Choosing a laptop It inevitably involves a question of commitment. A lightweight, more portable device means a small screen and a narrow keyboard. A larger laptop offers room to stretch out and usually more power, at the expense of portability. What should creativity do in motion? Is there the best of both worlds somewhere?
LG enters with its Gram Pro 17and I wouldn’t dream of burying the edge in this one: At 18 millimeters thick and weighing just 2.8 pounds, it’s the thinnest and lightest 17-inch laptop I’ve ever seen, and it’s not even close.
Some points of comparison to start, in case you think I’m being dramatic. The 17.3-inch Acer Nitro 17 I recently reviewed weighs 6.3 pounds and is 34mm thick. In 2018, HP’s Omen The only machine that measures up is the strange folding HP Specter. With its removable keyboard, it weighs 3.5 pounds and is 23mm thick, although it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison.
That is the point. There is no comparison for this laptop nor any meaningful benchmark. Unpacking it felt like someone was playing a joke on me. Did they somehow send me a plastic children’s toy instead of a Windows laptop? Where is the usual 1 pound power brick? LG has been making iterative versions of this laptop since 2019, but even the older models don’t match the featherweight of this 2024 model.
Photography: LG
Besides being incredibly light and thin, what do you get with the new Gram Pro 17? An Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU is backed by 32GB of RAM, a 2-terabyte solid-state drive (oddly configured as two logical disks), and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card. It’s a fairly dated low-end graphics processor. , which I’ll delve into in more detail soon. The bright IPS display offers 2,460 X 1,600 pixels of resolution, but it’s not a touchscreen (to keep things slim).
The selection of ports, arranged on both sides of the device with none on the back, is good but not entirely great. You get two USB-A ports, two USB-C 4.0 ports, and a full-size HDMI. You’ll need one of the USB-C ports to charge with the included A/C adapter.
LG’s design here is understated, all matte black, powder-coated with gentle curves at the corners and nothing that flourishes outside of the “Gram” logo at the top. There is room for a (rather thin) numeric keypad to the right of the spacious keyboard, although key travel is necessarily restricted due to the extreme thinness of the device.