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THIS LAPTOP IS SO THIN AND LIGHT THAT I WAS ABLE TO SUCCESSFULLY PRANK A COWORKER THAT AMAZON HAD ACCIDENTALLY SENT ME A LAPTOP WITH NO PARTS INSIDE.
It's so light that it's arguably more portable than a 13" MacBook Pro. The featherlikeness combined with its unheard of battery life makes it DEFINITIVELY more portable than any current or previous 15" MacBook Pro if you need a full day's work, because you can easily get a full 10 hourson this skinny beast and leave the adapter at home.
Also props to LG for making the smallest laptop power adapter I've ever seen, it somehow fits in my pocket comfortably.
Now let's talk about this I N C R E D I B L E screen + touchpad combination.
When I say INCREDIBLE I mean that they didn't overshoot the performance of Intel's integrated graphics and try to arbitrarily drive a 4k panel on it. They chose an unorthodox but genius resolution of 2560x1600 ( used to be what'd come on those big Dell 30" super expensive monitors which was the highest resolution you could get on a PC monitor for many years ). It's a 16:10 aspect ratio, which you never knew you needed, but once you try it and can see so much more content without scrolling it'll be hard to ever love a 16:9 laptop again. Move your taskbar to the left side of the screen and voila, you have a semi-desktop-like web browsing experience... on a macbook-air-level-thin-and-light laptop 😍😍😍😍😍😍😍
The trackpad. CAN WE TALK ABOUT THE TRACK PAD.
Having owned more than 15 macs myself over the years, I have to say, in SOME WAYS this trackpad is sharper and more precise than the MacBook Pro trackpads which have traditionally if not unanimously been the bar for a great trackpad experience.
The pad on this LG falls a little bit short in the "clicking" execution, but tracking your finger movements itself and even scrolling is on par with if not somehow better than macs. I know. I'm as shocked as you are. Just make sure you turn off the default setting of treating the bottom right portion as a right click area and use two fingers instead.
To be clear, literally every single Windows trackpad I've used over the years, which has been upwards of 30, has been terrible, in many cases pretty much unusably bad. But this Gram, somehow, is JUST REALLY REALLY GOOD. You'll still want to pack a mouse for real productivity, but for web browsing and non-creative work, even including on your stomach in bed which this laptop is actually super-well-suited to, this trackpad is a 9/10.
The keyboard is average, maybe above average for something this thin. But. It was an unrecovered fumble to tack on the numberpad which pushes everything to the side a bit when it could've been centered. 18 people left on Earth need and use a dedicated numberpad and AI will automate all 18 of their jobs away in the next 2 years, and until then those 18 people, all of whom I know personally ;), would be more than happy to buy a $10 accessory for when they're doing data entry. It's not a huge deal, but the laptop would've been both more attractive and more usable and ergonomic without the number pad.
And now the disappointing...
Thermals. Thermals are fantastic! This thing never even gets lukewarm!!! But. Probably because of that decision, it also doesn't seem to fully turbo boost even to 4 Ghz let alone the CPU's advertised 4.6 Ghz ever, even w/ all of the performance settings on max and it running off of outlet power.
It doesn't feel slow per se ( unless you compare it to say my desktop ), but plug 2 monitors in and you can definitely feel some latency if you're a power user. I hooked it up to a Dell ultrawide 3440x1440 and a 27" 1920x1080 with the internal screen still on for a 3-monitor workstation set up and I found it to be much slower feeling than my years-old 7700k desktop even for things like web browsing. Because this thing has a turbo-boost of 4.6Ghz, and is newer than my desktop which is overclocked to 4.8Ghz, they should feel about the same on the same Internet connection for something like loading a web page w/ no other apps running. But they don't. Because the LG isn't turboing to that speed unfortunately.
I believe the SSD may be part of the overall speediness problem, it was only pulling about 500 MB/s in Crystal Mark, versus the 3000-ish of my Samsung 960 Evo Raid 0 in the desktop. But I'm told it's user-replaceable, which is great.
The screen. It's beautiful, and glossy thank Todd. But, it's also a love hate thing. At 2560x1600 at this size and aspect ratio, you can't use the computer at 100% scaling no matter how good your eyesight is. Which is a slight bummer. LG, therefore, sets it to 150% by default.
Which looks good for many if not most use cases, but some fonts end up rendering weirdly and don't look quite the same as they do on other screens.
Source Code Pro, Liberation Mono, Consolas, and Cousine all look ever so slightly off w/ this set up, which makes me love coding on it a bit less.
But, at the same time, scrolling performance w/ the trackpad is really really really BUTTERY, smoother than OS X scrolling on integrated graphics feels much of the time, so there are clear benefits to choosing this resolution ( including that you still get a bit of the hiDPI effect on text in many situations as it looks smoothed and rich.
