LG Gram SuperSlim Review: A Portable but Weak 15-Inch Laptop

I fell in love with the LG Gram SuperSlim the second I laid eyes upon it. It’s impossibly skinny—simply 15 millimeters thick together with the elevating standoffs beneath the chassis—and simply 2.2 kilos in weight. All whereas sporting an ultrabright 15.6-inch display screen, a dimension that usually calls for bones that may weigh you down 4 kilos or extra. In all seriousness, this machine seems like it’s brushing up towards the terminus of how transportable a laptop computer can bodily get.

It’s a pc that actually invitations you to work in a number of home windows and unfold out when you’re utilizing it—a lot in order that there’s room for a numeric keypad on the fitting facet of the keyboard. This can take just a little getting used to, because the delete and backspace keys require some retraining of muscle reminiscence, but if spreadsheets are on the docket, it’s an actual timesaver.

The slim profile means keyboard journey is kind of restricted, but years of tapping on telephone screens have made limited-feedback touch-typing like this much less of a difficulty than it may need been in years previous. The smallish touchpad could also be both a professional or a con relying in your perspective. I discovered it a contact on the small facet but was joyful that I wasn’t by chance rubbing it with my palm on a regular basis, sending wayward faucets to Windows.

On paper, the specs are stable: a 2.2-GHz Intel Core i7-1360P processor, a whopping 32 GB of RAM, and a couple of terabytes of solid-state drive storage. There are three fashions of the SuperSlim, and the one variations are the quantity of RAM and storage—all three use the identical CPU. I examined the highest-level tier, formally denoted as mannequin quantity 15Z90RT-Okay.ADB9U1. Whew. This configuration retails for $2,000.

Here’s the purpose the place my love started to fade. I knew some compromises will need to have been made to get this pc right down to its flyweight stature, but I used to be shocked after I lastly noticed the Gram’s middling efficiency scores. On enterprise apps, the unit scored decrease than the $700 Asus Zenbook 14 I examined, and it did not do significantly better on graphics efficiency, utilizing its built-in chip to eke out body charges which may have been spectacular 4 years in the past.