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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 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.
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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,
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.
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
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.
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 with most of the "improvements" being colossal mistakes like the touch bar, so much so that sometimes I think the best thing Apple could do would be to open source macOS under a permissive license and cede the computer market to companies that actually still care about building computers.
IMO, it is pretty obvious when Apple stopped caring about Macs. Things started slipping in about 2008 or 2009, and the whole platform has been going downhill ever since. The last truly good version of OS X was 10.6.8, released in '09. The last XServe was released in 2009. The last non-speed-bump cheese grater Mac Pro was released in 2009.
To be fair, the annual release cadence (driven largely by trying to keep up with iOS, which ties major OS versions to iPhone hardware releases) is a big part of why macOS sucks so badly now, but Lion wasn't exactly a polished release, either. Basically, iPhone was simultaneously the best and worst thing that has happened to Apple since Steve's second coming. It was great for the stock. It was terrible for the Mac platform.
What's really funny is that the same thing happened to Apple back before S.J. returned, only it was the Newton that sucked all the resources away from the Mac. One of the smartest things he did was to kill that product line and save the Mac. These days, Apple lacks focus, and I'm not entirely convinced that they are capable of being both a computer company and a toy phone/tablet company. Maybe they should pick one, open source the other or license it to one or more of their competitors, and hope for the best.
I mean, who wouldn't want macOS to be a competitor to Windows on everything from Dell to HP to Asus?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.