I Was EXPECTING More! - LG Gram 16" 2-in1
ShortCircuit
·ShortCircuit
·2022-05-05
·
3,058 words · ~15 min read
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- Bet you were expecting Alex for this one, huh?
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(quiet bright music) Well, not today, Alex is elsewhere.
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For now, you've got me and this here LG gram.
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I actually haven't used LGs grams yet.
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I used an LG laptop a while ago, it was like, really old,
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I'm talking like Pentium 4 era. It might've actually been a Pentium 4 or Pentium Mobile.
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So what have we got here. This is a Core i7-1165G7, okay.
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A 16-inch LCD, so this is comparable in size
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to the new MacBooks. 16 gigs of LPDDR4x,
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that sounds like if it's LPDDR4x, then chances are it's soldered, so.
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We'll see about that, I've got a iFixit kit down here, we'll open it up and take a look.
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Got a terabyte SSD, NVMe. No wired LAN, I don't know why they even bother to list it.
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Wireless LAN, Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201, seems pretty standard these days.
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Bluetooth 5.1, it's built in. fingerprint reader, yep, and Thunderbolt, cool.
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And hang on, (Linus shouting) is this the right laptop?
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'Cause the laptop that I was told that I was going to be looking at runs Windows 11,
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but this is Windows 10.
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Okay, I guess we'll find out together. Ah, we've got a mystery on our hands.
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Let's get into it.
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Okay.
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That's nice. Yeah, that is pretty light,
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I'm not sure if I would call it a gram. In fact, I think it's more than a kilogram.
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All right. These dollops of glue or whatever that is.
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(imitating glue unsticking)
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The few grams I've seen so far, they've looked really plasticky and not premium, really,
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but this, this feels a lot nicer. I'm not sure that it's not still plastic,
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but it could be magnesium or something like that. I wish I had more information about it,
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but they gave me this like pre-brief guide.
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That was just like, "hey, it runs Windows 11 and it's got a 16-inch screen and it weighs this much.
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Hey, here's some influencer talk." And I'm just like, okay, cool.
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I would've liked to have more information, but okay, here we are. I really like the 15.6-inch class of laptops,
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and the 16 inch is, well, it's that, but with less bezel,
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I'm not a huge fan of how cramped this numpad is,
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but I'm glad to have it, I guess. Where are the speakers? They're downward firing.
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We have a headphone jack, two USB Type-C ports.
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I'm not sure if, yeah, they're both Thunderbolt ports, they're both labeled Thunderbolt.
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That looks like, I'm not sure if that's a power LED or a charging LED,
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probably charging if I had to guess. On the right-hand side,
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we've got a Micro SD card slot, that looks like the power button,
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and a full-size Type-A port with a little trapdoor latch.
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This is something that I kind of felt
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like Apple dropped the ball on with their previous generation MacBooks.
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There's totally enough space here for a Type-A port,
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like full size, without this little trapdoor thing, little hinge,
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if they had just come flush with the side of the laptop, instead of beveling it up like that.
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(quiet upbeat music) I'm not sure how I feel about the blocky font they got going here. It's clear, it might be too clear.
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I'm not sure how to feel about it. Like shift and enter and backspace all looks good,
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but like this, I don't know. I'm not looking at my keyboard very often anyway I guess,
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so it doesn't matter that much. Feels like there's a lot of travel actually.
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Wait, there's a power button right here. What was that other button?
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It's got a dedicated sleep button, right! Because you can use it as a giant tablet.
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I can see using it like this
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with the stylus or something like that, or like this, with it kinda like that.
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I don't feel especially confident in this arrangement.
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There's no bumpers or rubber or anything there,
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so like if I didn't have this desk mat,
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okay, well it's a little more stable than I thought it would be, but it still kind of moves.
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Then again, I don't know, the hinge feels pretty solid, so maybe I'm just being a hater.
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Oh man, it's got a battery? It's an active stylus?
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Why couldn't they have just licensed the tech from Wacom? (Linus shouting)
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Hello? Two buttons, these can be mapped
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to pretty much whatever you might want, I'm sure.
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A lot of visitors, there's a lot of background shouting, there's me and I'm just rambling,
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'cause like, I don't know, what am I doing here?
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And Linus is panicking over there, I don't know what's going on.
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I just work here. Anyway, shall we turn it on?
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5:28
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to help you save time and work better. (quiet bright music) All right, let's power it up.
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The sleep and wake button doesn't seem to work for that task,
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so, boop! Think that power button doubles as the fingerprint reader,
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'cause they don't see another place where it could be. Gram.
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Is this an, this is an LCD, yes. It is a very nice, high contrast LCD though.
