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THIS LAPTOP IS SO THIN AND LIGHT THAT I WAS ABLE TO SUCCESSFULLY PRANK A COWORKER THAT AMAZON HAD ACCIDENTALLY SENT ME A LAPTOP WITH NO PARTS INSIDE.
It's so light that it's arguably more portable than a 13" MacBook Pro. The featherlikeness combined with its unheard of battery life makes it DEFINITIVELY more portable than any current or previous 15" MacBook Pro if you need a full day's work, because you can easily get a full 10 hourson this skinny beast and leave the adapter at home.
Also props to LG for making the smallest laptop power adapter I've ever seen, it somehow fits in my pocket comfortably.
Now let's talk about this I N C R E D I B L E screen + touchpad combination.
When I say INCREDIBLE I mean that they didn't overshoot the performance of Intel's integrated graphics and try to arbitrarily drive a 4k panel on it. They chose an unorthodox but genius resolution of 2560x1600 ( used to be what'd come on those big Dell 30" super expensive monitors which was the highest resolution you could get on a PC monitor for many years ). It's a 16:10 aspect ratio, which you never knew you needed, but once you try it and can see so much more content without scrolling it'll be hard to ever love a 16:9 laptop again. Move your taskbar to the left side of the screen and voila, you have a semi-desktop-like web browsing experience... on a macbook-air-level-thin-and-light laptop 😍😍😍😍😍😍😍
The trackpad. CAN WE TALK ABOUT THE TRACK PAD.
Having owned more than 15 macs myself over the years, I have to say, in SOME WAYS this trackpad is sharper and more precise than the MacBook Pro trackpads which have traditionally if not unanimously been the bar for a great trackpad experience.
The pad on this LG falls a little bit short in the "clicking" execution, but tracking your finger movements itself and even scrolling is on par with if not somehow better than macs. I know. I'm as shocked as you are. Just make sure you turn off the default setting of treating the bottom right portion as a right click area and use two fingers instead.
To be clear, literally every single Windows trackpad I've used over the years, which has been upwards of 30, has been terrible, in many cases pretty much unusably bad. But this Gram, somehow, is JUST REALLY REALLY GOOD. You'll still want to pack a mouse for real productivity, but for web browsing and non-creative work, even including on your stomach in bed which this laptop is actually super-well-suited to, this trackpad is a 9/10.
The keyboard is average, maybe above average for something this thin. But. It was an unrecovered fumble to tack on the numberpad which pushes everything to the side a bit when it could've been centered. 18 people left on Earth need and use a dedicated numberpad and AI will automate all 18 of their jobs away in the next 2 years, and until then those 18 people, all of whom I know personally ;), would be more than happy to buy a $10 accessory for when they're doing data entry. It's not a huge deal, but the laptop would've been both more attractive and more usable and ergonomic without the number pad.
And now the disappointing...
Thermals. Thermals are fantastic! This thing never even gets lukewarm!!! But. Probably because of that decision, it also doesn't seem to fully turbo boost even to 4 Ghz let alone the CPU's advertised 4.6 Ghz ever, even w/ all of the performance settings on max and it running off of outlet power.
It doesn't feel slow per se ( unless you compare it to say my desktop ), but plug 2 monitors in and you can definitely feel some latency if you're a power user. I hooked it up to a Dell ultrawide 3440x1440 and a 27" 1920x1080 with the internal screen still on for a 3-monitor workstation set up and I found it to be much slower feeling than my years-old 7700k desktop even for things like web browsing. Because this thing has a turbo-boost of 4.6Ghz, and is newer than my desktop which is overclocked to 4.8Ghz, they should feel about the same on the same Internet connection for something like loading a web page w/ no other apps running. But they don't. Because the LG isn't turboing to that speed unfortunately.
I believe the SSD may be part of the overall speediness problem, it was only pulling about 500 MB/s in Crystal Mark, versus the 3000-ish of my Samsung 960 Evo Raid 0 in the desktop. But I'm told it's user-replaceable, which is great.
The screen. It's beautiful, and glossy thank Todd. But, it's also a love hate thing. At 2560x1600 at this size and aspect ratio, you can't use the computer at 100% scaling no matter how good your eyesight is. Which is a slight bummer. LG, therefore, sets it to 150% by default.
Which looks good for many if not most use cases, but some fonts end up rendering weirdly and don't look quite the same as they do on other screens.
Source Code Pro, Liberation Mono, Consolas, and Cousine all look ever so slightly off w/ this set up, which makes me love coding on it a bit less.
But, at the same time, scrolling performance w/ the trackpad is really really really BUTTERY, smoother than OS X scrolling on integrated graphics feels much of the time, so there are clear benefits to choosing this resolution ( including that you still get a bit of the hiDPI effect on text in many situations as it looks smoothed and rich.
Web browsing on it is great, and the default mode of the function keys being actual F keys makes toggling F11 ( fullscreen mode ) in Chrome really really great, further diminishing the typical negatives of using a laptop screen form factor.
If you dial the scaling down to 125%, you get a functional resolution of about 1280px. What's amazing about this laptop is that there's no palpable performance hit when you do that, versus even a $6,000 2019 MacBook Pro w/ a 4TB SSD. When you dial the mac's virtual resolution to 1920x1200, 7% less than the LG at 125%, OS X's scrolling gets visibly jaggier and choppy on even the current generation MacBook Pros. Coming from a hexacore MacBook Pro w/ the upgraded graphics myself, this is mind-boggling. Windows' scaling approach has some drawbacks, usually super old apps that you might still use ( SQLYog and a few other older dev tools in my case ) don't always scale well and have weird interface issues, but for the most part things look gorgeous. So pulling this off in a thin-and-light like this LG makes me giddy when I compare it to my touchstrip MBP. And then add on the superior battery life??? Wow.
The other arguable con: The price. $1700 can get you A HELL OF A LOT in the Windows world in 2019.
You can get an 8th gen hexacore, GTX 1060, 144hz 1080p panel w/ 16GB DDR4 and a 512GB SSD from Lenovo resellers for under $1100 as of this writing. Which can even handle Rift or Vive-level VR...
But if you're looking at this Gram, you're doing so because you want that big, sexy, glossy screen and you want something that won't make one of your biceps startlingly larger than the other when you carry it.
At what this laptop sets out to do, it FATALITY-level succeeds. But it could've been so much more.
Add in an RTX 2060 ( Max-Q ) and make it a bit thicker. Also an i7-8750H. And a better SSD. And charge me $2400 for it. You need a dedicated graphics card to run more than 1 external monitor super fluidly. And NVIDIA graphics cards have gotten so small and capable and cheap relative to the already high price of this laptop.
Do this and keep the screen exactly the same and you'll take over a GIANT chunk of the laptop market. Make the looks slightly classier and more industrial and you'll take over a giant portion of the entire laptop market. Also, put all of the ports on the back. All of them.
| Standing screen display size | 17 Inches |
|---|---|
| Screen Resolution | 2560 x 1600 pixels |
| Max Screen Resolution | 2560 x 1600 Pixels |
| Processor | 1.8 GHz core_i7 |
| RAM | 16 GB DDR4 |
| Memory Speed | 2400 MHz |
| Hard Drive | 512 GB SSD |
| Graphics Coprocessor | Intel HD Graphics 610 |
| Chipset Brand | Intel |
| Card Description | Integrated |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 16 GB |
| Wireless Type | 802.11ac |
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 4 |
| Average Battery Life (in hours) | 5 Hours |
