Samsung Notebook 9 - 2016

This cost and weight conscious 13-inch Ultrabook will wow you with its slender frame and gorgeous screen, but the short battery life is cause for concern.

Despite not decisively beating the competition in any one area, the Samsung Notebook 9 comes close across the board, making it a safe, if not exactly exciting choice for a slim 15-inch laptop.

Samsung's 15-inch Notebook 9 isn't flashy -- it doesn't have a detachable design or a 4K screen -- but it gets all the important stuff right, making it one of the best laptops we've tested recently. Highlights include decent battery life, fast performance and a comfortable keyboard. What's more, thanks to some slim bezels and a light, 2.9-pound chassis, it's so compact that it's easy to forget you're using a 15-inch system. If you can live without a touchscreen there's a lot to love here.

The Samsung Notebook 9 15-inch combines a big display with extreme portability and strong Core i7 performance.

The 15" market is mainstream in the US, and there are Ultrabooks, budget laptops with plastic casings and low end CPUs, just a few convertibles and quite a few quad core machines with strong dedicated graphics. Thus I can't say that you should run out and buy the 15" Samsung Notebook 9, because I don't know which of those four types of laptops you're in the market for. If you do want an Ultrabook with a dual core CPU and are looking for the lightest and slimmest laptop you can get, by all means the Notebook 9 15" is a top contender. The price is reasonable for what you get-- the LG Gram 15 similarly configured other than a bigger SSD, is $1,500.