New LG Gram is the Lightest 17-inch Laptop Ever at Just 3 Pounds (laptopmag.com) 139
LG has unveiled two new laptops in its Gram lineup in advance of CES in Las Vegas next month, and the Gram 17 looks like a stunner. LaptopMag: It weighs just 3 pounds, which is crazy light for a notebook with a 17-inch display. That's the same weight as the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. A typical 17-inch laptop weighs 6 to 6.5 pounds, so getting such a big screen in such a lightweight package is definitely no small feat.
Does that mean the specs skimpy? Nope. LG says the 15 x 10.5 x 0.7-inch Gram 17 packs a 8th-generation Intel Core i7-8565U, up to 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. (There's also a slot for an additional SSD). The Gram 17's 72W battery is rated for up to 19.5 hours of usage, which we will obviously put to the test once we get our hands on the laptop. Other highlights include a sharp 2560 x 1600 pixel display with a 16:10 aspect ratio, a fingerprint reader and a chassis that's rated MIL-STD-810G for durability. LG's website lists a suggested price of $1,699.99 for the LG Gram 17.
Does that mean the specs skimpy? Nope. LG says the 15 x 10.5 x 0.7-inch Gram 17 packs a 8th-generation Intel Core i7-8565U, up to 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. (There's also a slot for an additional SSD). The Gram 17's 72W battery is rated for up to 19.5 hours of usage, which we will obviously put to the test once we get our hands on the laptop. Other highlights include a sharp 2560 x 1600 pixel display with a 16:10 aspect ratio, a fingerprint reader and a chassis that's rated MIL-STD-810G for durability. LG's website lists a suggested price of $1,699.99 for the LG Gram 17.
Re:caps lock indicator? (Score:5, Funny)
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I sometimes wonder when the MacBook Wheel [theonion.com] will actually become a reality. Definitely will solve the key issues.
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That was 9 years after I designed the iSphere and an article about it...
https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
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I sometimes wonder when the MacBook Wheel will actually become a reality.
Apple released it in April 2010 under the name iPad (1st generation). This device, in essence a 9.7" iPod, turned out not to be an April Fools joke.
Re:caps lock indicator? (Score:5, Funny)
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"Does the laptop have a caps lock key, and if it does, is there a caps lock indicator?"
You know that you can disable the Caps-lock key?
First thing I do on a new machine.
There's even an app for that. :-)
Had not considered 17" until now (Score:2)
That's pretty impressive. (Score:5, Funny)
It's nice to know what I'll be buying in 5 years for $250.
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You won't be able to buy something this nice for $250 in five years. My current machine is six years old and still better than anything in the $250 range.
This is definitely on my list of candidates for my next laptop. I looked at the last model in detail and it seemed well made and durable. People have reported good durability. It's serviceable too, not quite on Thinkpad level but you can easily replace the important bits that are likely to die or need an upgrade over the course of a decade or more, e.g. th
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Some of us buy used computers, $250 for a used 17" "gram" sounds about right. Only problem is the lack of Thunderbolt as the integrated graphics isn't too impressive.
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I wish that were true. For $250-$300, you can get a 2 in one machine, i3 or i5, 8 gigs of RAM, and a 5400 RPM HDD, or at best a 64 GB MMC SD card, which renders the machine entirely unusable. It would be nice if a low-end M.2 SATA or even NVMe SSD were tossed in, but no PC vendor wants to make a usable machine at that price point.
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My current machine is a W530 with quad core i7, 32 GB of RAM, and a 2GB K1000 graphics card for which I am out $350.
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Well, you can buy a POS like you detailed, brand new for $250-300, or buy a 5 YO, used workhorse of a machine for that much. Performance hasn't changed much in the last 5 years. New machines will have USB C ports, and maybe better wifi down the road a few years from now, but all that stuff will still be around in 5 years when the LG machine gets cheap.
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But you can buy it now for 3 pounds.
