last time i picked a new laptop i made a big mistake
i accidentally chose one with such an unforgivable flaw in the keyboard that
my constant typos while i was making notes during monday morning meeting on
the projector became a running joke throughout the company i actually ended
up swapping it out for a dell xps 13 two
in one a notebook that i didn't really have my eye on until dell sponsored a
video about it now i ended up not following up with why
i chose it because i was worried that people were going to say oh well he only
stuck with this one because it was sponsored but that wasn't the case i
just tried it out because of a sponsored video and really liked it well today
lg is trying their hand at that same magic they sponsored this video checking
out not one not two
not three but four versions of their 20 20 gram
featuring Intel 10th gen processors to see if i can be convinced to finally
come back to the gram two long years after i left them for not
having Thunderbolt 3. see how that goes for them
let's begin with the one that i am very unlikely to settle on but that could be
very interesting to you guys the gram 17. now this puppy's claim to
fame is that it's got the same super super
light build quality as the rest of the gram family but
a gigantic display we go ahead and power
it on unfortunately they don't include Windows hello facial recognition with
these but they do have fingerprint sensors built into the power buttons of
all four of the models that i'm looking at hi there i'm cortana and i'm here to
help no no a little sign in here no
wi-fi there no there we go i see the 17-inch as you're
still very portable i mean it's still only about three pounds but extremely
capable work machines so it has a 1065 g7 core i7 processor that'll turbo up to
3.9 gigahertz and of course it's all
about the massive display which not only is bigger than the other grams but it's
higher resolution as well so it's 2560 by 1600 which at this size i think is
just an absolutely perfect middle ground because 4k is kind of overkill and
unnecessary and just adds extra strain to the GPU and it's going to hurt your
battery life whereas 1080 at this size does start to get a little bit chunky
what i really want to know is how they've done with respect to the
keyboard here one of the compromises you end up with with the gram series is that
they make them lighter sort of at the expense of the
of the feel of the units they tend to have more flex than some other notebooks
and when you push down on the keyboard there is a little bit more give than you
might expect from a machine that's heavier but it's one of those things where you can't
really eat your cake and have it too you've gotta you've gotta decide you
know what do you care about something that's as light as possible in your backpack or something that you know
you can pound on like this when you're typing right
this flex extends to the trackpad but what i can't fault is the tracking
they're using the Windows precision drivers and overall even on this large
screen it feels accurate and precise
which are different things by the way i o is pretty similar across the board lg
crammed a couple of usb type a's over on the right along with a headphone
microphone combo jack and micro sd card reader and then over on the left hand
side oh yes yet another usb type a an
HDMI and a Thunderbolt 3 port along with a barrel type charger now something i
want to try out as part of this experience because i'm a big fan of usb
type c charging is whether they just don't include a type c charger or
whether it doesn't support type c charging good luck everybody this is either going
to charge the laptop or fry the laptop
whoa okay so it does support type c charging
that's a strange thing to not include then because type c
is freaking amazing you can carry around one charger use it for your laptop
your phone your nintendo switch whatever else you
want i absolutely love it it changed my life while i was traveling not that not
that i travel anymore so we're looking at these more from like
a at home context you know bottom line the 17 is
probably not the device for me it's more like the device for
my wife i don't need the full number pad and i don't really need all of this
screen real estate for what i'm normally doing on the go whereas if i
used excel a lot or you know did a lot of accounting or that kind of you know
serious work as opposed to writing which is what i typically do then this would
be absolutely incredible still got that grand lightness
let's move on to a more likely contender though the core specs of the 15 are basically
the same as the 17 this time around so this particular loadout has a one
terabyte SSD 16 gigs of 3200 mhz ddr4
memory just like the gram 17 we just looked at and
this is pretty great an 80 watt hour battery that's rated for 17 hours of
life dang it Windows update one area where the 15 falls short compared to the
17 is like comfort so it does still have full
keyboard and full number pad but i would say this number pad is more for
you know data entry in a pinch whereas on the 17 it's nice and spread out and
comfortable you've got that gigantic tall display this one goes for a more
conventional 16 by 9 aspect ratio so it's 1920 by 1080 resolution meaning
that you're not going to have quite as many rows in excel and actually it makes
a big difference if you want to do something like video editing on the go
because having a little bit of extra room gives you you know one more track
in your video editor but that doesn't matter that much for me
because this one feels more like my speed and i wouldn't mind seeing this
trackpad increased in size a little bit but overall it's both comfortable and
quiet i've always liked lg's keyboard part of it is that i'm used to it from
daily driving a gram for well over a year a while back but
something lg's got to watch out for is that they haven't really changed their
keyboard much and it's still good but their competitors have been playing
catch up so i think that's something that i'd like to see them focus on for
