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LG Gram 17 (2021) review: a class of its own - The Verge

Posted: 04 Apr 2021 06:00 AM PDT

I've read plenty about what it's like to use, hold, and type on an LG Gram before, but that didn't take away from the impressive first impression it made when I used the new Gram 17 for the first time — especially this larger model. The Gram 17 has a grandiose 17-inch display, yet it's only three pounds, which is light enough for me to carry around one-handed. Its keyboard is a joy to type on with a surprising amount of tactility and travel in the keys, and the battery life outlasts a whole day of work, even much of a second one, too. It's a quiet laptop, and even under pressure, its fans weren't loud enough for me to hear once.

The Gram communicates its biggest selling points — lightness and longevity — so effectively that it outshines some persisting minor problems. Those include a keyboard layout that can be difficult to adjust to. For instance, the num lock is too easy to press accidentally, being right next to backspace, and the only function key is located too far away from the most essential function row buttons, making it a stretch to adjust the volume one-handed. Lastly, the large trackpad isn't always good at palm rejection. These are important things for any laptop to get right, let alone one that has a bunch of extra real estate that should be used to avoid flaws like these.

This new model for 2021 is mostly a spec update, not a design overhaul compared to the 2020 version. But it's a good update, at that. Inside of LG's sole $1,799 Gram 17 configuration (it's been available for $1,699 since late March), there's now an 11th Gen Intel Core i7 quad-core processor that promises — and actually delivers — better performance and longer battery life than the 2020 model my colleague Monica Chin reviewed. Additionally, this model's faster 4,266MHz LPDDR4X RAM, of which it has 16GB, likely plays a role in that speed boost. It's not a drastically different computer to use than before, but it can hold its own more reliably this time around.

While running my usual collection of around 10 tabs in Microsoft Edge for work, with Slack and Spotify running in tandem, performance didn't stutter at all. This is the bare minimum of competency tests for laptops, so for something more demanding, I exported a five-minute, 33-second test file from our Verge video team through Adobe Premiere Pro. Last year's model took 30 minutes to do this, but this one gets it done in around 11 minutes. That doesn't hold a candle to laptops that put more of an emphasis on power usually at the expense of heft, but it's enough of an improvement to make the Gram 17's price a little easier to justify. Razer's Book 13 with the same processor fared just about a minute faster with this test, but the Gram is on par with the latest Dell XPS 13 and Asus ZenBook 14.

Processor: Intel Core i7-1165G7 (quad-core, 2.8GHz base clock, 4.7GHz boost clock)
RAM: 16GB onboard
Storage: 1TB NVMe M.2 2280 SSD
Graphics: Intel Iris Xe Graphics
Display: 17-inch 2560 x 1600 non-touch 16:10 aspect ratio IPS display
Ports: one USB-C Thunderbolt 4 with DisplayPort and Power Delivery, one USB-C 4.0 Gen 3, one 3.5mm headphone / microphone combo jack, one microSD card reader, one HDMI, two USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports
Camera: 720p webcam
Biometrics: fingerprint reader in power button
Battery: 80Wh
Weight: 2.98 pounds (1.35kg)
Dimensions: 14.97 x 10.24 x 0.70 inches (380 x 260 x 17.78mm)
Operating system: Windows 10 Home
Connectivity: Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.1

The battery is also mystifyingly good — and better than before. With that same batch of apps I mentioned earlier, the Gram 17 lasted an entire workday and well into the next, around 12 or so hours later. If you're looking for a laptop that can go a full day of work without its charger, whether you have video calls or not, this is one for your shortlist. It features the same 80Wh battery as last year's model, which is still impressive considering the Gram 17's lightweight profile.

Also similar to the 2020 version is its USB-C charging. LG now includes a 65W USB-C power adapter instead of the 48W charger that shipped with the previous model. It can more quickly recharge with the included brick (which is no bigger than a compact power bank), but it still takes a few hours to refill it completely.

