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LG Releases Gram 17 Laptop: An Ultra-Thin Notebook with a 17.3in Display
- cpr 8y agoDamn, I miss my old “lunch tray” 17” MBP...
- ianai 8y agoI never heard a good reason for cancelling that model. Presumably with modern hardware they could be much more portable now. Imagine how much battery life they could get if they had a 17” with one of the low power cpus and just fit it with the largest battery they could?
- nikanj 8y agoIt looks bulky and unwieldy, and Apple doesn't want their logo on anything that unsexy.
- wtallis 8y agoThe practical limit for battery capacity is 100 Wh; beyond that you need airline approval to travel with it. Apple's 17" Unibody MBP had a 95 Wh battery, and when that was discontinued the 15" rMBP offered 95 or 99.5 Wh until the Touchbar was added. If Apple were to reintroduce a 17" model, it could only offer 19% higher battery capacity than the current 15", which means it probably couldn't offer any better battery life. I'd rather just see the 15" rMBP get a bit thicker so that it can have more variety of I/O and stay at the ceiling for battery capacity.
- gaius 8y agoThe practical limit for battery capacity is 100 Wh; beyond that you need airline approval to travel with it. Does that also apply if it’s two batteries, both physically removable, from the outside? Just curious. SWMBO and I travel with can lights for diving, big batteries but none individually over the limit.
- kkarakk 8y agoapple could never "regress" to user replaceable batteries unless ive retires/is replaced.their design culture would not allow it
- dawnerd 8y agoYeah, it’s per battery. I usually carry two nearly 100wh battery banks. Never a problem. I imagine 100wh limit is what they’ve determined they can contain if it catches fire. I believe they also offer exemptions for slightly more with airline approval.
- jpalomaki 8y agoSeems to be you can carry max 15 devices with built-in 100Wh battery and 20 extra 100Wh batteries. Larger batteries require approval. https://www.iata.org/whatwedo/cargo/dgr/Documents/passenger-lithium-battery.pdf https://www.iata.org/whatwedo/cargo/dgr/Documents/passenger-... Btw, newer Lenovo T4x0 models have a very nice dual-battery configuration, which allows you to swap the battery without shutting down.
- megy 8y agoIt is Apple, so they weren't selling well so they dropped it.
- jen729w 8y ago...which is what I’d do if I ran the company. Wouldn’t you? (Ex-MBP 17”-er here.)
- ianai 8y agoBy that logic, the iPhone is on its way out and the SE back into production.
- jen729w 8y agoHow did you reach that conclusion? The large phones sell better than the small phones. As it happens, I’m also an SE owner who is devastated that it has been discontinued. I love my small phone, but it seems that I’m in a minority.
- ianai 8y agoNumerous articles discussing the new models vastly underperforming estimates and expected sales volumes. Meanwhile, when the SE launched it sold very well. I think they’d have a similar success with an SE2 given those two factors and the age of the SE. I doubt the factors that led people to purchase the SE have changed toward the negative in that time.
- jen729w 8y agoYour statement implies that you believe that Apple are making larger phones which don’t sell as well, and that they know that smaller phones would sell in greater volume but are choosing not to do that. This is patently absurd.
- b3b0p 8y agoI had the first 17" Powerbook G4. I miss it so much. My favorite laptop ever. Even better than my Thinkpad 600e and 600x.
- genpfault 8y agoAll that space and they couldn't be bothered to put in full-sized arrow keys.
- nikanj 8y agoIt's weird and frustrating to see how laptop manufacturers always make basic mistakes like this. My favorite was placing ports so that you can't have an USB thumb drive and the charger at the same time. I guess the manufacturing pipeline really don't allow for prototypes, so by the time someone is using the device, they've already made twenty million of them and it's too late to change the design.
