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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.
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.
No, they removed the keyboard because it was too heavy.
16:10 aspect ratio on a 17" laptop that's only 3lbs! $1,700 price tag: can't afford... Waiting game, maybe price drop by next year.
It's nice to know what I'll be buying in 5 years for $250.
This laptop should be named the LG 1360.777 Grams. ... Perhaps that is the model number?
#DeleteChrome
I carried a 17" MacBook around for a while, which was great. Something to be aware of though if you are thinking about getting one, is a lot of laptop compartments in bags are assuming a 15" laptop at largest, so the 17" may not fit...
Still hoping Apple brings back a 17" model at some point.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I suspect the marketing is being laid on pretty thick here. They're claiming that a 72 Wh battery will run this 17" laptop for up to 19.5 hours, while the 15" MacBook Pro's 83.6 Wh battery is rated for up to 10 hours. I know it's a different CPU, but I have a hard time believing that Intel made a 2x improvement in performance-per-watt without a die shrink, much less enough extra improvement beyond that to make up for the extra power required by a significantly larger screen.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I sometimes wonder when the MacBook Wheel will actually become a reality. Definitely will solve the key issues.
Wonder what they took out Ben.
[($)]
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,
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
No. Its camera detects your rage and sets the caps lock accordingly.
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).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
From the summary it looks like it should have been named 1350 gram.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
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?
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.
That was 9 years after I designed the iSphere and an article about it...
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
BlameBillCosby.com
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.
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.
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
It's not about key size. It's about having to move the hands closer together and repetitive stress injuries.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
Don't they mean the LG 0.035274 Ounces?
It's funny that the article about a laptop called Gram gives its weight in pounds.
The weight is 1361 grams, by the way.
#DeleteFacebook
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Screen brightness all the way down, WiFi off, booted into Safe Mode, running Notepad.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I'd like it to be made out of helium or something really light. Then I can finally have literal cloud computing.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
"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. :-)
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.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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.
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.indiegogo.com/proj...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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/...
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 killed the idea of removable "drive bays", regardless of the thickness.
I guess the best thing to do is invest in one of those externals, like this Poster suggests. Is it a perfect solution?
Is anything? And just remember how much faster, and how much more I/O expandable, that 2016-2018 MBP is than your beloved Pismo... ;-)
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]
I normally think those things are kinda lame; but that looks like a perrfect companion for a mobile MBP setup.
Thanks for the tip!
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.
The retina display is considerably thinner than the pre-retina display was, so a retina MBP that's as thick as the pre-retina MBP would have a thicker body than the pre-retina MBP. I'm not sure you could actually squeeze in two 100 Wh batteries, but you could obviously do a lot better than what we have right now.
Solid block? The bottom is a separate plate that screws on. If done right, removable bottom batteries shouldn't significantly weaken the hardware structurally, I wouldn't think. Side batteries would be harder, but oh, so cool if they could pull it off.
I have such a device. In practice, I rarely use it, because there's not a huge difference between being tethered to a large external brick and being tethered to a wall outlet, in my experience. It's still pretty much the opposite of portable.
Yeah. Now I just need a separate laptop bag for all the dongles required to actually use that expandability. :-D
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It's a Gram, don't use pounds! That thing weights 1360.78 grams.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I saw the headline and thought "Gosh, only 3 pounds, that's really cheap!"
And then you got the trashcan Mac Pro. I guess it's spherical in two dimensions, at least.
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.
The link doesn't work, but this one does: https://www.indiegogo.com/proj...
Anyway, totally agree with you. USB-C has made it extremely easy to run your laptop longer.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
that's 1.4kg for the rest of us.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.