With my ancient Dell XPS laptop feeling super slow in 2025, I decided it was time to acquire a new laptop. The Dells are no longer my laptop of choice, after they started emulated the Apple Touchbar even though Apple has already abandoned it as a stupidly bad idea. Thinkpads are no longer priced competitively, even as much as I love their touchpoint.
In the past, I've always bought the smallest, lightest laptop with a combination of portability and good battery life. But when I saw that the 2025 LG Gram 17" laptop was on sale for $1000 during black Friday, I took a look at the specs and bought it, reasoning that I could try it for a month and see whether I liked it despite how big it would be.
The machine arrived and it's impressive how light it is. It weighs 3.22 pounds (or less than the 15 inch Macbook Air, and less than the 14 inch MacBook Pro, though slightly more than the 13 inch MacBook Pro). The 17" screen is huge, and runs at 2560x1600 resolution, with 2 USB C ports, 2 USB-A ports, a HDMI slot, and a headphone/mic jack. Because the weight is spread over such a large surface area, it feels a lot less dense than any of the other laptops I compared it against.
The keyboard feels great, and the processor is fast, especially if you turn off power savings mode. I tried several photo editing programs on it and they definitely work through photos quite a bit faster than my old laptop did. The touchpad was also pretty good --- it was big, did a good job of palm rejection, and very responsive. I still prefer having a trackball or mouse for fine great photo work, but for editing a blog post or writing e-mail this is a great laptop. It even has a dedicated numeric keypad for working on spreadsheets.
The battery life isn't as great as I was hoping for, given the relatively large battery and how the Intel 258V processor is supposed to have power efficiency in mind. It definitely qualifies for "all day" battery life, but don't expect more than an 8 hour day, and it will go much less if you're editing videos or photos. If you're writing in Microsoft Word you'll get much more than 8 hours. (Sad to say, modern web browsers are not power efficient!)
Sleep mode is usually where windows laptops do worse than Macbooks. To my surprise this laptop does a good job in sleep mode, losing about 5% overnight. This is more than good enough.
Needless to say, this is a great laptop. You wouldn't commute with it on your bike, but if you were doing a fixed based tour or on a hiking tour where luggage delivery delivers your baggage, it's definitely something worth carrying around. Color me impressed!
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