- rangibaby 8y agoApple doesn't do full-size arrow keys so we won't either – actual quote from design meeting
- maxxxxx 8y agoI wouldn't mind this as a Macbook. I kind of miss the old 17" Macbooks.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jtreminio 8y agoI'd give bunches of money for a 17", 4k laptop with a great keyboard AND NO numberpad. System76's come close, except for that pesky numberpad. I work from home, portability isn't my top priority. I wouldn't mind a heavier laptop with a very thick base sitting on my lap because I use a laptop tray which prevents the heat from burning my legs. Otherwise I'm at my desk with the laptop on a vertical holder. I do hate numberpad because I would never use it and it moves the touchpad to left of center.
- tln 8y agoThe trackpad is a little off center on this laptop, it looks like. Maybe 1cm? Could you really tell?
- hnbroseph 8y agointeresting. i avoid most laptops because they DONT have number pads :)
- sgc 8y agolikewise. I just looked over at mine lovingly.
- ericabiz 8y agoTry a Dell XPS 15 9570. 15” but 4K. No number pad. I really like mine.
- jtreminio 8y ago
- drcode 8y agoAnyone have a guess how well Linux would run on such a beast? How are the driver issues these days? Could I likely get by without manually compiling drivers and without putting magic incantations in config files?
- CrazedGeek 8y agoI'd guess reasonably well. Graphics card would work fine out of the box, Wi-Fi would work well (but probably requires Intel's nonfree driver). Probably the only issues would be the fingerprint reader (which don't seem to be particularly well-supported under Linux) and the screen DPI (1600p at 17" might be a little small for 1X and a little large for 2X, and fractional scaling under Linux is a bit messy).
- appleiigs 8y agoI have a 14” 2018 LG Gram and I run Pop!_OS on it with minimal config. The only thing I did was leave 100% scaling, but put on 1.5x font size (via gnome-tweaks). Might be different on a 17”. Haven’t found any issues at all, however my uses are quite pedestrian. Almost just terminal, Pycharm, browsers. Printer and wifi are all fine. I ran ElementaryOS on it but then I ran into a few things: 1) troubles getting audio out on HDMI instead of internal speakers (look Mom, no dongles!), 2) video in Chrome browser is broken, 3) some sort of high pitch, very loud tone at startup each time after updating system software. On Pop, I’m really happy with it. 14” is incredibly light and battery lasts all day for me. Keyboard is good - Ctrl button on outside left where it should be.
- kjeetgill 8y agoHuh. Pop and elementary are both Ubuntu based. I wonder why they gave such different experiences. Do they vary kernel builds by that much?
- Canadauni 8y agoI think that the team at System 76 includes some additional hardware drivers and tweaks that might provide a wider range of compatibility.
- JohnTHaller 8y agoIf only it had an MX150 or a Ryzen 2700U in there for some graphics goodness.
- Hextinium 8y agoLooks great but with many thin laptops especially 17 in models they look like i can just bend them in half. This looks no different or am I missing something?
- ams6110 8y agoUseless on an airplane tray table.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- adetrest 8y agoI wonder if the keyboard is like the newer macbooks. And of course the best way to ruin a display is to make it glossy, which they did.
- Slaul 8y agoI kind of like a glossy screen.
- appleiigs 8y agoNo, the keyboard is not like the newer macbooks. Quite normal.
- robocat 8y agoFor the XPS 15, the choice is either: matte and non-touch; or glossy and touch enabled. I was told touch screens are always glossy.
- ants_a 8y agoThinkPad touchscreens are semi-matte.
- akhilcacharya 8y agoIs there still a demand for larger screened laptops these days? I use a relatively compact machine (13 inch rMBP) which certainly isn't the largest device on the block, but I still struggle to use it on an airplane tray table. What's the appeal of a thin-and-light 17 incher?
- canuckintime 8y ago> I still struggle to use it on an airplane tray table. ... it's a LAPtop. Why bother with the airplane tray when it's thin and light enough to use on your lap? > What's the appeal of a thin-and-light 17 incher? Most mainstream customers don't need a powerful CPU/GPU (see success of MacBook Air). All they want is thin, light and a big beautiful screen.