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It looks like it's only 60 hertz. It is running Windows, wait, yeah, this is Windows 10.
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Am I looking at the right laptop? (laptop pinging) Shut up, you!
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Your PC comes with Alexa built in. (laughs) Oh no, I do not want A-L-E-X-A!
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Stay off my computer, Jeff. The heck is Virtoo?
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Link your smartphone to your PC. This is built into Windows!
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Why are we doing this?
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See, Alex doesn't talk about crapware and bloatware,
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I absolutely care about that stuff. You know, pre-installed crap,
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if it's actually crap that you're not gonna use, is how they're subsidizing the laptop,
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and this thing I don't think is a cheap laptop. Disney+ is installed for some reason, McAfee LiveSafe.
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Okay, cool, lower the charging capacity of the battery to 80% to expand battery life.
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Actually, probably something we should do. Instant booting, setup so the system
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will automatically boot up when you open up the notebook computer. Okay, so this is the thing
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that kind of caught me off guard with the Macs. Apple makes it so that you open the lid
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and the computer turns on even from complete off. This has that functionality as well,
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but you can turn it off if you don't like it. I feel like I'm being very negative about it,
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but like, I don't, generally speaking, like pre-installed software.
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I like a more vanilla experience,
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and it kind of does grate me a little bit that it's not something that Alex usually looks at.
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What Alex does look at are the speakers.
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And give you sticky keys. Anyway, "Crab Rave," let's try it.
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(energetic electronic music)
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(music stops) Perfectly serviceable. (quiet bright music) Not the best I've heard,
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I don't think it's quite as good as the MacBook, I could go up and get one.
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Very good speakers, a good showing. I would say that maybe could use more bass, et cetera.
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Like, it's got enough chassis probably to include bigger resonance chambers,
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but at the same time, they are constrained by their self-imposed limit
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of however many grams this thing weighs, I think it's like 1350.
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What do we got here? This is pounds.
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3.173, and with the pencil it's 3.211.
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And for everybody else, 1.439 kilograms,
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and with the pencil, 1.456. Is that what they claimed?
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Thought it was 1350 that they claimed. Maybe I actually do have the wrong laptop!
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Wait, yeah, supposedly less than three pounds, isn't it? Oh, I'm confused now.
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I'm confused now! Quickly, banana for scale.
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(exhales deeply) Familiarity.
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Pen input seems pretty responsive.
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Touching it like this, there's a little floating thing here and I can kinda outrun it,
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but that's just a function of it being 60 hertz. It's generally pretty,
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okay, nevermind, it's a little floaty. Okay, nevermind.
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Specs. So 17 inches, I don't, wait, 1350.
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Yeah, right, so how did this gain, like it gained 91 grams?
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This might not be the right laptop. I might've been reviewing the wrong laptop this whole time.
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Wouldn't that be hilarious? Oh yeah, that's totally a different model number.
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(laughs)
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We need to call Colton. (mysterious music)
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I've made an interesting discovery, a series of discoveries actually.
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Apparently this wasn't necessarily supposed to be the LG gram 17,
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it's just the LG gram 2-in-1 that we were kind of looking at,
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and it turns out that this is the 16-inch version.
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And in fact, the 16-inch version is 1,480 grams,
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so this is actually a little lighter. (quiet upbeat music) The reason for that actually is it's got an aluminum and magnesium alloy chassis.
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Cool, that's why I thought it was a little bit more premium-feeling than previous LG grams.
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Presumably the LG gram 17 is the plastic one. because that does only weigh 1350 grams.
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So, so this is the Influencer Brief and Content Guide.
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Okay, fair enough. So note that it says LG gram 2-in-1 16 up here,
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on this here image. About the product, 17-inch screen, 17 inch.
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Also it shows Windows 11, and there's an entire whole-ass slide here
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talking about the LG gram advantage, which is literally just Windows 11 talking points.
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I think LG got confused,
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in turn, we got confused. This is in fact the 16 and the 16 I shall review,
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or continue reviewing. Yeah. (music stops)
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Where do I pick up from here? (quiet bright music) The speakers were pretty good,
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screen looks pretty good to me. This is why I'm so negative right now, there's no specs!
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16 inches, 2560x1600 IPS LCD with Corning Gorilla Glass 6.
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Great, cool, I love it. DCI-P3 99%, okay, typical minimum, 95, great.
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Where's the brightness? This is HDR, is it like, just HDR capable?
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Is it HDR ARE, HDR 400, HDR whatever, like? (groans)
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Why can't I have more information? LG, put this information on your website.
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I just saw that checkbox turned on and it's in fact not HDR capable,
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it just can stream HDR video for some reason.
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Normally that doesn't show up if there's no HDR capabilities.
