Samsung Galaxy Tab S12+ review: My MacBook stayed in the drawer all week
Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S12+ officially hit Malaysian shelves earlier this month, and like every flagship tablet before it, it comes with the same promise that you can leave the laptop at home. I’ve heard that line plenty of times, so I decided to actually put it to the test.
My laptop went into a drawer for a full working week, and the Tab S12+ became my only machine for writing, emails, research, social media drafts and the odd photo edit, with one rule I wasn’t allowed to break: whatever came up, the tablet had to deal with it, no sneaking back to macOS the moment things got awkward.
Barely there in my bag
The first thing you’ll notice is just how little there is of it. At 5.3mm thick and 553g, the Tab S12+ weighs a fraction of my MacBook, yet the aluminium frame still feels solid in the hand rather than flimsy, and the IP68 rating meant I didn’t have to panic when I got caught in one of those Klang Valley evening downpours.
What really makes the week possible, though, is what Samsung puts in the box. Both the S Pen and the Book Cover Keyboard Slim come bundled, so you’re not forking out extra before you can even start working, and that keyboard is ultimately what turns this from a very nice Netflix screen into something resembling a laptop.
The 12.6-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X display deserves a mention too, because honestly, it was the first thing I missed when I went back to my MacBook. It runs at 2,800 x 1,752 with a 120Hz refresh rate, blacks are properly deep, colours are punchy, and the four speakers get loud enough that I stopped bothering with earbuds whenever I watched YouTube over lunch.
The missing trackpad takes some getting used to
Naturally, most of my week was spent typing, and I’ll admit the bundled keyboard surprised me with more key travel than I expected from something so thin. You get a full row of function keys, a dedicated DeX button and an AI key that brings up Gemini or Bixby, which is all well and good. The catch is that there’s no trackpad, no backlighting and the stand only holds the screen at one fixed angle, so while it works perfectly fine at a desk, it got wobbly enough on my lap and on cramped cafe tables that I usually just gave up and moved.
The lack of a trackpad was the bigger adjustment for me. After years of MacBook gestures, having to reach up and tap the screen felt clumsy for the first couple of days, although by midweek I’d more or less stopped noticing. If you’re planning to make the switch for good, Samsung does sell a Pro Keyboard with a proper trackpad, backlit keys and a hinge that adjusts to almost any angle, but sold separately.
Meanwhile, DeX did most of the heavy lifting. Beyond running directly on the screen, plugging via USB-C gives you a lag-free wired workstation, while Wireless DeX lets you cast the desktop layout straight to a TV or monitor cable-free. Either way, you get resizable windows and a taskbar to keep Google Docs, Gmail, Chrome, and Canva side by side.
Photoshop runs better than I expected
If there’s one thing that genuinely caught me off guard, it’s how well the Tab S12+ handled creative work. This is the first Android tablet line to ship with Adobe Photoshop preloaded, and buyers get four months of the premium plan for free. While it remains the touch-optimised mobile client rather than the full desktop macOS suite, the interface feels intuitive with the S Pen, handling multi-layer layouts and quick assets without slowdown.
Credit goes to the 3nm MediaTek Dimensity 9500 paired with 12GB of RAM here, because nothing I threw at it made the tablet stutter. Trimming clips in CapCut, juggling a dozen Chrome tabs in DeX and, admittedly outside working hours, a few rounds of a demanding mobile game on high settings were all a breeze.
The S Pen was far more useful than I expected. For jotting notes and marking up PDFs, it doesn’t need any charging or pairing, and it snaps magnetically right onto the tablet. It handled all my daily work effortlessly, even if serious digital artists might find its lightweight build a bit basic.
As for Galaxy AI, it actually earned its keep. Note Assist tidied up my messy meeting scribbles into something readable, Writing Assist came in handy for tweaking the tone of captions, and Transcript Assist did a solid job turning recorded interviews into text, even if it occasionally tripped over local accents and Manglish, so you’ll still want to proofread.
Still not quite a MacBook
Battery life was the one thing I never had to think about. The 10,600mAh cell comfortably got me through full workdays of writing, browsing and video calls, and I’d usually go to bed with charge to spare. It supports 45W charging, but with a battery that big, a full top-up from empty still takes a little over 2 hours, and mind you, there’s no charger in the box, only a USB-C cable.
That said, a week was more than enough to find the gaps. Some of the desktop-class tools I rely on simply don’t have equally capable Android versions, managing files is nowhere near as straightforward as Finder, and the missing trackpad on the bundled keyboard never fully stopped bugging me. It’s also a bit odd that the Tab S12+ tops out at Wi-Fi 6E when the pricier Tab S12 Ultra gets Wi-Fi 7, especially at this price.
On the bright side, there’s a microSD slot for extra storage, and Samsung is promising seven years of OS and security updates, so this is a tablet you can comfortably hang on to for a long time.
Worth it if you mostly live in the browser
So, can the Galaxy Tab S12+ replace a MacBook? For a week of writing, emails, social media planning and light creative work, my honest answer is yes, and there were parts of it I actually enjoyed more than my laptop, because the screen, the weight and the stylus are things a MacBook simply can’t give you. If your work depends on specific desktop software or you can’t live without a trackpad, though, you’ll want to budget for the Pro Keyboard or keep your laptop around.
In Malaysia, the Galaxy Tab S12+ comes in Gray and Silver with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, priced at RM4,999 for the WiFi model and RM5,649 for the 5G version. Until 8 November, Samsung is knocking RM400 off when you pay with SPayLater or an eligible bank card, bringing the WiFi model down to RM4,599, while students and educators can get it from RM3,999.20 after verifying a .edu email.
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