Samsung’s new 15-inch Notebook 9 is a shockingly light workhorse

Samsung’s Notebook 9 series laptops are best known for their light weight, and this year is no exception. The company announced a spate of super-sleek notebooks before the show started, but we took the updated 15-inch Notebook 9 for a spin and it was immediately clear that portability fanatics will find a lot to like here.

It’s one thing to read about how light this thing is — it’s another thing entirely to actually feel it for yourself. When I first picked up the 15-inch Notebook 9, I honestly thought it was a dummy model Samsung forgot to put away. (The fact that the screen was on should’ve been a give-away, but what can I say — I was a little shocked.) In case you haven’t been keeping count, this particular Notebook 9 variant weighs in at only 2.17 pounds, or just a few hairs heavier than Apple’s 12-inch MacBook. This stunningly light body was made possible because of a magnesium alloy that allows for great durability (or so Samsung says) without the added ounces. Samsung’s It’s been a day since I played with the machine and I still can’t quite get it out of my head.

More importantly, the 15-inch Notebook 9 doesn’t force you to choose between power and portability. You’ll be working with one of Intel’s 7th generation i7 chipsets and up to 8GB of DDR4 dual-channel RAM — I didn’t get to spend a ton of time with the machine, but it certainly felt snappy enough as opened Chrome tab after Chrome tab and tried to treat it like a jerk. We’ll have more nuanced impressions on performance after we get a final production unit, but for now it seems safe to say the Notebook should slot into your daily workflow without much trouble. For those of you who need a little extra oomph for your gaming, Samsung also has a variant on deck with a dedicated NVIDIA 940MX GPU — just know that machine is about half a pound heavier than the base model. No matter what graphics processor drives those visuals, they generally look pretty great on Samsung’s 15-inch, 1080p screen — did anyone expect anything different from them?

There’s a full complement of ports here too — 2 USB 3.0, 1 USB 2.0 and HDMI — but the Notebook 9 uses a Type C port for power. Your phone charger will do in a pinch if you need power, but you should make sure to keep that included 45W power adapter handy, as it should fully recharge the machine in about 80 minutes.

There’s at least one potential problem though: as far as looks go, the Notebook 9 is unassuming at best. The body is bathed in a nondescript silver, without much to break up the visual monotony beyond a Samsung logo slapped on the front. Style mavens might not need to apply, but the folks who value functionality over sheer style probably won’t mind the trade-off much (if at all). In fact, the overall strength of this package is enough to make me consider ditching the 12-inch MacBook I’ve been traveling with lately. We’re counting on nabbing one for review soon, so stay tuned as we dive deeper into Samsung’s latest work.

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