That sums up the biggest changes to this year's Gram 17. There are a few smaller tweaks I liked, too. The arrangement of ports has been shifted around in a more logical layout. On the left side, there's a Thunderbolt 4 port (it can be used for charging, data, or connecting to a display), one USB-C 4.0 Gen 3 port, a headphone combo jack, and an HDMI port. Over on the right is where you'll find two USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports next to a microSD card slot and a Kensington lock.

If you're shopping around for 17-inch laptops, you'll be hard-pressed to find anything lighter than the Gram. It's 2.98 pounds, which is just a little heavier than the 13-inch MacBook Air. The Dell XPS 17 is one of LG's main competitors in this space, yet its baseline model weighs over a pound and a half more. If you get an XPS 17 model like the one we reviewed in July 2020, it'll weigh almost as much as two Gram 17s at 5.53 pounds. That added weight does bring more power and a dedicated GPU in the Dell, but if you just want a big, portable screen for productivity, the Gram is more than capable.

As my colleague Monica Chin mentioned in her review of the 2020 LG Gram 17, this laptop isn't a looker. It still doesn't stack up next to the high-end design of the XPS 17, which features an aluminum chassis. The Gram has a tough magnesium alloy-clad body, but it looks and feels plasticky. That said, there's technically nothing flawed about its design, and it seems better than most black aluminum laptops I've tried at resisting fingerprints. Some people might actually prefer that its design doesn't stick out much, even when its backlit keyboard is on.

Something minor that I wish LG offered with this model is the option for a matte display. It's rare for ultrabooks to have them, but I find it hard to stay focused on what's happening on the screen when I can see a reflection of all my apartment's happenings staring back at me. Wherever you use this laptop, glare could be a big problem, like it can be with a TV. This doesn't take away from the Gram 17's display being sharp and vivid. It's a WQXGA (2560 x 1600) IPS non-touch panel from the company's own display division, and it makes everything look excellent with 99 percent DCI-P3 color gamut coverage. If a touchscreen is important to you, LG's Gram 2-in-1 laptops feature them. LG was one of the first Windows laptop makers to move to a 16:10 aspect ratio, and the Gram 17 has one, too. It gives you a little more vertical real estate to work with on the screen compared to 16:9 displays. It's most beneficial for productivity (you see more info at once, so less scrolling is necessary), but you'll have black letterboxing for most full-screen videos you watch.

The Gram is short on bloatware, which I love to see. It ships with Amazon's Alexa built-in, though it requires activation before you can use the service. A few other preinstalled apps include McAfee LiveScan and a suite of creator tools from CyberLink. Compared to some other laptops I've used recently, like Acer's Predator Triton 300 SE, the Gram doesn't shove pop-up notifications in your face seemingly every time you use it.

There are few 17-inch laptops to choose from and even fewer models that are as lightweight as this one. This year's LG Gram 17 is unique in the sense that it's more powerful than ever, but it doesn't give up its portability. Oddly enough, the only competition it faces at the moment comes from within LG. The 16-inch Gram is lighter and less expensive, yet it features the same design, screen size, port selection, battery capacity, and specs (aside from having significantly less storage) for $1,399. You can find one that has the same 1TB storage as the Gram 17 for $1,599. If the Gram 17's $1,799 price is too expensive, at least you have an alternative that'll likely deliver the same great results.

But if the price isn't an issue and you want a surprisingly portable and powerful laptop with an oversized screen, the Gram 17 is in a class of its own.

Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it — contracts that no one actually reads. It's impossible for us to read and analyze every single one of these agreements. But we started counting exactly how many times you have to hit "agree" to use devices when we review them since these are agreements most people don't read and definitely can't negotiate.

