- Dare me to spin it?
- Whoa. - [Jono] Whoa. - I do love me some LGs and today I've got three of them,
a 14, a 16, and a 17-inch version
of the LG Gram 2021 laptop.
Now, which one do you guys want me to start with? The little one or the not-so-little one?
- [Jono] The chungus. - The chungus?
That's fine. That's fine, just fine. We're going full chungus here.
So, the Gram 17 is not as light
as the Gram 14, which is just one kilogram. This puppy is 1.35 kilos.
But it does come with some key benefits
including an 80-watt-hour battery instead of a 72-watt-hour battery,
and a 2560 by 1600 screen
instead of a 1920 by 1200 screen.
And I got to say, the first thing that stands out to me about this
has got to be the finish. LG has glowed up the Gram, like,
big-time here.
Whoo. Now, I know this is just a black laptop,
which isn't exactly an innovation, but the finish on it is really sleek.
Let's just see if they've managed to make it not, you know, totally flexible,
(laptop creaking) Hm, keeps improving.
You know, it's always going to be a lightness first, ruggedness second kind of device,
but that's actually not too shabby.
Included in the box is a nice, compact power brick, I actually really like the rounded edges on it,
makes it a little easier to slip in and out of your bag. And then over on the side here, there we go,
we've got HDMI-to-USB Type-C ports,
those are those Thunderbolt 4 as well as an audio jack.
I'm just going to power it on real quick here, show off the dual USB Type-As as well
as a Kensington lock and Micro SD. And now let's talk about that power button for a second,
that is not your ordinary button, we've seen this feature before, notably from ASUS.
But it's a fingerprint sensing power button that does more than just detect your finger print
when you get to the login screen and let you login. It actually caches your fingerprint ahead of time.
So you power up the machine, it goes, "Oh that fingerprint,
okay, I'ma hold on to this for a second." And then when you get to the Windows login in screen...
(snapping) It will log you right in. Assuming of course that you have...
- Welcome, I'm Cortana. - Pre-configured the thing.
(laughing) Cortana, shut up, we don't care.
- For all you plan to do. - Which is fine because the 2021 Grams also includes support
for A-L-E-X-A if you're into that sort of thing, because Amazon doesn't have enough of your data yet.
Let's go ahead and blow through the setup wizard and we'll talk about some of the other cool stuff.
Boy that is a big screen.
The touch pad is another big improvement
over the last generation. This is actually, oh, look at that. (laughing)
Jono happens to have a 2020 Gram,
so you can see not only is it much larger on the 2021,
I actually really prefer the more sharp corners compared
to the super rounded corners on the last one and this color scheme just looks next gen.
See you later 2020 gram. Almost there.
Hey, there we go. Do I have an option to not get started?
(chuckling) Nope. That's this, you can adjust the color temperature of the display.
That's another key benefit LG is touting for the 2021 series Grams,
it is 99% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space.
Pretty darn impressive. Now, what I want to know is,
this looks like a 60 hertz display, but could that be perhaps turned up
or are we just going to have to settle for color accurate?
I do wish everything had high refresh rate. Nope, okay, that's fine.
It's standard dynamic range and only 60 hertz refresh rate.
One of the other key improvements, pun intended, is to the keyboard.
So they've added another 0.1 millimeters of key travel
as well as flattened out the tops of the key caps
instead of making them concave. I'm not a huge fan of concave key caps on a laptop
so I personally consider this to be a good move. As for the layout, It is a touch cramped
because LG has opted to include a number pad on the 17-inch model.
But as we have a look at the smaller ones, you're going to see that that's not necessarily present.
When I say cramped, by the way, to be fair, I don't mean, you know, it doesn't have the right number of keys
or anything like that I just find a couple of them like the enter and the backspace are a little bit easier
to overshoot and accidentally go off the rails here.
It's the kind of thing that if you were actual owner of this device, you would get used to.
Uh-oh, you see this? A McAfee pop-up.
Andy, there's McAfee on my machine.
Oh yeah, there was also a DTS X Ultra icon here.
So supposedly the two watt speakers in here
are like DTS X surround or something.
So why don't we go ahead and see how they sounded at least,
even if we're not testing the DTS capabilities
- NVIDIA's long awaited premium, mid range
and pure architecture GPU, this-- - Yeah, it sounds super hollow, doesn't it?
- [Woman on laptop] XT provides high performing teams of developers to-- - I'm talking like, you know what I mean?