Re:Perversion of english (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect the marketing is being laid on pretty thick here. They're claiming that a 72 Wh battery will run this 17" laptop for up to 19.5 hours, while the 15" MacBook Pro's 83.6 Wh battery is rated for up to 10 hours. I know it's a different CPU, but I have a hard time believing that Intel made a 2x improvement in performance-per-watt without a die shrink, much less enough extra improvement beyond that to make up for the extra power required by a significantly larger screen.
Re:Perversion of english (Score:4, Interesting)
FTFY. I don't think I've ever gotten anywhere close to ten hours on my retina MBP. On average, I'm lucky to get much more than three hours unless I'm doing something that uses almost zero CPU, like web browsing.
The problem is, power management is not a replacement for a larger battery, but unfortunately, Apple's hardware engineering managers, with their utterly myopic focus on making laptops thinner, can't seem to let that reality seep through their thick skulls. So instead of giving us the maximum battery size you can legally carry on an airplane (100 Wh), each generation of MBP has had a smaller battery than the one before it. Therefore, in my experience, actual battery life has gotten measurably worse every time I've upgraded my hardware.
Of all the Macs I've owned, the one with the best battery life was the PowerBook Pismo, way back at the turn of the century. Why? Because the pre-iPhone Apple understood that having removable batteries means you can have more than one, and that what matters is not the best-case battery life, which most users will never actually see, but rather the worst-case battery life, which all users will at least sometimes see. The 4x difference between best-case and worst-case is a real kick in the teeth, and will continue to be until such time as the worst-case battery life improves by at least a factor of two.
The Pismo, in particular, was notable in that it had two battery bays, each of which could hold a roughly 70 Wh battery. If needed, I could easily carry around a third battery and hot-swap it for the fully-drained battery without even putting the laptop to sleep. The result was a whopping 9+ hours of real-world battery life (best-case 15 hours) even while running apps like Photoshop or audio editing software. Every laptop Apple has made since then has been a complete joke by comparison, unless you're using the laptop for a task that an iPad can handle just as well, such as light-duty web browsing.
These days, I always carry a power supply around, and assume that if I'm doing anything even remotely interesting for more than an hour or so, I'm going to end up tethered to a wall outlet. Gone are the days of writing software on the beach. Modern Apple hardware just can't do it anymore. Neither can anybody else's, to be fair, but Apple is pretty just about the only company whose hardware ever could, and I miss that.
Mind you, I don't relish going back to the thickness of the Pismo (mainly thick because of the design of the plastic case and the use of round cells in the battery pack), but I would gladly go back to at least the thickness of the pre-retina MBP if it got me two removable 99.9 Wh LiPo batteries.
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FTFY. I don't think I've ever gotten anywhere close to ten hours on my retina MBP. On average, I'm lucky to get much more than three hours unless I'm doing something that uses almost zero CPU, like web browsing.
The problem is, power management is not a replacement for a larger battery, but unfortunately, Apple's hardware engineering managers, with their utterly myopic focus on making laptops thinner, can't seem to let that reality seep through their thick skulls. So instead of giving us the maximum battery size you can legally carry on an airplane (100 Wh), each generation of MBP has had a smaller battery than the one before it. Therefore, in my experience, actual battery life has gotten measurably worse every time I've upgraded my hardware.
I agree that Apple should maxout the battery size in MBPs, but their obsessive desire to make it as thin as possible negates any chance of a larger battery. However, companies are starting to offer external batteries with decent wattages. Hyper offers a 100Wh model that claims to double the 15"MBP operating time. It also charges other devices and doubles as a charger when plugged into an outlet. I am considering getting one for when I travel since I can charge a phone, iPad and MBP with it. https://www.indi [indiegogo.com]
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companies are starting to offer external batteries with decent wattages. Hyper offers a 100Wh model that claims to double the 15"MBP operating time. It also charges other devices and doubles as a charger when plugged into an outlet. I am considering getting one for when I travel since I can charge a phone, iPad and MBP with it. https://www.indiegogo.com/proj [indiegogo.com]... [indiegogo.com]
I normally think those things are kinda lame; but that looks like a perrfect companion for a mobile MBP setup.
Thanks for the tip!
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The link doesn't work, but this one does: https://www.indiegogo.com/proj... [indiegogo.com]
Anyway, totally agree with you. USB-C has made it extremely easy to run your laptop longer.
