Samsung Galaxy Book S Laptop Review: Long battery runtime and under 1 kg

[Redaktion]

Samsung's Galaxy Book S is an extremely lightweight mobile companion, which is powered by an ARM processor. The latter offers advantages like low power consumption and integrated LTE connectivity, but you cannot use 64-bit apps in return.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Samsung-Galaxy-Book-S-Laptop-Review-Long-battery-runtime-and-under-1-kg.477103.0.html

[Puppy]

Why the 16:9 again? It has killed it  :-\

[Joel]

Price seems rather high for what this is... $700 or so ought to be top dollar for these specs.
Additionally, these Arm systems would make perfect Chromebooks -- why wouldn't they aim in that direction instead of trying to deal with Windows software headaches?

My company would pay $500 in a heartbeat for a 15" 1080p non-touch, 64MB storage Chromebook version of this for our employees.

[djkasiodjas]

15hours in wifi test is not that amazing. There are Intel laptops that can do that in a similar chassis size and weight (1.2-1.5kg). And when you add in the price...and you can't even run basic 64bit apps, this is a joke. I don't know why you even praise it. I get this is something novel, but come on...this should be 500$ tops.

[Konstantinos]

The article is unintentionally misleading in my opinion.

The laptop is perfectly capable of running 64 bit apps, faster than many i3 laptops like the benchmark shows IF they are compiled for the Arm architecture.

The problem is the operating system that it is not ready for Arm. Install ChromeOS or Linux on this laptop and it will fly in performance with all the battery benefits.

Also many complain about the price but they can't see the top quality of the device components other than the processor.

[_MT_]

The laptop is perfectly capable of running 64 bit apps, faster than many i3 laptops like the benchmark shows IF they are compiled for the Arm architecture.

The problem is the operating system that it is not ready for Arm. Install ChromeOS or Linux on this laptop and it will fly in performance with all the battery benefits.

No, the problem is that there is a lot of legacy software that is not available in native binaries for ARM nor through Windows Store. And a lot of it probably never will. That's not a problem of an OS. Just a result of ARM not being supported before (= no existing ARM binaries) and closed source codes (= you can't make them yourself). The OS is there. It's the ecosystem that's lacking.

[_MT_]

The article is unintentionally misleading in my opinion.

It's a potential trap for unsuspecting people who just see a Windows laptop. So, it is an important limitation that people need to be aware of. Despite the wording being inaccurate.

[Konstantinos]

No, the problem is that there is a lot of legacy software that is not available in native binaries for ARM nor through Windows Store. And a lot of it probably never will. That's not a problem of an OS...

Well, the microsoft/windows approach is closed source most of the apps are also closed source so impossible to recompile unless the original developer decides to do so.

In Linux almost all apps are available in both x86 and arm as well as other architectures because the operating system's philosophy is that.

So it is an OS philosophy issue as well as the app ecosystem issue. 

[pierro78]

just got mine : octane v2 32584 (29364 in the article)

[pierro78]

Is anybody interested in linux on this snapdragon 8cx laptop ??
If yes here is a kernel, dtb and firmware for testing : https://github.com/pierro78/galaxybooks8cxkerneldeb/releases ... these work better than the ones included in the 2021 aarch64-laptops/debian-cdimage (5.11 kernel)  ...

Now that this interesting light and slim laptop is kind of affordable (about $300 used on ebay.com or amazon.com) maybe more people will be interested in playing with linux on it ...