Yeah. Wow, I can really feel the position
of the speakers on this device. Normally you wanted to kind of sound to the user,
like the person they're actually watching is speaking and the sound's coming out of the screen,
but we do not get that effect at all
with the downward firing speakers here. They sound like okay,
but especially in a world where Apple's MacBooks exist
and actually Dell's XPS lineup for that matter. It's a little bit tough to have speakers
that are this far behind. Depending on which version of mobile mark you look at
LG rates this puppy for anywhere from 15 to 19 and a half hours of battery life.
And the last thing I want to check before we check out the 16-inch is,
here we go, ready?
Not bad. Does it do it when it's fully turned off?
I would like to know.
Did it do it? It did do it.
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Now let's shift our attention to the 16-inch.
This is a more conventional Gram kind of finish,
but you know what? It's a little bit kind of a cooler color
than I'm accustomed to seeing. This looks really sharp as well.
So you see how much room there is for air flow back there?
Kind of crazy. Just like the 14 and 17, the grand 16-inch is equipped
with an 11th Gen Intel processor. And if you've got a core i5 or a core i7,
that means it comes with Xe graphics. Now, one thing I was a little disappointed to see,
where did my fix-it kit go? Is that it appears that though they got a speed boost
going to LPDDR4X memory at 40 to 66 megahertz,
which is fantastic for performance,
it appears as though the memory on these machines is not upgradable in any way.
So let's go ahead and pop it open in order to verify.
Oh wow. You can really see like how skinny
the material it's made out of is. Like, it's kind of amazing by the time they assemble
this whole thing that it's rigid at all, you know?
- [Jono] That's a really attractive battery. - Yeah, I know, they really stepped up
their battery packaging game. So that's the 80-watt-hour that's in the 16 and 17-inch.
And... That's the soldered system memory.
Ugh, that means that whether you go eight gigs or 16 gigs,
you are stuck with it forever.
I would like to see a 32 gig option in that case
and what I'd really like to see, especially given that they have so much space in here
is a SODIMM memory slot although admittedly,
it would add extra weight. Simple single heat pipe cooler
with the exhaust right back here. And this is nice though,
at least they've got dual M.2 expansion slots. So both of these are NBME capable
and this one's actually SATA capable as well. It's always so crazy to me the lengths
that LG will go in these grants to save some weight, like look at this, having the motherboard,
look at this, look at the size of this motherboard, that's it, right? So there's your CPU, memory, storage,
It's basically all there. And then they go all the way over here with the little skinny ribbon.
Okay, so there's your daughterboard to handle your USB.
Wireless is over here as well. And then you've got these gaps, see this?
You've actually got gaps in the PCB again, probably to save weight.
It could also be cooling related since it's right next to the M.2s.
And then Thunderbolt is handled over here along with HDMI.
Oh. Probably should have powered that off
before I opened it. - [Jono] Oh my God, it's on?
(laughing) - Now it's time to check out the 14-inch.
Okay, only 72 watt hour battery and yet
somehow it ends up with very similar rated battery life
to the other two and a big part of that is because it does have a smaller, lower resolution display.
Of course, when you step down to a 14-inch device,
you don't need as much resolution because the pixel density
is still going to be quite solid. On the subject of solid,
given that this is the only still sub kilogram LG Gram,
that is actually not too shabby at all. Like I'm putting...
You can see I'm putting a lot of force on this thing here. How's the screen?
Especially now that we've seen the individual layers and the material and like how flimsy they are
it's kind of amazing that it's as solid as it is.
In terms of IO, it's identical to the others, so Thunderbolt 4 is still included,
full-Sized HDMI, full-size USB and of course it's crazy, crazy light.
The touch pad is not as large as the other two, but for a 14-inch notebook,
I would say that this is a very generous sized touch pad.
And as for the keyboard, I'm actually expecting to prefer this one,
because one of the things that bothers me about larger laptops with a number pad off to the side
is that it kind of makes it so that centered in front of the device,
you know, where the touch pad is right in front of you, you have to go over here in order to type,
and I find it a little uncomfortable, so let's see.
That feels, that feels pretty darn good.
Wait a second, what is lock button? Oh, okay, turns the webcam and mic off.
Okay, they've comes so far since the original Gram where they couldn't even manage to put a backlight
in the keyboard and keep it under the weight limit. Nowadays, I mean, it's got all the creature comforts.
It's got Thunderbolt, it's got a high-speed processor,
it's got adequate cooling, great battery life. I mean, there's a reason that these LG Grams
never last long on the inventory shelf, people always snatch them up for internal use
just because it's just kind of what you need
and nothing else. And I really love the new finishes for this year.
So that's it, that's our first look at the LG Gram 2021 lineup.
The one thing we don't is a refresh of the two in one,
which was actually my favorite from last time around. So that was the foldy touchscreen one, but who knows?
Maybe LG will send over one of those when they are good and ready.
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