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Mind you, I don't relish going back to the thickness of the Pismo
...and therein lies the rub.
Yes, batteries have gotten a bit better since the Pismo days (was it even LiOn?). Nope, it was NiCD (!!!) (I think it was actually at least NiMH in 2000) :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
But I'm not sure even making the MBP as thick as a Mid-2012 Non-Retina version (which I happen to own), would make room for 2 100 WH batteries (and could you even fly with that?!?).
Sorry, making MBPs out of a solid chunk of Aluminum makes for a very rugged laptop; but unfortunately, has kinda ki
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Apple switched from NiCd to NiMh in the second generation of PowerBook 5300 batteries (circa 1995), and from NiMh to Lithium Ion (round cell) in the PowerBook 3400 (1997). Note that they were round-cell Lithium ion, not Lithium polymer (flat bags). Those didn't come until much later.
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You obviously do not run Xcode. Or Finale. Or Lightroom. There's no way any of those apps runs anywhere close to 6 hours unless it is idle, and in the case of Finale, not even then.
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I suspect the marketing is being laid on pretty thick here.
Ya thunk?!
The thing weighs 1300 grams and they call it the Gram to brag about how light it is.
If the 17" screen was 1" usable, I'd say that's pretty good, way closer to the truth than some of their other claims.
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Whenever you see the words "up to", substitute "less than", which means the same, but conveys the truth better.
I want to know what the worst case numbers are, not the best case. Because worst case is what will be what causes grief, not best case.
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See subject: #1 = how you got a +5
I can't speak for any of the upmodders, but would like to venture a guess that it's due to an attempt at being helpful and friendly, using reasonable articulation instead of coming across as a lunatic.
I used to feel sorry for you, apk. I really did. Your universe clearly only partially overlaps the one the rest of us live in, which cannot make life easy. But the stalking behavior, following people to attack them is just not excusable.
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Screen brightness all the way down, WiFi off, booted into Safe Mode, running Notepad.
False advertising (Score:3)
This laptop should be named the LG 1360.777 Grams. ... Perhaps that is the model number?
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This laptop should be named the LG 1360.777 Grams. ... Perhaps that is the model number?
;-)
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That's what I was thinking.
If this thing really weighed one gram like the name implies, by my calculations it would float away like a helium balloon.
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If this thing really weighed one gram like the name implies, by my calculations it would float away like a helium balloon.
The New LG Gram - It's Lighter Than Air!*
* Tether not included
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Displays are measured corner to corner. Of course, sqrt(15^2 + 10.5^2) is actually 18.3 inches, so some of those numbers must be off.
If it's a 16:10 display, to compute the dimensions, use w = 1.6h and fill that into the pythagorean theorem (c^2 = a^2 + b^2).
(17^2) = [(1.6h)^2 + h^2] = [2.56(h^2) + h^2] = 3.56(h^2)
Thus, h^2 = 17^2/3.56, and h ~= 9", w ~= 14.4". Yeah, those numbers are way, way off. Either that or it isn't a 17" screen.
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Displays are measured corner to corner. Of course, sqrt(15^2 + 10.5^2) is actually 18.3 inches, so some of those numbers must be off.
Aren't you ignoring the bezel?
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Couldn't they just put a notch in instead?
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Ah. Those were the machine dimensions. I misread that being as the dimensions of the display. Then yes, those numbers make complete sense.
nobody wants this (Score:1)
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That is my expectation as well. The heaviest components in a laptop is normally its support structure, the cooling path and the battery. My Laptop is in the 6lbs range but the case is solid metal and very sturdy and not flimsy at all. The specs that they give, doesn't add too much weight compared to other specs. an SD card for 500gigs will weigh as much as a 100gig sd card, Getting 1 16gig ram weighs as much as an 8 gig ram.
Much of the weight on a laptop is holding it together,
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I had a good look at the previous model and it was solid. I guess it depends what materials they use and how they structure the body.
You could open the base with standard screws and upgrade it too.
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Anything this light is flimsy and impossible to service or cool.
