LG Gram laptops have always been excellent, but after years of having basically the same design and similar specs, the company finally tried to shake things up in 2023 with the SuperSlim and Style models. I'd argue those didn't quite do what they should have. The SuperSlim was, in fact, very thin, but it had a 15.6-inch 16:9 Full HD display at an exorbitant price. Meanwhile, the Gram Style could have been nearly perfect, but its terrible cooling made it hard to recommend as a premium product.

So for 2024, the company decided to go back to the drawing board with the Gram Pro, which essentially replaces the Gram Style. It has a thinner design, but a more conventional one, with more ports and a more subdued look, while keeping the top-notch specs and display. I checked it out at CES 2024 and I was ecstatic to do so, as it seemed like LG had finally nailed a premium laptop. I was more excited about the 2-in-1 model, but for review, I got the clamshell version.

And sadly, it seems like my hope may have been misplaced. While the LG Gram Pro looks sleek and feels more premium than its predecessors, it once again misses the mark in terms of performance.

About this review: LG sent me the 16-inch Gram Pro with Nvidia graphics for this review. The company had no input in its contents.

Pricing and availability

LG announced the Gram Pro lineup ahead of CES 2024, and it became available to buy a few months later. You can find it on multiple retailers, as well as directly from LG itself.

The laptop starts at $1,700 officially, though you can currently find the base model for $1,500. The configuration I was sent is a very high-end one, with the OLED display and optional Nvidia graphics, and that costs $2,400 outside of any sales.

Design

The sleekest, most premium Gram yet

LG Gram laptops have always been great in many ways, but the design hasn't necessarily been one of them. While the laptops have always been very light, they looked fairly bland, especially in the gray colorway you'd find most of them in. The LG Gram Pro is the second entry that tries to change this, and I think it succeeds for the most part. While it's still made of magnesium, which is prone to feeling less premium than aluminum, the Gram Pro has a much more refined feel compared to the standard Gram models.

Unlike some other models I've tested, it doesn't feel particularly flimsy, and the surface of the laptop also feels smoother and slightly more reflective, so it feels a bit more premium overall. I still sometimes hear a little noise when I lift my hands from the wrist rest, so the chassis does flex a bit, but this is one of the better built Gram models yet.

The Gram Pro has a much more refined feel compared to the standard Gram models

It's not the lightest unit I've reviewed, though it's far from heavy for a 16-inch laptop. Since I got the version with discrete Nvidia graphics, the weight goes up to 2.84 pounds, which is still one of the lightest laptops you can get at this size. Personally, for my usage, I'd have taken the lighter model without discrete graphics, but just like previous models, picking up the Gram Pro still feels magical with how light it is.

Ports haven't been sacrificed

The LG Gram Pro is thinner than most of the company's previous models, which is something LG has also done with the Gram SuperSlim. But while the SuperSlim came with big sacrifices in terms of ports, being limited to just USB Type-C connections. The LG Gram Pro makes no such sacrifices. In fact, it has even more ports than the LG Gram Style, which was noticeably thicker.

On the left side, you get two Thunderbolt 4 ports along with HDMI. Meanwhile, the right side has two USB Type-A ports (at 10Gbps speeds) and a headphone jack. In an era where many premium laptops force yo u to buy docking stations if you want a decent port selection, it's always nice to see someone a product that feels more complete.

Display and webcam

OLED continues to be amazing

The LG Gram Pro comes in a few versions in regards to the display. The 16-inch model comes in both IPS LCD or OLED options, while the 17-inch version is exclusively LCD. I got the OLED model, though, and to the surprise of no one, this is an absolutely stunning display. OLED is always fantastic, and that holds up perfectly here. Colors are vibrant and punchy, and everything just feels so lively on this panel. It's also a very high resolution and a smooth 120Hz refresh rate, so everything on this screen looks phenomenal.

The glossy plastic cover helps colors look that much more vibrant, though it comes at the cost of being very reflective in daylight. Also, the glossy plastic feels pretty bad to the touch and it's hard to clean since it's very grippy. But since this isn't a touchscreen, that's probably fine.

This is an absolutely stunning display

To test the comapny's claims, I ran the usual suite of tests with my SpyderX Pro sensor, which shows the screen covers 100% of sRGB and DCI-P3, plus 93% of Adobe RGB and 91% of NTSC.

As for brightness, the display hit nearly 420 nits in my testing, with the usual near-zero black levels you'd expect from OLED. The white point is also fairly consistent across different brightness levels, which is nice to see.

