New LG Gram is the Lightest 17-inch Laptop Ever at Just 3 Pounds (laptopmag.com)

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.

Comments

Re:Perversion of english

[dgatwood]

That's because everyone but Apple lies like a dog even worse than Apple does when it comes to battery life claims.

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.