Emitting photons doesn't have to weaken the materials, and LEDs are getting more efficient all the time; that means they run cooler.
Seems really nice, just watch out for bags (Score:2)
I carried a 17" MacBook around for a while, which was great. Something to be aware of though if you are thinking about getting one, is a lot of laptop compartments in bags are assuming a 15" laptop at largest, so the 17" may not fit...
Still hoping Apple brings back a 17" model at some point.
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1. I don't think it will ever happen. Tim Cook seems to hate Macs and only uses an iPad.
2. Even if they did bring back the 17" MacBook Pro, it's going to have that awful, fragile, no-keys-travel keyboard with crap butterfly switches that fail either from dust, heat or manufacturing defects.
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I don't think it will ever happen. Tim Cook seems to hate Macs and only uses an iPad.
Someone that hated Macs wouldn't have produced the iMac Pro, the new Mac mini, and soon the updated Mac Pro...
They did have a bit of a pause on decent hardware updates, but that drought has ended.
Even if they did bring back the 17" MacBook Pro, it's going to have that awful, fragile, no-keys-travel keyboard with crap butterfly switches that fail either from dust, heat or manufacturing defects.
I like the new keyboard persona
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I'll give you the new Mac mini because it is exactly what most people have been asking, down to the selection of ports at the back. The only missing thing is a user-replaceable m.2 SSD and maybe easier-to-access SODIMM slots and given the new higher price it should come with 16GB instead of 8GB.
I can't give you the
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Supposedly "pro" laptops without physical function keys and tiny arrow keys in one of the worst possible layout I've seen?
The Touch Bar is vastly more useful than physical function keys and the moment an external keyboard comes out with one I would buy it for my desktop. I've asked Apple for one in feedback surveys...
The arrow keys did not bother me.
As for the MacBook Air, why does it NEED more than a dual core processor? There is a lot of value in a system that updates all of the other components while k
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I'm not asking for an 85W 64-cores CPU in the MacBook Air, but even the iPhones and iPads have been at least quad-core for a number of years now. Heck there's even quad-core Atom CPUs so surely there is a quad-core i3 that could fit inside the MacBook Air.
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1. I don't think it will ever happen. Tim Cook seems to hate Macs and only uses an iPad.
2. Even if they did bring back the 17" MacBook Pro, it's going to have that awful, fragile, no-keys-travel keyboard with crap butterfly switches that fail either from dust, heat or manufacturing defects.
You do realize, of course, that Apple has been running more Mac ads than iPhone ads ever since the beginning of November. I have seen two ads: The MacBook Air ad, and now followed by the black and white ad showing people using Macs in various settings (including a shot of Paul McCartney behind a mixing desk).
In fact, November and December marks the most amount of Mac advertising on TV since Jobs' died.
Sorry to refute your Hater meme there; but dems da fax.
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Gotta sell those laptops with defective keyboards as soon as possible to rack in as much repair fees as possible once they get out of warranty!
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Why would they advertise products that are selling well? There's no need to advertise the iPhone. But the Mac platform is a train wreck, largely from having been ignored so thoroughly for so long, and
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with most of the "improvements" being colossal mistakes like the touch bar
Which makes it very interesting that that's the only one in your "colossal mistakes" list.
The TouchBar isn't a colossal mistake. It is actually pretty damned useful, given the right Application. But I think I would have rather seen the TouchPad turned into a mini-Digitizer (with Pencil Support!), too.
I think that it would be silly to say that Apple didn't run to the mobile device market pretty quickly, and pretty whole-hog; but I think that with the move to the new HQ, they have reapportioned their talent s
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The touch bar is a colossal mistake. Any apps in which you regularly have to use modifier keys with anything in the top row results in a crazy rate of false triggering that makes the app borderline unusable, and worse, option + touchbar actually opens the System Preferences app and kicks you entire
Re:7 pounds (Score:2)
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4 pounds of weight must not have been hard to Remove.
But the first 3 pounds must have been easy. What have they been putting in laptops to make them so heavy?
Batteries, Heat Sinks and Cooling Systems.
