Due to their size and lack of portability, 17-inch notebooks are not exactly popular among road warriors. Instead this is largely the domain of desktop replacement-class machines, which in turn has caused 17-inch laptops to be built bigger still in order to maximize their performance and emphasize the replacement aspect. Every now and then however we see a 17-inch laptop that still tries to be reasonably portable, and this is the case with LG’s latest gram laptop, which hit the market this week.
Equipped with a 17.3-inch screen featuring a 2560×1600 resolution, the LG gram 17 comes in a dark silver Carbon Magnesium alloy chassis that is only 17.8 mm (0.7 inches) thick, which is thinner than most 15-inch notebooks (in fact, this even thinner than the ASUS ZenBook Pro 15). Meanwhile, the laptop weighs 1.33 kilograms (2.95 pounds), which is in line with many 13-inch mobile PCs. As a result, while the 17-inch gram still has a relatively large footprint, its still a relatively portable laptop.
I’m genuinely surprised LG decided to put this 17-incher on the market – consider it a sort of spiritual successor to the 17″ PowerBook G4, in my view one of the best laptops ever made. It seems like the market has pretty much settled on 12″-13″, with a few professional and low-end laptops offering a 15″ screen. I hope this LG laptop is at least even a modest success, because I’d love for more 17″ laptops to make it to market.
Thom Holwerda,
Many people, including my parents, are buying laptops as a desktop replacement where the large form factor is extremely compelling for them. I also appreciate how larger workstation class laptops don’t compromise on performance/ports/keyboard depth/etc. I sure hope someone keeps putting out products that don’t fit “average” users because when all manufacturers are serving the same demographic, we end up with many similar products but less meaningful choice.
For significantly less money (800-900) you can get essentially the same platform (exact same CPU/GPU) in a Yoga 730 with a 15 inch screen (touchscreen too, convertible). For a couple hundred less money you can get the same with a 4K screen and GTX 1050 in it. A light 17″ is nice, but I’m not sure it’s worth that much extra chedder.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lenovo-yoga-730-2-in-1-15-6-4k-touch-sc…
Edited 2018-12-08 06:39 UTC
It’s too bad this seems to be missing Thunderbolt support, otherwise it would be possible to hook up an external GPU and have the best of all worlds.
That, and it’s also using a SATA SSD instead of NVMe. Not only would NVMe save space and weight, it would be several times faster than SATA. The cost difference would be negligible. I feel that it’s a huge blunder in an otherwise sexy laptop.
I didn’t even notice that compared to the Yoga 730 I mentioned – it has NVMe and 512GB, twice as much as this unit.
Frankly, I find pretty much all proper SSDs (so no eMMC of ~netbooks) fast enough. Near 0 access time of all of them seems more important for comfort than absolute max transfer rate (as long as it’s at least decent).
The vast majority of people that would even consider a large screen laptop are gamers.
Now… that being said, there is the idea that the general population is getting very old and have trouble seeing (and higher resolutions hurt this more than help this btw). IMHO, that means they probably aren’t driving or doing much moving. Just get them a big screen all-in-one (and normal HD or less) or something.
So, I think the market for this is quite limited.
Due to aging, I’d even say that market is present, maybe even growing, at least for a certain time, until the last ones who do not want to do real work on smartphones and mini-laptops have died. There is constant aging in many branches of the industry (especially the boring office parts).
By the way, I wonder why the argument of energy consumption hasn’t come up. Commonly, laptops are seen as superior to fixed PC installations in terms of power consumption. But it makes sense from a business point of view to ignore this potential to save energy and costs: Nobody seems to be interested in saving energy and costs, especially as they can easily increase the prices to have their customer pay the bill; down the “trading chain”, the final consumer will pay everything. So I’d say only self-employed older users will be interested in larger screen laptops, as corporate offices can always use tax deduction to properly deal with rising energy costs… 😉
Hm, we need some solid stats on that one… (for what’s worth, majority of laptops on offer at my largest local ~electronics store seem to be 15.6″)
They have the space for almost a full-sized desktop keyboard there, but instead chose to invent a new key placement system…
I should not be required to change my habits for the sake of a machine. The computer should match my habits. People are used to a certain key placement, and have developed motor skills based on memorizing the places of keys. Why should I sacrifice my existing motor skills just for the capricious design LG chose to go with? Those motor skills give me speed, and allow me carry out more work in a given time frame (=more money).
Edited 2018-12-13 10:36 UTC