I have had my galaxy book 4 edge 16" (X Elite - X1E80100) for about a year now (Bought in Aug 2024).

I will admit, I jumped onto the bandwagon of ARM chips and being super efficient + long battery life which was perfect for my use case (uni student who has to write code).

However, my experience has been quite abysmal with the GB4E, and looking back, I wish I had just bought an M1 MBP or something instead.

The Good

GB4E is fairly good CPU wise. Good at handling Notion, many chrome tabs, etc. Screen was great, keyboard is fine, I think for a university student looking for an alternative to Apple, it seemed to meet most of my needs. I ran into compatibility issues for certain Java versions but there were alternative work arounds that fit my use case.

For a 16", it was quite light, which also helps as I have to carry it around all day for hours. It also ran mostly cool although it would get warm after a few hours of notion and google docs use.

Connectivity with my Samsung Tablet was also pretty good. Using Samsung Notes on my tablet and then viewing and editing on my laptop was pretty helpful.

The Bad

Battery life was quite disappointing. I found that I could get about 8 hours of battery life on min settings with brightness at ~60% from a full charge. It wasn't a big issue since I could go home and just charge at the end of the day, but I was expecting more of a charge every few days or so experience.

While the CPU was fine, I don't know if it's $1200 good. Does it work fairly smoothly most of the time with Notion and Docs? Yes. Does it occasionally chug and stutter when I'm writing lecture notes for a single lecture? Also yes.

The Ugly

A few months ago, I started running into some hardware issues with my laptop. The fingerprint sensor (which was working fine for most of my time with it) suddenly decided to stop working. Windows Hello wouldn't detect anything, and device manager could detect it as EGISTEC BOOTLOADER, which after some googling means the sensor wasn't initialized? Uninstalling it did nothing. A fresh windows install did nothing. I have given up on troubleshooting it.

The issues did not stop there though.

My laptop now is consistently hanging/freezing and I have to manually force a reboot to fix it. My speakers will randomly stop playing sound even though Windows still detects it and will only play sound again once I reboot my laptop. The fans randomly will start whirring at 100% and making strange sounds despite only having a few tabs open (like Gmail).

Any forms of troubleshooting have been in vain. I cannot reinstall drivers via Samsung Update because it has been sunset for Windows 11 25H2. It will direct me to Samsung Device Care for driver updates except there is not tab for it on the software:

WHERE TF IS UPDATES??

Manually downloading drivers through the Samsung website fixed no issues either.

When speaking with Samsung Support, the only way they can fix it is for me to send it in, except as a full time Uni student who also works part time and needs the laptop, I do not have the time to wait for a week+ while it ships, gets fixed, and ships back.

Googling hasn't really brought up many solutions either, as the last posts abt the GB4E seems to be from years ago. Maybe I did just get a faulty unit. Maybe I was just unlucky. But for not having damaged the laptop at all (never dropped, never got any water on it), I feel like the laptop was just a huge waste of money.