 Last time I picked a new laptop, I made a big mistake. I accidentally chose one with such an unforgivable flaw in the keyboard that my constant typos while I was making notes during Monday morning meeting on the projector became a running joke throughout the company. I actually ended up swapping it out for a Dell XPS 13 two-in-one, a notebook that I didn't really have my eye on until Dell sponsored a video about it. Now, I ended up not following up with why I chose it because I was worried that people were going to say, oh, well, he only stuck with this one because it was sponsored, but that wasn't the case. I just tried it out because of a sponsored video and really liked it. Well, today LG is trying their hand at that same magic. They sponsored this video checking out not one, not two, not three, but four versions of their 2020 Gram featuring Intel 10th Gen processors to see if I can be convinced to finally come back to the Gram two long years after I left them for not having Thunderbolt 3. See how that goes for them. Let's begin with the one that I am very unlikely to settle on, but that could be very interesting to you guys, the Gram 17. Now, this puppy's claim to fame is that it's got the same super, super light build quality as the rest of the Gram family, but a gigantic display. We go ahead and power it on. Unfortunately, they don't include Windows Hello facial recognition with these, but they do have fingerprint sensors built into the power buttons of all four of the models that I'm looking at. Hi there, I'm Cortana and I'm here to help. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, There we go. I see the 17 inch as you're still very portable. I mean, it's still only about three pounds, but extremely capable work machine. So it has a 1065 G7 Core i7 processor, that'll turbo up to 3.9 gigahertz. And of course, it's all about the massive display, which not only is bigger than the other Grams, but it's higher resolution as well. So it's 2560 by 1600, which at this size, I think is just an absolutely perfect middle ground. Cause 4K, it's kind of overkill and unnecessary and just adds extra strain to the GPU. And it's gonna hurt your battery life. Whereas 1080 at this size, does start to get a little bit chunky. What I really wanna know is how they've done with respect to the keyboard here. One of the compromises you end up with with the Gram series, is that they make them lighter, sort of at the expense of the feel of the units. They tend to have more flex than some other notebooks. And when you push down on the keyboard, there is a little bit more give than you might expect from a machine that's heavier. But it's one of those things where you can't really eat your cake and have it too. You've gotta decide, what do you care about? Something that's as light as possible in your backpack or something that you can pound on like this when you're typing, right? This flex extends to the track pad. But what I can't fault is the tracking. They're using the windows precision drivers and overall, even on this large screen, it feels accurate and precise. Which are different things by the way. I.O. is pretty similar across the board. LG crammed a couple of USB type A's over on the right, along with a headphone microphone combo jack and micro SD card reader. And then over on the left hand side, oh yes, yet another USB type A, an HDMI and a Thunderbolt three port along with a barrel type charger. Now something I wanna try out as part of this experience, cause I'm a big fan of USB type C charging, is whether they just don't include a type C charger or whether it doesn't support type C charging. Good luck everybody. This is either gonna charge the laptop or fry the laptop. Whoa. Okay, so it does support type C charging. That's a strange thing to not include then cause type C is freaking amazing. You can carry around one charger, use it for your laptop, your phone, your Nintendo Switch, whatever else you want. I absolutely love it. It changed my life while I was traveling. Not that I travel anymore. So we're looking at these more from like a at home context, you know? Bottom line, the 17 is probably not the device for me. It's more like the device for my wife. I don't need the full number pad and I don't really need all of this screen real estate for what I'm normally doing on the go. Whereas if I used Excel a lot or did a lot of accounting or that kind of serious work as opposed to writing, which is what I typically do, then this would be absolutely incredible. Still got that gram lightness. Let's move on to a more likely contender though. The core specs of the 15 are basically the same as the 17 this time around. So this particular loadout has a one terabyte SSD, 16 gigs of 3,200 megahertz DDR4 memory, just like the gram 17 we just looked at. And this is pretty great, an 80 watt hour battery that's rated for 17 hours of life. Dang it, Windows update. One area where the 15 falls short compared to the 17 is like comfort. So it does still have full keyboard and full number pad, but I would say this number pad is more for, you know, data entry in a pinch. Whereas on the 17, it's nice and spread out and comfortable. You've got that gigantic tall display. This one goes for a more conventional 16 by nine aspect ratio, so it's 1920 by 1080 resolution, meaning that you're not gonna have quite as many rows in Excel and actually it makes a big difference if you wanna do something like video editing on the go, because having a little bit of extra room gives you, you know, one more track in your video editor. But that doesn't matter that much for me because this one feels more like my speed. And I wouldn't mind seeing this track pad increased in size a little bit, but overall, it's both comfortable and quiet. I've always liked LG's keyboard. Part of it is that I'm used to it from daily driving a gram for well over a year, a while back, but something LG's gotta watch out for is that they haven't really changed their keyboard much and it's still good, but their competitors have been playing catch up. So I think that's something that I'd like to see them focus on for the next wave. Ooh, they