- eropple 8y agoThe neck angle of putting a laptop in my lap on a plane is unusable.
- canuckintime 8y agoyes with an 11" notebook the angle would be a pain but with a 17" screen it's quite usable
- lj3 8y agoI worked my way through grad school with a 17 inch macbook pro. I would work in between classes by sitting in a chair in the lounge, putting the laptop on my lap and working. The height of the arms of this one chair was perfectly level with the top of the laptop. The angle of the chair back put the screen straight ahead in my vision. The ergonomics were almost as good as working at a desk. Ikea doesn't sell that chair anymore and apple doesn't sell that laptop anymore. sigh
- chx 8y ago> All they want is thin, light and a big beautiful screen. I disagree with the thin part. I have yet to see anyone care whether a laptop is 1" or .7". This is a pointless marketing ploy, invented by Jobs. Yes, lightness matters. But we have seen (and I actually owned one) incredibly light laptops mostly from Japan well before Jobs invented the thin craze.
- whalesalad 8y agoI was at Fry's electronics about 30 minutes ago to just wander around and look at stuff. These Gram laptops caught my eye but after holding them in my hand, I was really disappointed. They didn't feel dense... like they were light but also felt low quality. The materials didn't feel sturdy. They feel nerf. The nicest PC hardware I saw was from Microsoft or Samsung.
- appleiigs 8y agoWhen I got my 14", I thought the same thing, but it might be due to how light it is. LG boast military grade durability if that means anything. I've carried mine in a duffle-bag for the past year and no problems at all. I'm pretty rough with my laptops. I've broken 2 macbooks previously (HDMI port, logic board).
- rchaud 8y agoWell, it is a 3 pound laptop in a gargantuan 17-inch form factor. At that weight class, I wouldn't expect it to feel particularly solid.
- slacka 8y agoWould love to see the 16:10 ratio come back in vogue. For the web and with so many productivity apps having a ribbon UI, a little extra vertical real estate makes a huge difference.
- Technetium_Hat 8y agoWhy not just go all the way to 3:2 like the surface laptop? It's better for anything but full screen video.
- zokier 8y ago> It's better for anything but full screen video. Not better for having two windows side by side. Considering that we're talking about 17" laptop here, that isn't especially far fetched use case.
- Aardappel 8y agoSome Chromebooks/Pixels and the MS SurfaceBook have 3:2 for that reason, even better. But why stop there? For predominant web/doc/code usage, I'd dream of having a 1x1 screen laptop! Imagine the Dell XPS 13, same width of screen and keyboard, now bigger vertically to match the width. It'd be physically smaller than a 17" 16:9 machine, yet have more vertical space.
- reaperducer 8y agoOK, for the first time since 2003, I'm tempted to get a non-Apple laptop. I loved both of my 17" MacBook Pros (2003 and 2007, both of which still work). But Apple doesn't care about big screens and proper keyboards anymore, so this is very attractive to me.
- skboosh 8y agoSad but true. I can see my 2013 MBP being my first and last Mac. I'm not spending that sort of money to lose the escape key/function keys.
- lunchables 8y agoThings to keep in mind with LG. And I am NOT a Mac user ("BTW I use Arch"), but I have owned a Mac in the past (2010 Macbook Air). I am NOT trying to talk you out of this, but you should go into this understanding the trade-offs you will make. - The build quality will not be like what you are used to. The entire chassic will flex and the keyboard will feel more like a trampoline than the keyboard on your Mac. - Customer support will be useless, just write that off now. - Keyboard layout might be a little bizarre, I have not looked at this one. [Ed: just looked, wow thats bizarre. Tiny keys, weird arrows, num pad is strange. Just take a good look before you pull the trigger. Not saying its bad, just ... odd. OK maybe bad.] - Webcam will probably be worse than you are used to - Trackpad will be light years behind your Mac both in feel and how it performs. Apple just has this figured out and no one else can touch it. Might still be "good" just wont be "Apple good". - Quality control will be really poor compared to Apple, you might have dead pixels in the display or other build quality or QA issues. - Prepare to spend the first 15 minutes peeling off stickers and the glue from them. - You will probably want to just wipe it and re-install Windows or install Linux vs "de-crapwaring" it. No idea what Linux support will be like and I would be hesitant to be the first one to buy one to find out. And this is from someone who runs Linux exclusively.