But that's ok, you don't need any of those, do you?
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Batteries, Heat Sinks and Cooling Systems.
But that's ok, you don't need any of those, do you?
Also screws, brackets, access panels, sockets, separate PC boards for DRAM and flash, etc.
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Given the battery and CPU specs, I would guess more like 6–7 hours of light web browsing, 1 hour to 75 minutes under heavy CPU/GPU load.
That said, I agree that the battery looks massively under-specified for a 17" laptop, unless I'm missing something (such as deliberately massively throttled CPU performance).
Who would buy this? (Score:1)
Who would buy a 17" laptop while also being obsessed with weight to the point of spending way more money than they need to on an inferior product simply because it is marginally lighter? Seems like a VERY niche audience.
Also nice use of 15" keyboard on a 17" laptop. No wasted space there.
A lot of people would like this (Score:2)
When I travelled with a 17" laptop, I loved the larger screen size - it's especially good fo consulting if you are visiting client sites a lot and bringing your own laptop to work on - even with an external monitor available.
Who doesn't like a larger screen? With the extra weight slimmed off it's even more valuable.
The only real issue (which I mentioned earlier) is that a lot of laptop compartments in bags and backpacks will not fit a 17" laptop. Maybe with it being slimmer some would work though.
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It's not about key size. It's about having to move the hands closer together and repetitive stress injuries.
Misnamed. It is not gram (Score:2)
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Their name is off by three orders of magnitude? Lame.
17" 16x10 (Score:2)
I hung on to my old 2011 17" Macbook Pro till it would no longer reliably boot up, purely for that screen form factor. I would buy this just for that screen, regardless of other specs.
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Step 1: buy metal briefcase
Step 2: buy 2018 Mac mini
Step 3: Buy display that fits inside the cover of the briefcase
Step 4: buy the most lightweight UPS you can find that will power both your Mac mini and display for as many hours as you need
Step 5: buy reliable keyboard
Step 6: put everything in the briefcase
Voilà, portable Mac with a 17" display and a reliable keyboard.
So no Discrete GPU? (Score:2)
The low weight is pretty impressive but I'm going to guess there's no discrete GPU if they didn't bother listing what it was which makes the specs on this laptop a lot more believable. Seems like an "ultralight" class 13 inch laptop that's been sized up to 17 inches so for the business travelling laptop that wants a huge screen.
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Believe it or not, not all computer users are 20-something with 20/20 vision that don't mind computer screens the size of toys.
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It's funny that the article about a laptop called Gram gives its weight in pounds.
The weight is 1361 grams, by the way.
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17" and it's not 4K? (Score:1)
LG What? (Score:2)
Waiting for 0 effective mass laptops (Score:2)
I'd like it to be made out of helium or something really light. Then I can finally have literal cloud computing.
They messed up the keyboard (Score:5, Insightful)
One look and it's not an option.. the keyboard has a numpad, so the typing keys are shoved over to the left.
This is massively stupid, seems to happen on all Windows PC laptops and it's a mistake Apple didn't make. I use my laptop for typing documents. A numpad ruins it.
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It's not just the number pad. A lot of laptop keyboards are simply badly designed, the space is being used for the wrong(TM) things. Thinkpad keyboards used to be great with a clear set of Home/End/PgUp/PgDn and large Esc/Del keys, I'm not sure if they still do. While Apple does put the typing area in the center, they hardly have any usable arrow keys or the aforementioned ones.
Old PC keyboards had Home/End/PgUp/PgDn on the number pad when NumLock was off. So a number pad wouldn't be all bad if they just
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Type in data?
You need better lab equipment.
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I got an Elsra USB num pad. It's programmable so you can thrown macros in the keys and you can slip paper under the transparent key caps. So a it's a battery free shortcut button pad.
Grams, people! (Score:2)
16:10, yippy!!! (Score:2)
I really hope this laptop will sell well because it's the first non-apple laptop offering 16:10 aspect ratio and above-HD resolution in many years. Maybe this will convince HP and others to again make some 16:10 laptops, too.
or 1.4kg (Score:2)
that's 1.4kg for the rest of us.