Web browsing on it is great, and the default mode of the function keys being actual F keys makes toggling F11 ( fullscreen mode ) in Chrome really really great, further diminishing the typical negatives of using a laptop screen form factor.
If you dial the scaling down to 125%, you get a functional resolution of about 1280px. What's amazing about this laptop is that there's no palpable performance hit when you do that, versus even a $6,000 2019 MacBook Pro w/ a 4TB SSD. When you dial the mac's virtual resolution to 1920x1200, 7% less than the LG at 125%, OS X's scrolling gets visibly jaggier and choppy on even the current generation MacBook Pros. Coming from a hexacore MacBook Pro w/ the upgraded graphics myself, this is mind-boggling. Windows' scaling approach has some drawbacks, usually super old apps that you might still use ( SQLYog and a few other older dev tools in my case ) don't always scale well and have weird interface issues, but for the most part things look gorgeous. So pulling this off in a thin-and-light like this LG makes me giddy when I compare it to my touchstrip MBP. And then add on the superior battery life??? Wow.
The other arguable con: The price. $1700 can get you A HELL OF A LOT in the Windows world in 2019.
You can get an 8th gen hexacore, GTX 1060, 144hz 1080p panel w/ 16GB DDR4 and a 512GB SSD from Lenovo resellers for under $1100 as of this writing. Which can even handle Rift or Vive-level VR...
But if you're looking at this Gram, you're doing so because you want that big, sexy, glossy screen and you want something that won't make one of your biceps startlingly larger than the other when you carry it.
At what this laptop sets out to do, it FATALITY-level succeeds. But it could've been so much more.
Add in an RTX 2060 ( Max-Q ) and make it a bit thicker. Also an i7-8750H. And a better SSD. And charge me $2400 for it. You need a dedicated graphics card to run more than 1 external monitor super fluidly. And NVIDIA graphics cards have gotten so small and capable and cheap relative to the already high price of this laptop.
Do this and keep the screen exactly the same and you'll take over a GIANT chunk of the laptop market. Make the looks slightly classier and more industrial and you'll take over a giant portion of the entire laptop market. Also, put all of the ports on the back. All of them.
Pros
Typing feels nice
Trackpad is top notch
Screen is beautiful, text is super crisp
Battery life is fantastic
Lightest 17" laptop in the world, enough said
Fan is silent
Case is relatively easy to open
Thin bezels make this machine feel very modern
Cons
Included SATA SSD is relatively slow for an SSD
Speakers are just ok
Other notes
I ran into an issue which necessitated an exchange. LG support was relatively competent in determining the defect, and Amazon was great in the exchange. New one has no problems.
Ended up upgrading the SSD to a Samsung 970 EVO since the slot the original SSD is in supports 4 channel NVME. Swapped it over, reinstalled windows. Windows apparently managed to pull the digital license from the original install somehow since it already said activated when I loaded it up, so that was nice. Now it runs even faster than right out of the box :)
I am not a fan of the fingerprint reader that forces you to have your fingerprint read anytime you hit power, but the reader software can be disabled and a standard circular blackout sticker fits perfectly over top of the reader itself.
Conclusion
Would I recommend this laptop? Well it is on the expensive side, but is such a joy to actually use. The couple downsides can be worked around (upgrading SSD, bluetooth speakers), and there is nothing else like it on the market. There are other laptops a bit more powerful, but it feels very snappy and anything faster has downsides (lower battery life, louder fans). This laptop feels like it strikes a happy medium between performance and portability that is rare for something so light, and impossible to find on any other 17". If you can afford it I would absolutely recommend this machine.
I essentially wanted a Mac Book that wasn't made by apple. Great design, excellent display, & long battery life. That is exactly what this product is. The only major con I'd say is the SSD isn't NVMe, which at $1700, that's kinda bs.
2019 Feb 8 Update: while it's great for what it is - a super light 17 inch, it's too big and heavy to use on the move, especially without a touchscreen (for example in a train on your lap, on small table in an airline - you need a touchscreen since it's hard to properly use the trackpad in crowded situations) it's meant to be used on a desk. For that reason, I'm likely to return this and continue using the 15 inch gram.
2019 Feb 6:
Upgraded from 15 inch gram. Initially thought lack of touchscreen would be inconvenience, but bigger trackpad makes it manageable.
With respect to differences between the 15 inch gram, the screen seems sturdier and laptop is noticeably heavier and bigger footprint.
Keyboard is exactly the same, used same keyboard protector cover.
Wishlist: touchscreen, more spacious keyboard, bigger touchpad.
Love the Large screen
Love the Light weight design
Love the Track Pad
Love the Long Battery Life
Love the Number of ports
Slightly smaller than my old 15.6 inch laptop. So cool.
Upgraded the hard drive to an NVMe drive, so with that additional upgrade I also love how responsive and fast it is. Especially on startup. I open up the computer from a cold shutdown and it's ready to accept my fingerprint right away. Pretty great.
