All > LG Gram
LG Gram
Retail Price
$1880
Lowest Price
$1299
Release Date
April 2022
The LG gram 15 (15Z980) ($1,999), at just 2.41 pounds, is the lightest 15.6-inch notebook we know of—lighter than, and thanks to a nearly borderless screen not much larger than, most 14-inch laptops. It’s also a capable desktop-replacement with serious CPU (if not graphics) power, ample memory and storage, a handsome display, and remarkable battery life.
Overview
- Overview
- Hardware
- Specifications
- Features
- Positive
- Negative
Overview - At just 2.41 pounds, the LG gram 15 (15Z980) ($1,999) is the lightest 15.6-inch notebook we know of—lighter than, and thanks to a nearly borderless screen not much larger than, most 14-inch laptops. It's also a capable desktop-replacement with serious CPU (if not graphics) power, ample memory and storage, a handsome display, and remarkable battery life.
PCMag - Charles Jefferies
04/24/2018
Hardware - The LG gram 15 is a notebook of many extremes, all of them are good. At the forefront of these are its phenomenal light weight and 16-plus-hour battery life. The gram also offers a great-looking touch screen, excellent system performance, and a comfortable keyboard.
PCMag - Charles Jefferies
04/24/2018
Specifications - The gram 15 is a premium machine. It is sold in one configuration (model 15Z980-R.AAS9U1) in the US that includes a full HD (1,920-by-1,080) touch display, an Intel Core i7-8550U quad-core processor, 16GB of memory, and 1TB of solid-state drive (SSD) storage. The system has a large 72-watt-hour battery. The laptop is LG's top-of-the-line, $2,000 configuration with an eighth-gen Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, dual 512GB SSDs and integrated Intel UHD Graphics 620 that helped push performance notably beyond what the 2017 model was capable of.
PCMag - Charles Jefferies
04/24/2018
Features - The LG gram 15 carries out the firm’s legacy of ultra-light, large-screen laptops with style and impressive engineering. This laptop packs all of the features you’d expect from a 12- or 13-inch ultralight laptop but with a 15.6-inch screen. There’s nothing glaringly wrong with the LG gram 15.
techradar - Joe Osborne
05/26/2018
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Design
- Bezels
- Price
- Screen
- Positive
- Negative
Bezels - For such a light device with razor-thin bezels, LG has also managed to include several ports – not to mention a webcam in the space where it should remain on all laptops: above the screen.
techradar - Joe Osborne
05/26/2018
Price - Its conventionally dull lines don't quite look the part of its $1,999 price tag.
PCMag - Charles Jefferies
04/24/2018
Screen - It has a big 15.6-inch full HD touch display. It's not the brightest screen and battling reflections off the glossy screen was kind of a thing.
CNET - Joshua Goldman
03/30/2018
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Build
- Dimensions
- Durability
- Hardware
- Material
- Weight
- Positive
- Negative
Dimensions - The gram 15 is amazingly light at 2.41 pounds for a 15.6-inch notebook. The LG manages to be a bit trimmer too, at 0.7 by 14.1 by 9 inches (HWD). Its thin bezels help it fit a 15.6-inch screen into a chassis that's just a tad larger than what we're used to seeing from 14-inch laptops.
PCMag - Charles Jefferies
04/24/2018
Durability - It'll stand up to a daily commute, but it's not a rugged laptop by any means.
CNET - Joshua Goldman
03/30/2018
Hardware - The gram 15 is a premium machine sold in one configuration that includes a full HD touch display, an Intel Core i7-8550U quad-core processor, 16GB of memory, and 1TB of solid-state drive (SSD) storage. The system has a large 72-watt-hour battery.
PCMag - Charles Jefferies
04/24/2018
Material - The Gram's full-metal body is made of nano carbon magnesium that LG says is tougher than the shell of conventional laptops. It is also now clad in a deeper, tarnished bronze color on the lid and base.
CNET - Joshua Goldman
03/30/2018
Weight - The laptop is incredibly light still, feeling like essentially nothing in a backpack.
techradar - Joe Osborne
05/26/2018
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Ports & Connectivity
- Connectivity
- Ports
- Positive
- Negative
Connectivity - The right edge holds the remaining connectivity, including a microSD card reader, the audio combo jack, two more USB 3.0 ports, and a Kensington-style cable lock. For wireless, the gram packs Intel's 8265AC 802.11ac card and Bluetooth 4.1.