- p1esk 8y agoAre you saying this from your first hand, recent experience using LG Gram laptop on every day basis?
- walterbell 8y agoWhat a nice collection of features ignored by other OEMs: wide range of screen choices (13.3, 14, 15.6, 17), USB C/A ports, headphone jack, 16:10 ratio, 72Wh battery, micro-SD, ethernet port. Whiskey Lake is supposed to have hardware fixes for Meltdown and L1TF, which should boost performance and battery life. (Edit: CPU for the 17" is Whiskey Lake, the others appear to be Kaby Lake Refresh, e.g. LG Gram 13.3: https://www.lg.com/us/support/products/documents/13Z980-A.AAS7U1%20Spec%20Sheet.pdf https://www.lg.com/us/support/products/documents/13Z980-A.AA... No info on key travel) Might there be a vPro configuration with a TPM, for running QubesOS?
- dangwu 8y agoI wasn’t aware that headphone jacks on laptops were a cause for celebration now. A sad state of affairs...
- danieldk 8y agoWhat major laptops actually sell without a headphone jack? Apple, killer of the 3.5mm jack, still ships with a 3.5mm jack on all MacBook models.
- fredley 8y agoI have a current-gen macbook pro and a Google Pixel 1. I feel like I'm living in a great, but precarious period when I can charge my phone and my laptop with the same cable, and plug my headphones into either my laptop or my phone (while charging!). The phone is getting old though, and I'm hoping that when it dies, the replacement will have both USB-C charging and a headphone jack too. Is that too much to ask?
- llampx 8y agoI have a Huawei phone and a ThinkPad, both of which can use USB-C charging. In fact, the Huawei charger does charge the ThinkPad albeit slowly. I love it!
- 8y ago
- xiphias2 8y agoI love a lot of things in my LG gram 14 inch, except the poor speakers (my mobile phone has a better one) and the fact that I can't use it outside in the sun.
- rubenerd 8y agoLooks amazing, I also miss my massive MacBook Pro's size. But the 17-inch screen only has the same resolution as my 13-inch MacBook Pro, like so many PC laptops. If it had an equivalent DPI, it'd be very compelling.
- roboyoshi 8y agoAnd for some reason it's totally normal to increase the phone screen size. I don't understand..
- ngcc_hk 8y agoNo thunderbolt ... can’t have it as I need to access egpu for computation from Time to time.
- lallysingh 8y agoCloud?
- jerrysievert 8y agoit looks great! definitely a good offering from LG, with the exception of a few small things: * at 17" I'd like more memory available than 16gb * same for more than 512gb of disk * pretty small trackpad for all that space, make use of it! I'd be very interested to see how well it sells - I know a few people that swear by 17" laptops, and was sad to see apple exit that market (for them, 13" is easily a large enough laptop for me)
- djhworld 8y agoJust been looking at the 13"/14" models as I'm not that interested in a 17" screen, disappointed to see (unless I'm mistaken) that there doesn't seem to be a way of upgrading the RAM to > 8GB
- puranjay 8y agoYou can release the best possible hardware on a laptop and I'm still going to pass because of Windows 10. Windows 10 is easily the worst edition of Windows I've ever used. It forces you to update and breaks the entire damn machine at every go
- bufferoverflow 8y agoBullshit. Windows 10 is the best Windows ever made. Never had a problem with it, and the updates are generally great. They had one recent one that went bad for a small number of users. None of our machines had any problems. My Ubuntu desktop and my Ubuntu server in comparison are constantly having problems, especially when I upgrade the distro to the next version.