To start using the LG Gram 17 (2021), you'll need to agree to the following:

A request for your region and keyboard layout
Windows 10 license agreement
PIN

You can also say yes or no to the following:

Wi-Fi
Microsoft account (can be bypassed if you stay offline)
Privacy settings (location, Find My Device, sharing diagnostic data, inking and typing, tailored experience, advertising ID)
Option to "customize your device" for gaming creativity, business, schoolwork, or entertainment
Allow Microsoft to collect personal information for Cortana, including location and location history, contacts, voice input, speech and handwriting patterns, typing history, search history, calendar details, content and communication history from Microsoft services, messages, and apps.
Your Phone setup
The option to use OneDrive
The option to sign up for a Microsoft 365 trial

That's four mandatory agreements and 14 optional agreements to use the Gram 17 (2021).

Photography by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge

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New reports say the Pixel 6 will feature a custom Google “Whitechapel” SoC - Ars Technica

Posted: 04 Apr 2021 06:00 AM PDT

It sounds like this custom Google SoC-powered Pixel is really going to happen. Echoing reports from about a year ago, 9to5Google is reporting that the Pixel 6 is expected to ship with Google's custom "Whitechapel" SoC instead of a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip.

The report says "Google refers to this chip as "GS101," with "GS" potentially being short for "Google Silicon." It also notes that chip will be shared across the two Google phones that are currently in development, the Pixel 6 and something like a "Pixel 5a 5G." 9to5 says it has viewed documentation that points to Samsung's SLSI division (Team Exynos) being involved, which lines up with the earlier report from Axios saying the chip is "designed in cooperation with Samsung" and should be built on Samsung's 5nm foundry lines. 9to5Google says the chip "will have some commonalities with Samsung Exynos, including software components."

XDA Developers says it can corroborate the report, saying "According to our source, it seems the SoC will feature a 3 cluster setup with a TPU (Tensor Processing Unit). Google also refers to its next Pixel devices as 'dauntless-equipped phones,' which we believe refers to them having an integrated Titan M security chip (code-named "Citadel)." A "3 cluster setup" would be something like how the Snapdragon 888 works, which has three CPU core sizes: a single large ARM X1 core for big single-threaded workloads, three medium Cortex A78 cores for multicore work, and four Cortex A55 cores for background work.

The Pixel 6 should be out sometime in Q4 2021, and Pixel phones always heavily, heavily leak before they launch. So I'm sure we'll see more of this thing soon.

Reasonable expectations from Whitechapel

It's easy to get overhyped about Google's first in-house smartphone SoC—"Google is ready to take on Apple!" the headlines will no-doubt scream. The fact of the matter, though, is that Apple is a $2 trillion hardware company and the iPhone is its biggest product, while Google is an advertising company with a hardware division as a small side project. Whitechapel will give Google more control over its smartphone hardware, but Google's custom chips in the past have not exactly set the world on fire, and therefore it's reasonable to temper expectations for the company's first-generation SoC.

Google's consumer hardware team has already shipped several custom chips, and I don't know if you could call any of them world-beaters:

The Pixel Visual Core in the Pixel 2 and 3 was a custom camera co-processor created with the help of Intel. The Visual Core helped with HDR+ processing, but Google was able to accomplish the same image quality on the Pixel 3a, which didn't have the chip.
The Pixel Neural Core in the Pixel 4 was spun out of the company's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) AI accelerator efforts and had a similar job doing camera and AI voice recognition work. It was unimportant enough to just cut from the Pixel 5 entirely.
There was the air-gesture detection chip, Project Soli, on the Pixel 4. This was a radar-on-a-chip concept that Google originally pitched as capable of detecting "sub millimeter motions of your fingers," but by the time it was commercialized, it could only detect big, arm-waving gestures. The feature still exists today in the new Nest Hub, for sleep tracking, but it was not good enough to make the jump to the Pixel 5.
The company's Titan M Security Chip works as the secure element in some Pixel phones. Google says this makes the Pixel phones more secure, though a roughly equivalent secure element also comes with a Qualcomm chip, or at least, the company has never demonstrated a tangible difference.

I think the biggest benefit we'll see from a Google SoC is an expanded update timeline. Android updates go a lot smoother when you get support from the SoC manufacturer, but Qualcomm abandons all its chips after the three-year mark for major updates. This lack of support makes updates significantly harder than they need to be, and today that's where Google draws the line at updates. With Qualcomm out of the way, there are no excuses for Google to not match Apple's five-year iPhone update policy. With a custom SoC, Google will totally control how long it can update devices.