PCMag - Charles Jefferies
04/24/2018
Ports - The left edge holds the AC power jack, a USB 3.0 Type-A port, HDMI video-out, and a USB-C port with Thunderbolt 3. Other ports and connections include two USB 3.0 ports (Type-A), a microSD card slot, HDMI output and a USB 3.0 Type-C port that supports charging, video out, high-speed data transfer and Ethernet via an adapter.
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Keyboard & Touchpad
- Keyboard
- Touchpad
- Positive
- Negative
Keyboard - The keyboard backlighting has two levels of brightness. The island-style keys felt good under our fingertips. The power button is at the top right of the keyboard. It's not obvious, but it doubles as a fingerprint reader. The gram’s keyboard remains spacious, punchy and deep in travel – it feels substantial and comfortable despite the lightness you may otherwise associate with weakness.
Touchpad - The keyboard and touchpad don't change from last year's model. The touchpad is solid: It's smooth and responsive without any jumpiness. Below the keyboard is the buttonless touchpad. Its smooth surface makes it easy to use, and it's appropriately sized for the LG's 15.6-inch display.
CNET - Joshua Goldman
03/30/2018
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Display
- Display
- Bezels
- Resolution
- Brightness
- Touch Response
- Positive
- Negative
Display - The Gram has a 1080p screen with an IPS (In-Plane Switching) panel technology, you can look at it from any angle and see a consistent picture.
PCMag - Charles Jefferies
04/24/2018
Bezels - LG employs incredibly thin bezels to fit such a screen inside a 14-inch wide frame, so it’s laudable that the firm manages the proper webcam position.
techradar - Joe Osborne
05/26/2018
Resolution - The screen resolution is standard fare for a 15.6-inch touchscreen panel, having 1080p IPS touchscreen.
PCMag - Charles Jefferies
04/24/2018
Brightness - The display could be a bit brighter when maxed out – either that or a matte display coating to avoid sun glare.
techradar - Joe Osborne
05/26/2018
Touch Response - The touch response is spot-on, and the single hinge is fantastic for putting up just the right amount of resistance under our fingers.
techradar - Joe Osborne
05/26/2018
See All Sources
Camera & Audio
- Camera
- Sound
- Positive
- Negative
Camera - The webcam above the display is a 720p/30fps model. The picture quality looked sharp and had minimal grain. Like other laptop makers, LG slimmed its display bezels nearly out of existence, which forced it to move the webcam to below the display. This year's Gram has the webcam back up above the screen and the bezel didn't get noticeably bigger because of it.
Sound - The bottom-facing speakers are plenty loud, but they’re no better than most 13-inch laptops – even with DTS:X audio tuning software at play. While watching TV and movies on it is a good experience, listening to any sort of audio through its weak speakers is not.
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Performance & Features
- Battery
- Processor
- Software
- Benchmark
- Gaming
- Security
- Positive
- Negative
Battery - For the battery life, it clocked an amazing 14 hours on the streaming video test. The 2018 LG Gram has simply great battery life, beating the 2017 model's by roughly four hours.
Processor - The gram has a significant performance advantage over notebooks with the older CPUs. Intel's eighth-generation Core i7-8550U processor is at the heart of the gram 15. This chip fits four processing cores into its 15-watt thermal envelope, whereas previous-generation Intel chips packed just two cores.
PCMag - Charles Jefferies
04/24/2018
Software - LG has admittedly loaded the gram 15 with quite a bit of software, but much of it is rather useful for users.
techradar - Joe Osborne
05/26/2018
Benchmark - The gram 15 was a strong performer in PCMark 8 office productivity benchmark; any score higher than 3,000 indicates a very fast machine. The LG handily outperformed the Samsung Notebook 9 Pro and its previous-generation Core i7-7500U in the Cinebench R15 and Handbrake tests. The gram 15 puts forth some impressive numbers in every benchmark, indicative of a jack-of-all-trades machine.
PCMag - Charles Jefferies
04/24/2018
Gaming - You may even be able to do some basic gaming and video or image editing with this laptop, but not nearly as much as you will on MacBook or Dell.
techradar - Joe Osborne
05/26/2018
Security - The Gram 15 also sports a fingerprint reader embedded into its power button. Once set up, it’s incredibly fast.
techradar - Joe Osborne
05/26/2018
See All Sources
Comparison
- Alternatives
- Battery
- Weight
- Competition
- Positive
- Negative
Alternatives - If you want a large screen, a long battery life and the lightest travel weight possible, this is the answer, but be prepared to pay for it. If those things aren't crucial to your needs, you might want to consider something else such as the 14-inch Lenovo Yoga 920, 15-inch HP Spectre x360, Dell XPS 15 or Microsoft Surface Book 2.
