Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsExcellent laptop for speed, form factor, battery
Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2019
I did a lot of research and purchased an LG Gram 14" i7 2 months ago. This is not a laptop I had in my sights, but after looking at a lot of options, it really fit what I wanted. The Gram is feather light (2.2 lbs), has a quad-core processor (both the i5 & i7 versions are quad-core w/ hyperthreading), supports either 20 or 24 GB RAM (i5 vs. i7), and has two M.2 SSD slots. I bought the i7 14" mainly because I couldn't do the i5 14" which _only_ comes in white. I actually preferred the i5 for a little better battery life, and the price was $400 less before Christmas, but I just couldn't do white. White looked nice in the store, but I was afraid it wouldn't wear well over the long term. That said, the battery life on the i7 is still awesome! The i7 I bought easily runs 8+ hours and I toggled the switch to only charge the battery to 80% max in order to preserve battery life. I upgraded to a 1TB Samsung 960 EVO NVMe drive and to 24 GB RAM with a Crucial 16 GB stick (The Crucial website is spot on for the module type and max RAM supported by the Gram). The upgrades did impact battery life. I was getting noticeably better battery life before the upgrades, but it is still quite good at 8 or so hours on 80% charge. Why 80% charge? See below. (BTW, there's a good Tom's Hardware Guide article on the battery impact of NVMe drives. Just google "battery nvme" and it's near the top.)
Here are some nice surprise features (things I didn't expect to care much about, but appreciate after using it for 2 months):
-The bundled LG management software is actually really good. In particular, "LG Control Panel" lets you easily disable the touch screen (I don't use it), switch the max battery charge between 100% or 80% to preserve battery life (charging to 100% is generally not good for lithium batteries--but on occasion, it's nice to be able to just toggle on 100% charge in the LG Control Panel software), toggle keyboard backlighting on/off, and several other settings. Also, the "LG Update Center" makes it easy to update drivers and software--really easy.
-On the i7 version, the Fingerprint reader is nice. Super fast to logon with Windows Hello. Wouldn't say this alone is worth the upgrade, but I'm really liking it.
-Charging with USB-C Power Deliver (PD) is handy. I bought a wall charger (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0712252ZQ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o05__o00_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1) and battery (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B072BD98CM/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04__o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1) that can charge the LG Gram.
The only cons I have so far are fairly minor. The main one is that I would have preferred a matte screen to glossy. This actually is kind of annoying when I'm at a coffee shop or other location with a lot of sun coming in the window. I don't know why they do laptops with glossy screens. If I were working outside a lot, this would be a pretty big problem. But I'm usually inside, so not huge. Also, removing the bottom cover to get to the motherboard was a pain. I really thought I was going to break it, but luckily I did not. If you're going to do some upgrades, look for videos online showing you the process.
