gram 16” Lightweight Laptop, Intel 13th Gen Core i7 Evo Platform, Windows 11 Home, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Black

Note: I got the 16 (blazing ddr5) /256/Xe model with 2560 x 1600 IPS, Evo 12th Gen i7 1260P.I've been buying portable computers since my Kaypro, and as a road warrior, laptops since my Toshiba T-1000. I've also got kids and a wife who used to work in design. So in addition to building PCs I have bought a LOT of laptops, easily over 50 over the past 35 years. But my now dying Thinkpad lasted so long that it has been six years since I bought one for myself.I got a chance to see this LG Gram in store and really first fell in love with the screen. It is bright, has great resolution. I also love the weight and form factor of this machine. It has a very sleek professional look and doesn't look like some plastic masquerading as an advanced alloy. Despite its sleek thinness there is virtually no flex at the palms or hinge. It has the ports I want as well. It has two USB C, both thunderbolt 4, as opposed to a single setup that I have to spend a lot of money to get a better two USB C hub/dock, nevermind the mess that would happen should I kill one port, and two USB-A 3.2.The balance of CPU and ram is optimal. Win 11 pro runs great.Before buying I wanted to make sure I could do some upgrading, so I watched some Youtubes. I already cloned boot, and swapped in a 1TB Samsung 980 as boot. I will probably swap out the original 256 to a 2tb in a year and have 3tb total. Keyboard has good action. Speakers are good as well.For my entire experience buying laptops, prices went down and capabilities went up relentlessly every year. So it was a shock when I started looking last month, given how the chip shortage has made an expensive mess for buyers. This was exactly mid budget for me.I am using the machine a fair amount, four to five hours a day and will return to note any issues should they arise. At this point I am very happy with this machine. It is a excellent combination of function and form.

I have conflicting thoughts about the LG Gram. If you're reading this, you may have already gone through all the specs, the reviews, the videos, etc. to try to determine if this is the right laptop for you. So I will note only a few things that were relevant in my decision to ultimately NOT keep the laptop.1. The weight of this thing is a marvel. If you are coming from a laptop that is 4 lbs+ and thought that was heavy, you probably won't be able to stop yourself from lifting the laptop a few times to test the weight before you use it each time. However, if you're coming from an ultrabook and you just want a bigger screen without adding weight, you may not be as impressed. That's because of the way this thing feels in the hand. If you've used any sort of premium ultrabook, the LG will feel like a plastic toy in comparison. It just always gave me a certain impression of flimsiness that I didn't love.2. The screen is glorious for regular office work. It's bright, it's sharp, and the 16 inch real estate is amazing. I was so delighted to look at the screen and this alone made me go back and forth on whether or not to keep it. But it did so as both a pro AND a con. My laptop shipped with some excess backlight bleeding in one corner. It was about the size of a large thumb. I tried to ignore it, then I tried to work with LG to fix it, and both were more difficult than I wanted to put up with. I'm not sure if this is a common defect, but because of how thin the screen is, it felt like this could be a common failure point3. The keyboard felt fantastic to type on. Really, the key travel felt good, almost like some kind of very weak and shallow mechanical keyboard. It was one of my favorite laptop keyboards in terms of how it felt (compared to Dell XPS, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, HP). However, because of how thin the keyboard is, I was getting some strange typing quirks, like certain keys registering even when I didn't touch them. Because I do so much typing (as you can tell from this review!) this canceled out the benefit of the keyboard.4. This part is just a pro, not a con, but something I noticed and didn't see anyone else mention when I did my initial research. My Sennheiser 58X headphones plugged directly into the laptop and listening to Spotify sounded really, really good for some reason. Not sure of the reason - in comparison, a MacBook Pro 14 which has a high-impedance headphone jack, to my ears, didn't sound as good as this. Now if I tweak the settings on the Mac and listen to Apple Music lossless, I can get it equal or better, but it was weird that the default on the LG sounded so very good.If the screen was perfect from the start I would have definitely kept this laptop and been happy to use it as my daily driver despite the other quirks. It has so many pros and if the price is under $1,000, I don't really see any other laptops providing this much value in terms of lightness, screen size and solid specs.