I did notice an issue with all of this, though. In some apps, including the Windows Photos app and Adobe Photoshop, any image I opened had a strong yellow tint. This is a software issue that I managed to work around by resetting the Windows color management settings to their defaults, but that may not be an ideal solution if you're working on color-sensitive projects.

Disappointing speakers

With such a great display, you might think you're in for a fantastic media experience, but the LG Gram Pro falls a little flat when it comes to audio. The bottom-firing speakers are okay, but far from impressive. My Asus Zenbook 14 OLED put these speakers to shame, for example. They're quiet and they sound kind of flat, there just isn't a lot of volume to anything coming out of them. They do the job, but that's about it.

As for the webcam, it's alright. 1080p webcams have thankfully become the standard and this one works well enough, but it's also not going to blow your mind. Even in pretty good lighting, photos are noisy and a bit blurry, with some finer details being easily lost, like the holes on the shelf behind me in this sample.

At least there's an IR sensor, though, which I always love to see in my laptops.

Keyboard and touchpad

Not the most comfortable

When your goal is to make a laptop as thin as possible, some sacrifices are going to be necessary, and unfortunately, the keyboard tends to be one of them. Now, typing on the LG Gram Pro isn't necessarily bad. The keys all work totally fine and function as you'd expect. But the keyboard is very shallow and it doesn't feel good to type on after some time. It's just not satisfying or comfortable. I'm also starting to become less of a fan of number pads as time goes on, I would have exchanged that for better speakers.

The touchpad, however, is pretty good. It's a decently big area (though it feels like it could be bigger) and it's pretty comfortable to use. The main issue with it stems from the inclusion of the number pad, which forced the touchpad to move slightly to the left, which meant I was often clicking the right button when I thought I would be clicking the left. It's something you can get used to, but not ideal. LG is no longer using the seamless touchpad it used in the Gram Style, which is a bit of a shame, but the extra tactility of a mechanical touchpad does feel more natural to me.

Performance

How does this keep happening?

My big hope with the LG Gram Pro was that the company would have taken its learnings from the Gram Style, which was held back by heavy thermal throttling, and use those lessons to make this a near-perfect laptop. The unit I reviewed includes an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU. These aren't super powerful components for media creation, but they're more than powerful enough to handle photo editing and even some video editing. Or at least, they should be, especially paired with 32GB of RAM.

But while day-to-day use browsing the web and writing articles worked fine for me, editing photos became a tremendous chore. I edited the photos for my Geekom A8 review using the Gram Pro, and it did not go well. Applying the AI-based noise reduction in Adobe Lightroom started well, but as I edited more photos (of a total of just over 20), the PC began slowing down to a crawl, until eventually Lightroom just stopped responding and I had to close it. This was with the laptop plugged in and set to high performance mode, so it makes no sense to me. I didn't experience any other freeze-ups, but editing photos was never a super smooth experience on this laptop, which makes no sense.

Of course, I ran the usual set of benchmarks, and those scored more or less in line with the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED, and actually even surpassed it in some tests.

However, you can see here that GPU performance isn't exactly outstanding for a laptop with a discrete GPU. It just barely edges out the integrated GPU in the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED in 3DMark Time Spy. And of course, it's not even in the same ballpark as the XPS 16, though I don't think that would be the case even if this was a properly optimized laptop.

On the bright side, battery life has been excellent, which is something I've noticed with laptops using Intel Core Ultra. I usually got between 6 hours and 27 minutes and 7 hours and 56 minutes, which is very good performance for a laptop with discrete graphics and such a high-resolution display. The screen was also set to a 120Hz refresh rate (not dynamic), so that's all the more impressive. I usually had brightness set to 30% because that's what I've always defaulted to.

Should you buy the LG Gram Pro?

The LG Gram Pro is an unfortunate tale of me falling out of love with this lineup. Gram laptops have always been excellent, and for the second year in a row, LG has tried and failed to make this lineup as premium as it deserves to be. With the Gram Style, I thought it was because of the bold design changes, and I had high hopes that the more traditional (and slightly boring) look of the Gram Pro meant this wasn't going to be a problem.

Instead, I find myself in a similar position to last year. I can't really recommend a PC that costs this much money yet struggles with fairly basic photo edits. I know the AI-based noise reduction takes a big toll on a GPU, but nothing justifies the app freezing up completely. So while I like a lot about the Gram Pro, I have a hard time recommending it over the many excellent laptops on the market today.

You should buy the LG Gram Pro if:

• You want a beautiful OLED display
• You want a slim laptop that still has a lot of ports
• Your work mostly involves browsing the web and writing up documents

You shouldn't buy the LG Gram Pro if:

• You need to edit photos or video regularly
• You like keyboards with more travel
• You can go find a different 16-inch model