Currently, Google is in the embarrassing position of offering less support for its devices than Samsung, which is now up to three years of major updates (Qualcomm's maximum) and four years of security updates, while Google only offers one year less of security updates. It's a weird position for Google to be in, which previously was leading the ecosystem in hardware support. Maybe Google didn't immediately match Samsung because it's waiting for the Pixel 6 launch, where it will announce dramatically longer support timelines thanks to its own chip?

Actually competing in the SoC business is tough

Beyond easier updates, I don't know that we can expect much from Whitechapel. Lots of Android manufacturers made their own chips now, with varying levels of success. Samsung has the Exynos line. Huawei has its HiSilicon chips. Xiaomi made the Surge S1 SoC back in 2017, recently launched the Surge C1 camera chip in the Xiaomi Mi Mix Fold, and it has an investment in a silicon designer. Oppo is working on developing in-house chips, too. None of the existing efforts has been able to significantly beat Qualcomm, and most of these companies (other than Huawei) still choose Qualcomm over their own chips for important devices. Everyone, even Qualcomm, is relying on the same company, ARM, for its CPU designs, so there's not much room for difference between them. When everyone is using off-the-shelf ARM CPU designs the major areas of differentiation left are the GPU and modem, two areas Qualcomm excels at, so it gets picked up for most major devices.

The companies that take hardware seriously do their best to separate themselves from ARM's baseline CPU designs, choosing instead to design their own cores based on the ARM instruction set. Apple dominates mobile CPU performance thanks to its acquisition of an entire semiconductor company, PA Semi, back in 2008. Qualcomm is doing its best to catch up, buying Nuvia, a chip-design company founded by some of those ex-Apple chip designers, and it plans to ship its internally designed CPUs in 2022. Google has made a few chip design hires, but those are split between the separate hardware and server teams, and they pale in comparison to buying an entire company. When even Qualcomm isn't currently shipping custom chips, I don't see any way Google uses anything over the off-the-shelf ARM CPU designs.

Google's GPU and modem solutions will be an area of great interest. There aren't a lot of GPU designs to go around. Qualcomm has its own Adreno division, which it purchased years ago from ATI. Samsung has a deal with AMD for its future GPUs, but I doubt that would be up for grabs in its Google partnership. If this chip is really Exynos-adjacent, Samsung and many other also-ran SoC vendors go with off-the-shelf ARM Mali GPUs, which are generally not competitive with what Qualcomm puts out. Samsung signed that AMD partnership for a reason!

Imagining Google's SoC having an onboard modem is a challenge. You generally don't get to integrate a modem into your SoC unless you own the modem design, and Google doesn't own any modem IP. Samsung has produced chips with onboard 5G modems, but they generally don't come to the US, so a Samsung modem would require both sharing the design to Google and bringing it to the US for the first time. Qualcomm is, of course, the king of strong-arming companies with its modem IP and keeping competitors out of the US, and it's also generally a leader in modem technologies like 5G. Apple has managed up to now with separate cellular modems—today the iPhone 12 comes with a discreet Qualcomm modem for 5G, which is probably the most likely option for Google. Apple also bought Intel's modem division for a billion dollars, indicating it's working toward onboard modem tech.

Along with the usual CPU/GPU/modem options, Google could also include some camera and AI special sauce in the form of some kind of co-processor (hopefully we'll also get the Pixel's first camera sensor upgrade in four years). Google will also probably include a Titan security chip. Even if it did, I can't imagine these making a huge difference compared to something like shipping with a low-quality GPU or modem. Google has never demonstrated a strong end-user benefit from its custom silicon in the past, just a whole lot of hype.

It's hard to be bullish on Google's SoC future when the company doesn't seem to be making the big-money acquisitions and licensing deals that Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung are making. But at least it's a start.

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