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Oh no! Okay, let's try the stylus.
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Like, I mean, it's got this hover thing, which is great.
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Webcam, let's try the webcam. Seems reasonable.
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I think it's pretty obvious that it's like 720P.
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I see a little bit of fringing and fuzz in the darker spots.
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Whites are blown out. Again, it's perfectly fine, like if I tilt it down like this, oh, it gets even worse.
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There's so much noise. Also, it's like really cold over there,
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like that white is super blue and I'm just super orange.
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I can't really test the tablet mode and stuff.
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This is so impractical. Really what you'd want it for is for this,
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this kind of thing. Probably like closer to this for most people.
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Oh, look at all the fingerprints on this thing already. Like this was fresh out of the packaging
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and I've just been touching it. That's a problem. I think that's the magnesium, magnesium's pretty good
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at picking up fingerprints like that. How well does it wipe off?
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Oh, not easily. That's bad. Yeah, you're gonna clean this thing constantly,
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or wear gloves. (bright music)
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There we go. (exhales deeply)
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So that's a big battery. Oh, there's so much empty space in here!
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They could have put such big speakers in here. Look at all this empty, right next to the speakers even!
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There's just empty space. You could make big old cans here
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and they don't have to even weigh much, they're just need to be there to direct the sound.
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(sighs) At the very least., we've got a spare M.2,
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so it's not unexpected that people are going to get into this. What's the SSD?
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SK Hynix, well, it's an SK Hynix of some variety.
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Very OEM, one terabyte. Looks NVMe to me.
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Oh yeah, this is an NVMe-only slot, the other slot can take NVMe or SATA.
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The RAM is soldered, and that sucks.
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But yeah, that's rather disappointing. I would have expected A, this to come off more easily,
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certainly not to have screws hidden underneath plastic plugs.
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And B, there to be more efficient use of the space,
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instead, it's mostly empty. I get that the idea of the gram is to be as lightweight as possible,
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but like, when you're making concessions like having these major chamfers here,
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it doesn't make a whole lot of sense given the internal volume that's going to waste here.
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Like this battery could be thinner and use up more area,
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that way the actual laptop could be thinner if you wanted that.
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Like, I don't know, I'm not an engineer, but it seems a lot like
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there's a lot of missed opportunities here. I don't know why I went into this so aggro.
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I don't know why I'm being so negative. I don't know.
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I just generally feel like at this point
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I was expecting more from the gram. Not everything has to be a MacBook,
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but this is like kind of MacBook price, I think this thing is like $2,200 or something like that.
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Let me get this thing back together, get it powered back on, and then we'll close it out.
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Yeah, it was the bloatware that really got to me, that's what really annoyed me I think,
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is the stuff that they had pre-installed on this thing and everything kind of went downhill from there.
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Like it felt good at first, except then you end up with these fingerprints all over it.
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It looked like it had pretty decent IO at first, except really you just get
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two USB Type-C/Thunderbolt ports and a Type-A, which depending on your point of view
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is better than what Apple does. I don't want to hate it as much as I do.
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I don't know why I hate it, other than that it came with a bunch of stuff.
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That's easily fixable, I could just reinstall Windows.
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But I feel like the out-of-the-box experience is something that many companies like LG,
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like Acer, like HP, like Dell, typically make a negative thing.
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I dunno, for a computer that I'm spending this much money for, I expect a certain level of respect as a user
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and I feel like LG kinda didn't do it.
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That being said, I mean, you've got a pretty decent pen, it's not bad.
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You've got the convertible aspect of it.
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You've got the quality materials that you need to make sure you keep clean at all times.
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The display is really nice. It's not super bright, it's not HDR like I thought it was.
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The speakers are pretty great. Fundamentally, it's a good laptop.
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Yeah, so here's this one for 1499 for the 512 gig SSD and a Core i5.
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So yeah, this thing is like 2200 bucks, something like that.
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If I were to go to apple.com, I know Apple's not everybody's cup of tea,
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but like Dell, even, a better laptop that's a little bit heavier,
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and that's just all there is to it.
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That's the LG gram's, that's its shtick. So you're paying for the lightness,
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which you're not even really getting in this 16-inch form factor anyway.
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So that's the LG gram. I know I'm being kind of down on it.
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I know Linus loves the gram series, I know a lot of people here love the gram series,
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and it's, again, fundamentally a good laptop, but I don't think the price is right
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and I don't think that it necessarily is the best user experience,
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especially when it comes to servicing. With that said, if you thought that this was a good user experience,
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maybe you can get subscribed and like this video,
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maybe check out some more videos similar to this one or not like this one.
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I do some retro stuff from time to time, and Alex does laptops and cars.
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Lots of stuff to choose from.