I travel a lot (and work on the go) so all of the up sides of the computer are what I actually care about. Heavy graphics processing can wait until I get home to a dock or something.
One of the durability specs really stood out was resistance to "Salt fog" and humidity. That's actually important to me since I spend most of my time in Hawaii and have seen many computers die of salt fog and humidity. It's a real problem. Hopefully this computer stands up to the salty fog and it doesn't end up being just a marketing gimmick.
Cons? I like all the strengths of this design, so I don't have any.
If I want extra graphics processing, I would just buy an external that plugs in to the thunderbolt 3 for my desk setup. I'm pretty sure this computer can cool properly with that extra processing since there is so much extra space for it to dissipate heat even though there is only one fan. Not an expert on that, but I look forward to it being tested.
People can stop complaining they didn't include a dedicated graphics card in the computer. It's made to have that extra 5+ hours of battery life instead of giving you an overpowered laptop that most people don't need while traveling and on the go.
*Update after a couple weeks of using this*
I found out that the usb 3.1 ports don’t output more power than it consumes while using my iPhone XS while using hotspot (with WiFi and Bluetooth turned off). That was annoying to have my phone die while plugged in and tethered using the apple lightning to usb. The lg gram 17 was plugged in to power too. Strange since my wife’s Microsoft surface pro 5 didn’t have a problem outputting more power than my iPhone XS could consume while using my hotspot.
Pretty sure it’s not my usb apple cable problem. More likely it’s a power output problem for the lg gram 17 USB ports. Don’t have any evidence other than my experience, but I’ll look into it.
The solution I found was to get an apple lighting to usb C cable. It works great to tether the laptop to my hotspot and keep my phone charged.
It’s also been really nice to travel around with and compute on the go. I might update this again after I have used it and traveled more.
Feature Product
- 17-Inch WQXGA (2560 x 1600) resolution 16: 10 IPS display
- Intel 8th Generation Intel Core i7-8565u Processor
- Windows home 10
- 72Wh Lithium battery - up to 19. 5 hours Battery Life (mobile mark 2014 standard)
- Thunderbolt 3
- 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD
- Mil-std-810g durability standard
Description
Deliver necessary portability with uncompromising features on the new LG gram 17Z990. It has a huge 17-inch WQXGA (2560x1600) 16: 10 IPS display, while still slim and light enough to take anywhere. At under three pounds and delivering almost 20 hours of battery life, this LG gram is great to carry around for a long day of work. The 17Z990 also impresses with an 8th-gen Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB RAM, a 512GB solid state Drive, and USB Type-C connectivity.
Even though I give this Laptop a 5 star review, there are a few things i'm not very fond of.
The first, is the poor quality of the power connector. The brick is very small, but it generates a lot of heat when charging. But, the real problem is the very tiny, flimsy connector that feels like it can snap off if you apply any pressure to it. This is, by far the worst thing and while it's a concern, it's not that big of one.
Second, the screen is very glossy, which some people love. I work in a very bright environment, so this creates some glare. It's annoying, but I can live with it. It's not a "quality" issue, it's more of a personal preference that this doesn't fit. The screen is very thin, and the bezel is quite slim as well.
Overall, this is a very good machine, with an amazing battery life. The specs claim 19.5 Hours, and I may well get almost that from regular use. Heavy use would probably halve that, but even so.. that's still an amazing battery life for this extremely light weight (under 3 pounds) dynamo.
The pixel density is great, higher than FHD, but not so high as to make it unusable for apps that aren't DPI aware. This is the perfect middle ground.
It does not come with much bloatware. Just a few support apps from LG. This was a nice change of pace.
The keyboard is soft, and spongy, but then so are most laptops. It's not a mechanical keyboard, but oh well. It has a number pad, which is nice and it doesn't take up too much space (very slim layout).
It's not a gaming monster. it only comes with an Intel GPU, but it's ok for the casual gamer, and you can always hook it up to an external GPU if that's really important. I figured that 90% of the time i'd prefer the light weight nature.
At less than 3 pounds, this is so lightweight.
I think the most appealing part to me is the 17 inch 16:10 screen. But the chassis is not as rigid as expected. I understand it is to reduce the weight, but I would prefer it to be stronger.
What a great laptop! I put 32GB RAM (total 40GB RAM), 1TB + 2TB SSD disk space in and now have perfect machine for my coding on the go. Hacker's dream. Highly recommended!
I know I'm a random person you have never met.... But seriously consider this option in your search! Note: you definitely DO NOT get 19 hours battery life. Closer to 10
This laptop is so light that everyone who picks it up gasps in surprise. It feels like it can't possibly be real.
But the screen is huge and beautiful, it's very zippy, and the sound volume is decent. My family has started watching movies on it in front of the fire rather than go in the other room to watch the big TV.
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