Samsung Galaxy Book 2 review: thin and light design with long battery life, integrated LTE, but Snapdragon 850 is sluggish, and Windows 10 on ARM has issues
Dan Seifert / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
This review lands a week after Samsung put the $1,000+ Galaxy Book 2 on sale as its direct Surface competitor, and it reads against two earlier data points: the original 2017 Galaxy Book shipped with half its promised battery life, while the Surface Laptop 2 reviewed the same week delivers snappy performance but skips USB-C entirely.
So the question the review answers is whether Samsung's second ARM attempt fixes the first one's problems — and the verdict splits: the thin design, LTE, and battery deliver, but the Snapdragon 850 and Windows 10 on ARM software drag the experience back down.
First-order effects
- Holiday buyers weighing the Galaxy Book 2 against the Surface Laptop 2 face a stark tradeoff at similar prices: always-on LTE and long battery versus the Surface's snappy performance, with the sluggish Snapdragon 850 undercutting the $1,000+ ask.
Second-order effects
- Samsung's own response comes fast — within a year it moves to Qualcomm's newer Snapdragon 8cx in the $999 Galaxy Book S, an implicit admission that the 850 was not fast enough to carry the line.
Third-order effects
- The fault line persists for years: the 2024 Galaxy Book4 Edge still gets marked down for ARM compatibility limits even as its Snapdragon chip loses to rivals, indicating that app support rather than silicon has kept Windows-on-ARM a niche since this review.
The trend: Windows-on-ARM laptops keep trading app compatibility for battery life and built-in connectivity, with each Snapdragon generation narrowing but not closing the gap.