CNET - Joshua Goldman
03/30/2018
Battery - The gram 15 more than doubled the battery life of its predecessor.
PCMag - Charles Jefferies
04/24/2018
Weight - It weighs a remarkably light 2.5 pounds (1.1 kg), and while you can certainly find other ultraportables at that weight, they don't have 15.6-inch displays.
CNET - Joshua Goldman
03/30/2018
Competition - Two of the LG 15's closest competitors are the Dell XPS 15 Touch and the 15-inch MacBook Pro. The Huawei MateBook X Pro, is a 14-inch laptop with dedicated Nvidia MX150 graphics connected to that very same Intel chip, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD for less than either LG gram model at $1,499 (about £1,119, AU$1,999. Meanwhile, the latest Dell XPS 15 at $1,499 (about £1,119, AU$1,999) nets you a stronger H-series, 8th-generation Intel Core i7 processor, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics that outclass either aforementioned laptop.
PCMag - Charles Jefferies
04/24/2018
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Price & Variants
- Price
- Variants
- Positive
- Negative
Price - LG has just one, single configuration of the 15-inch LG gram. The laptop goes for $,1999 (about £1,499, AU$2,639) and includes everything seen in the sidebar, plus some features worth digging into.
techradar - Joe Osborne
05/26/2018
Variants - The 2018 Gram models start at $1,000 but climb up to $2,000. The Gram 15 starts at $1,150, though. There is also a 14-inch version of the 2018 LG gram available, which has the same processor and half as much memory and storage inside.
CNET - Joshua Goldman
03/30/2018
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Feedback
- Battery
- Build
- Design
- Display
- Keyboard
- Ports
- BIOS
- Camera
- Sound
- Trackpad
- Positive
- Negative
Battery - The battery is excellent, but will not last as long as advertised. Doing productivity tasks gets the computer to last ~10 hours on 70% brightness and on recommended battery mode.
KimiNoNarwhale
09/09/2021
Build - The build quality feels top notch.
trandaa
02/28/2021
Design - The LG Gram 16 inch is very slick, super thin, and super light. The case is magnesium alloy, so it does have a slight amount of flex in the middle of the chassis. It looks and feels so premium.
KimiNoNarwhale
09/09/2021
Display - LG is known for their screens, and I must say, it is a very nice display. The 16 inch 2 in 1 is also among the few laptops to offer a QHD screen (as opposed to FHD or 4k). I find this type of screen offers the best balance between having a good resolution and good battery.
KimiNoNarwhale
09/09/2021
Keyboard - The most accurate description of LG Grams' "general" typing feel is similar to pre-2016 Apple MacBooks - low travel yet very snappy feedback, quiet, and surprisingly high typing accuracy. LG Gram Q4 2021 refresh has improved its chassis massively compared to older generations. They fixed "cheap plastic feeling" people complained about pre-2021.
OrganicBn
03/01/2022
Ports - For ports, the computer comes with a headphone jack, two USB C ports with thunderbolt 4 (with the charger plugging into one of the ports), a USB-A port, and a microSD card slot. The port selection is quite good.
KimiNoNarwhale
09/09/2021
BIOS - BIOS doesn't have the hidden advanced settings mode accessible via stantand Ctrl+Alt+F7 shortcut. It works on the 17" laptop and allows to tune thermal settings and a bunch of other advanced things.
KimiNoNarwhale
09/09/2021
Camera - The webcam is also nothing to write home about, and is your standard 720p webcam. It should be noted the device has no IR camera, so Windows Face Recognition will not work on this device.
KimiNoNarwhale
09/09/2021
Sound - Some reviewers seem to have horror stories about the sound quality from the LG Gram devices. Personally, I have found the sound okay on the 16 2-in-1. It is nothing to write home about, but the trebles are still very sharp, and the volume is good.
KimiNoNarwhale
09/09/2021
Trackpad - I couldn't get used to the cheap feeling trackpad. It was a plastic trackpad and in absence of the trackpoint. While the keyboard did have ample key travel the keycaps felt a little bit cheap and 'plasticky'.
InterestingSpecific9
03/01/2022
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