the next wave ooh they sent over the 14 in a white finish
that's actually really nice looking this
is the machine for the road warriors or just
anyone who doesn't like charging devices it's only 2.2 pounds so that's one
kilogram 14 inches and even though it's only got
a 72 watt hour battery compared to the 80 watt hour in the 15 inch because of
the smaller screen and the power sipping core i5 processor it's actually rated
for 18 and a half rather than 17 hours of battery life
it's still got usb 3 full sized HDMI and Thunderbolt 3 this
was what ultimately caused me to abandon my gram back in the day was that the
model i liked the size i wanted to use didn't have Thunderbolt 3 while the
other ones did that's gone they've all got Thunderbolt 3 now but we do lose one
of the usb type a's over on the other side in terms of keyboard flex i would
say somehow this one actually isn't as good as the 15. it seems like
the 15 is the one that kind of got the most attention with respect to balancing
weight and sort of construction ruggedness
but if you want the absolute lightest
this is the gram for you bringing us finally to the one that i am
actually considering since i left the gram they introduced
the gram two in one as you can see i already had this one open because
i actually logged it into my microsoft account and started getting
some of my apps set up on it and everything because the truth is i have
grown quite accustomed to being able to
switch my laptop into tablet mode over the years i actually started out with an
ancient dell xps 12 two in one and it's
the kind of thing that you don't use all the time in fact
i use it maybe two percent of the time but when i want to use it
it is pretty freaking handy
now that's curious i wonder if it allows you to use your oh it does you can use
fingerprint login from the back of the device so just like the other ones
you've got a full-size keyboard with no cardinal sims committed it's even got
separated up and down arrow keys which is a pretty big deal to me
it's got Thunderbolt it's got the fingerprint reader
and in terms of io this is really really nice this is one
of the big things that's bothered me about my xps 13 two in one
right there that full-sized HDMI in my
job i actually conduct a lot of meetings and being able to plug into HDMI to the
projector and present when i'm talking to people is a pretty big deal without
pulling a dongle out of my bag the one change on the right hand side compared
to the 14 is that the lock button is there now or actually oh
wait what is that a second oh
interesting so this lock button gets disabled when
you're not in tablet mode uh yes i would like to switch to tablet
mode this is a quad-core CPU
so okay i'm not getting uh not getting an upgrade to six core there it's the
same spec that we saw in the 15 and 17. i'm setting up my gaming graphics card
for gamers and i actually realized there's a stylus pen in the box
so this is a wacom stylus pen with over 4 000
pressure levels it uses what looks like a quadruple a
battery got a couple of extra tips included there
let's go ahead and put it together
this is the kind of thing i really don't see myself using very much
wow go away there's a little bit more flex
than i would probably like in the screen
but i think it's the kind of thing where oh shoot i just hit the power button i
would be unlikely to notice if i was actually holding the device in my hand
like this i wanted to try
handwriting oh no way i got that
that's terrible let's find out if lg has considered
where to store the stylus when not in use
unfortunately it looks like they have not i mean it's not the kind of thing i
would use anyway i plan to just leave it in the box immediately yeah i think it's something
that all laptop makers should consider if you're going to include a stylus
there should be somewhere to put it going to beat up some bots hmm that's a
little unfortunate from a gaming perspective it gets quite toasty on the
left side of the keyboard here this is a perfect example of how even an ultrabook
these days with the right accessories can totally be used for gaming
now i'd like to see everything phones gaming machines ultrabooks i'd
like to see everything move to high refresh rate at least 120 hertz so maybe
that's something they can work on for the next generation oh shoot i just got killed by a bot
but uh at least the performance is there we're
turboing up from 3 to 3.3 3.5 gigahertz
not bad for the CPU definitely enough for a decent gaming experience but as i
mentioned before the 60 hertz refresh rate of the panel is gonna hold you back
as far as that goes at least it's an lg laptop so it uses an lg ips display so
the image quality is really good if you're not after those super high
refresh rates for me though ultimately this is a very very i would
say tertiary use case for a device like this
for me so it's gonna come down to
the keyboard time for a side by side
fingerprint unlock super close xps is
probably a touch brighter actually now that i now that i look at it
keyboard flex worse on the gram
but the grams got the bigger screen and it manages to be lighter in spite of
it i mean that it's a gram that's kind of their whole jam
and one of the really big annoyances for me with the xps has been the i o not
having an HDMI port has actually bothered me more than the lack of usb
type a but the gram has both
i think what i'm going to do is i'm going to switch to the gram for a while
and i'm going to see if the xps beckons me back because
it does have its drawbacks but it also has its advantages
and it really is crazy light considering the size
so thanks to lg for sending over all these notebooks for sponsoring this
video thanks to you guys for watching if you guys are looking for another video
to watch maybe actually check out the other video i did when i chose my chose
my new laptop i didn't ultimately end up sticking with that one but it did
include a lot of my thoughts on a lot of the things that i look for when
selecting a device