sent over the 14 in a white finish. That's actually really nice looking. This is the machine for the road warriors or just anyone who doesn't like charging devices. It's only 2.2 pounds, so that's one kilogram, 14 inches. And even though it's only got a 72 watt hour battery compared to the 80 watt hour in the 15 inch, because of the smaller screen and the power sipping core i5 processor, it's actually rated for 18 and a half rather than 17 hours of battery life. It's still got USB 3, full-sized HDMI and Thunderbolt 3. This was what ultimately caused me to abandon my gram back in the day was that the model I liked, the size I wanted to use, didn't have Thunderbolt 3 while the other ones did. That's gone, they've all got Thunderbolt 3 now, but we do lose one of the USB type A's over on the other side. In terms of keyboard flex, I would say somehow this one actually isn't as good as the 15. It seems like the 15 is the one that kind of got the most attention with respect to balancing weight and sort of construction ruggedness. But if you want the absolute lightest, this is the gram for you. Bringing us finally to the one that I am actually considering. Since I left the gram, they introduced the gram two in one. As you can see, I already had this one open because I actually logged it into my Microsoft account and started getting some of my apps set up on it and everything. Because the truth is I have grown quite accustomed to being able to switch my laptop into tablet mode over the years. I actually started out with an ancient Dell XPS 12 two in one. And it's the kind of thing that you don't use all the time. In fact, I use it maybe 2% of the time. But when I wanna use it, it is pretty freaking handy. Now that's curious. I wonder if it allows you to use your... Oh, it does. You can use fingerprint login from the back of the device. So just like the other ones, you've got a full-size keyboard with no cardinal sins committed. It's even got separated up and down arrow keys, which is a pretty big deal to me. It's got Thunderbolt. It's got the fingerprint reader. And in terms of IO, this is really, really nice. This is one of the big things that's bothered me about my XPS 13 two in one, right there. That full-sized HDMI. In my job, I actually conduct a lot of meetings. And being able to plug into HDMI to the projector and present when I'm talking to people is a pretty big deal without pulling a dongle out of my bag. The one change on the right-hand side compared to the 14 is that the lock button is there now. Or actually, oh, wait, what? Is that a second? Oh, interesting. So this lock button gets disabled when you're not in tablet mode. Yes, I would like to switch to tablet mode. This is a quad-core CPU. So, okay, I'm not getting an upgrade to six core there. It's the same spec that we saw in the 15 and 17. I was setting up my gaming graphics card for gamers, and I actually realized there's a stylus pen in the box. So this is a Wacom stylus pen with over 4,000 pressure levels. It uses what looks like a quadruple A battery. Got a couple of extra tips included there. Let's go ahead and put it together. Swoop. This is the kind of thing I really don't see myself using very much. Wow. Blah, blah, blah, blah, go away. There's a little bit more flex than I would probably like in the screen, but I think it's the kind of thing where, oh, shoot, I just hit the power button. I would be unlikely to notice if I was actually holding the device in my hand like this. I wanted to try handwriting. Oh, no way, it got that. That's terrible. Let's find out if LG has considered where to store the stylus when not in use. Unfortunately, it looks like they have not. I mean, it's not the kind of thing I would use anyway. I plan to just leave it in the box, but. You'd also lose it immediately. Yeah, I think it's something that all laptop makers should consider. If you're gonna include a stylus, there should be somewhere to put it. Gonna beat up some bots. Hmm, that's a little unfortunate from a gaming perspective. It gets quite toasty on the left side of the keyboard here. This is a perfect example of how even an Ultrabook these days with the right accessories can totally be used for gaming. Now, I'd like to see everything. Phones, gaming machines, Ultrabooks. I'd like to see everything move to high refresh rate, at least 120 Hertz. So maybe that's something they can work on for the next generation. Oh, shoot, I just got killed by a bot. But at least the performance is there. We're turboing up from three to 3.3, 3.5 gigahertz. Not bad for the CPU. Definitely enough for a decent gaming experience. But as I mentioned before, the 60 Hertz refresh rate of the panel is gonna hold you back as far as that goes. At least it's an LG laptop, so it uses an LG IPS display. So the image quality is really good if you're not after those super high refresh rates. For me though, ultimately this is a very, very, I would say tertiary use case for a device like this for me. So it's gonna come down to the keyboard. Time for a side by side. Ah, fingerprint unlock, super close. XPS is probably a touch brighter actually now that I look at it. Keyboard flex, worse on the gram, but the grams got the bigger screen and it manages to be lighter in spite of it. I mean, that's a gram, that's kind of their whole jam. And one of the really big annoyances for me with the XPS has been the IO, not having an HDMI port has actually bothered me more than the lack of USB type A, but the gram has both. I think what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna switch to the gram for a while and I'm gonna see if the XPS beckons me back cause it does have its drawbacks, but it also has its advantages and it really is crazy light considering the size. So thanks to LG for sending over all these notebooks, for sponsoring this video. Thanks to you guys for watching. If you guys are looking for another video to watch, maybe actually check out the other video I did when I chose my new laptop. I didn't ultimately end up sticking with that one, but it did include a lot of my thoughts and a lot of the things that I look for when selecting a device.