- justtopost 8y agoWe got a contrarian! Seriously tho, I have 16 machines I use. Running everything from amigaos to ubuntu studio, win10, and mac. Windows 10 is by far the least responsive, and tqkes more time updating and fixing drivers than the rest combined. Sure, I use music interfaces, latency is my devil, but even ignoring that weakness, Windows 10 is both the worst OS I run, and only better than ME and Vista even in the microsoft world.
- lunchables 8y ago>Bullshit. Windows 10 is the best Windows ever made. Never had a problem with it, and the updates are generally great. They had one recent one that went bad for a small number of users. None of our machines had any problems. Pulled updates because of files being deleted, network drives not working after updates, updates installing without user confirmation on reboot forcing people to wait for Windows to get done. Automatically re-installing games into the start menu even on "Professional" version of Windows 10. Start menu searching that is inconsistent and slow. Invasive privacy settings that have a tendency to "accidentally" reset themselves after updates. This is all well documented on the web, feel free to do some searching. I cannot fathom how anyone can believe Windows 10 is the best version of Windows. >My Ubuntu desktop and my Ubuntu server in comparison are constantly having problems, especially when I upgrade the distro to the next version. https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-forced-downloads-we-wont-do-them-again-pledges-microsoft/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-forced-downloads-we... And besides the forced upgrades, the amount of issues people had with Windows 7 to 10 upgrades might have been the worst I've seen of any version of Windows.
- vermaden 8y agoThere are so many laptops available today, but NONE of them provides real 7-row keyboard ... one of the reasons I still use 2011 ThinkPad laptops - for the convenience of having INS/DEL HOME/END PGUP/PGDN top-right layout really keyboard layout.
- smiley1437 8y agoLook for the Thinkpad 25th anniversary edition, it has a 7 row keyboard with more modern (t470) guts but expensive af
- jacquesm 8y agoAnd discontinued.
- culot 8y agoI keep hoping they bring that back for an X1 Extreme successor. That is where that keyboard truly belonged.
- vermaden 8y agoI knew that one, but it was 5000 pieces limited production and its no longer available. https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-t-series/ThinkPad-25/p/22TP2TTTP25 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-t-ser... ... and besides that one no other modern laptop has 'real' keyboard.
- gigatexal 8y agoUnder three pounds? Not bad! Does the ram go up or is it fixed at 16GB?
- b1gtuna 8y agoHopefully this is the beginning of large screen laptop resurgence. Has anyone really extensively used an LG Gram as a daily? Does it hold up well over time? The last thing I want is to have something break and wait 2 months for a warranty repair...
- gabriel34 8y agoI have one, older generation. Holding up pretty well. The casing scratches really easily though
- bitwize 8y agoGod that thing looks like holy hell to type on.
- exabrial 8y agoApple is their own worst enemy. 3d Touch, Touchbars, horrible keyboards, etc drive their material cost up and no one cares or uses these "features. It seems OSX is the main attraction to their hardware these days; as it turns out a lot a lot of manufacturers can get hardware "right".
- java-man 8y agoI cannot believe this. All this space available and no separate PgUp/PgDn keys?
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y agoThe big negative for me is lack of Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt provides so many future options (eg external gpu, etc) that I refuse to purchase a premium laptop without Thunderbolt support.
- nroach 8y agowith the igpu and such a nice screen its a shame TB isn't an option. This seems otherwise perfect for work-on-the-go and plugging into a eGPU at home in the evenings.
- jammygit 8y ago19 hour battery life means what, 6 in real world use? Companies shouldn't be allowed to exaggerate this number every single machine they build.
- GordonS 8y ago> Meanwhile, the laptop weighs 1.33 kilograms What?! The last 17" laptop I had the misfortune to be lumbered with was an HP Zbook 17. I don't recall exactly, but it was easily at least 4kg and about 1.75 inches thick! I'm astonished they've got this so light and thin - will definitely be considering one when it's time for an upgrade, as I much prefer a larger screen for coding!