LG Gram 2022 Review

Made from magnesium alloy, the LG Gram looks slick and minimalist. It’s not overdone in any way and follows a clean design principle overall. The ‘Gram’ logo is the only thing on the lid in terms of branding and you get tastefully placed Intel stickers when you open it. It feels great to hold and even with grubby fingers, won’t register massive amounts of smudges or grime. 

What truly astonishes us though is the weight! Looking at the form factor of a 16in laptop, your brain instantly expects it to weigh as much as a brick, but pick it up and your brain feels confused. You instantly go ‘WOW’ and start to think if it’s just the shell that LG has sent over. But nah, it’s the whole laptop and it just weighs 1.19kgs which is lighter than some of the 14in units we’ve reviewed here. Picking it up with two fingers is not a problem and of course all of this translates to a super comfortable travel experience if you have to lug your laptop around. 

The light weight does not translate to light quality though. The shell feels strong and the Gram has passed 7 different MIL-STD 810G tests for durability! At launch, LG told us we could even stand on it and nothing would happen, but umm, we got cold feet, but hey, we believe them!

Probably the best bit about the Gram apart from the weight (or the lack of it) is the gorgeous WQXGA 16:10 display! The aspect ratio adds that much needed real estate required for work, be it additional spreadsheet lines or additional email listings. It is an underrated feature that you don’t think of till you’ve worked on the laptop and it increases your productivity in a subtle but substantial manner. 

The display gets plenty bright too and is an anti-glare panel which means that you will be the only one breaking a sweat while working under direct sunlight. It covers 99% of the DCI-P3 panel and the colours appear vibrant and the tones are beautifully judged here. Binging Netflix and even watching random YouTube videos is a great experience! You can extend the display and add in the LG Gram+ View via the Thunderbolt 4 which turns the Gram into a monster productivity machine!

The Gram has got some serious real estate! It’s a nice and wide base, extremely comfortable for typing, even if you have giant hands! The keyboard is nothing fancy at all and super functional, just the way we like it. The key travel is standard fare and you can type all night without fatigue.

The major issue we faced was with the trackpad. It’s huge, but it’s not as tactile as we’ve experienced on other laptops and it’s a bit buggy! It literally glitches and stops functioning in the middle of use and that is a shame. We don’t know if this is just a fault with our review unit or with all the others too, but we tried reinstalling the drivers and Windows itself, but nothing seemed to resolve the issue unfortunately.

The 12th-gen Evo processors offer up a great balance of performance and battery life and the i7-1260P is quick at dismissing basic tasks faster than a blink of an eye. Comparing it to the latest MacBook Air side-by-side, the Gram was slightly slower (one second) in loading an InDesign document, but that’s hardly a deal breaker here and has to do with other parameters as well. Overall it’s quite capable for day-to-day work and won’t stutter. 

LG has added a host of add-on features too by Mirametrix. There’s a Privacy Guard, Digital Wellness and a Smart Pointer Technology which can be accessed via a handy shortcut. These features make use of the camera that senses when you are in front of the display and takes action accordingly. The Privacy Guard is handy, but can get quite annoying as it blurs the display as soon as someone passes behind you. Multiple trigger levels can be set, but it’s still a bit of an annoyance. The Smart Pointer feels more tedious to work with as well thanks to the issues we pointed out earlier with the trackpad. But with a bit more development, we see these features coming in handy for sure.

If you have to lug around a laptop everyday wherever you go, the LG Gram has to be it. At the end of the day, nothing beats light weight. It reduces fatigue and removes the ‘chore’ mindset of lugging around a machine which is sort of fundamentally embedded in us thanks to heavier laptops. With the LG Gram, it becomes an afterthought and after a while, you don’t even think about it. That is what the Gram has achieved.