The fan does kick in when under heavy load, but it doesn't bother me. The graphics aren't meant for gaming, obviously, but does its job.
8gb of ram - I can open 12 major applications and only get to 6.8 gb, but I can't imagine a scenario where that's necessary.
SSD is super fast - my first laptop with ssd and it makes a killer difference. You only get around 200gb (of 256gb) of space after windows takes its share, but since I put everything on the cloud through Drive, Dropbox, Box, and OneDrive, I don't use more than 100gb after all of my 23 programs are installed. Also, you can eliminate a lot of the bloatware that comes with it, so that frees up space and speed. I would highly recommend tweaking the start up programs, I can do a cold boot in 5 seconds, and a sleep wake in 0.8 seconds. It's great.
Keyboard is fun to type on, I wouldn't write this much unless it was. The backlight is unlike any I've seen, it's like a muffled light, and it's okay if it's completely dark but it doesn't get too bright.
Don't get frustrated with this trackpad - it takes a learning curve for your fingers to learn the muscle memory, but when you do, it works really well. There are built in trackpad settings on Windows 8 + 10 to help adjust to your needs
Speakers are interesting - they're clear and loud, but they face towards the bottom, so having it on a pillow for instance muffles it. Other than that, surprisingly good sound quality.
This computer is very stylish and svelte. I get a lot of compliments on how great it looks, and the design is very simple. A simple samsung logo on the lid, one under the screen, and everything is built of matte aluminum. Feels good.
Battery life: With maximum brightness, high performance setting, and running code compilers with internet browsing while streaming music and downloading files, I got 3 hours. But that's at absolute max usage. I tried to burn through the battery As fast as possible. Under normal usage (internet browsing, writing an essay) at 60-70% brightness, I got 5-6 hours. Granted, it's not the up to 10 hours that samsung says, but I think 10 hours of battery is completely unreasonable to expect from an ultrabook as thin and portable as this. On the upside, the charger is very compact and really easy to carry around (I carry it in my back pocket between classes)
Wifi signal strength is comparable to other high end laptops (as this has been a topic in prior samsung laptops).
Price - a little high, but I'm willing to pay for quality, so I don't mind. I'd rather pay an extra 500$ and have a great laptop for like three years than have a mediocre one.
Would recommend getting insurance - I personally like squaretrade, they gave me an amazon gift card for the purchase price of my old laptop when they couldn't repair it, so I spent that on this.
A few tips:
Uninstall bloatware, I don't use Dragon voice, so that's gone.
Adjust the start up (through task manager). I only have the essentials and the boot is amazing.
Go through trackpad settings and see what's right for you.
If you use a samsung phone or tablet, side sync is actually pretty cool. I use it to send texts during class without taking my phone out and transfer files.
I set up a dual boot on my computer to Windows 8, and another to Windows 10 just to test out Windows 10 and see how it works on this laptop. It's pretty smooth, and the only issues and bugs are those that are common to Windows 10 in general. I'd recommend waiting until the bugs get fixed (probably at service pack 1) since Windows 10 seems to be a bit buggy. Battery life, I'd say, is just a little better on Windows 10.
Be careful when moving the screen to the 180 degree position. I've seen people just snap it back really quickly and just crack the internal of the hinge. That's just unwise.
MAKE A BACKUP. I really will never understand why people do not do this. Samsung's recovery software is pretty good, and I make a recover like once every couple of weeks.
tl;dr - Great laptops, tons of pros, a few cons but none that are significant enough to change my opinion that it's one of the best high end laptops out there right now. You get what you pay for.
