Hands-On With the 17" LG Gram and a Look at Apple's Old 17" MacBook Pro

LG recently introduced a 17-inch ultralight laptop, which we thought would be interesting to take a look at in light of rumors suggesting Apple may be planning to introduce a 16 to 16.5-inch MacBook Pro in the future.

We compared the LG Gram to a 15-inch MacBook Pro, but we also thought it might be fun to take a look at Apple's old 2011 17-inch MacBook Pro at the same time, as it was the last larger-display notebook Apple released.

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Priced at $1,700, the 17-inch LG Gram features a 2560 x 1600 display with a slim and light enclosure. It has a full keyboard and a decent-sized trackpad, with speakers built into the bottom of the device.

The bezels at the top and the sides are super slim, and bezel size reduction is one of the ways Apple could expand the size of its current MacBook Pro lineup without making the enclosure larger.

The 17-inch LG Gram weighs just under three pounds, making it a pound lighter than the 15-inch MacBook Pro. The LG Gram is an impressive demonstration of how far technology has come over the course of the last eight years, as compared to Apple's 2011 17-inch MacBook Pro, it's so much lighter, thinner, and sleeker.

Apple's 17-inch MacBook Pro weighs a whopping 6.6 pounds, but back in the day, components were larger and Apple also packed an entire SuperDrive for CDs and DVDs inside. The elimination of large components like this is a major reason why notebook computers today are so much thinner than they were in the early 2010s. The larger size of components in 2011 is also the reason why Apple's 17-inch MacBook Pro has so much more open space than the LG Gram around the trackpad.

The LG Gram offers three USB-A ports, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a micro SD card slot, an HDMI port, and a USB-C port, which is a better variety of ports than we're likely to get in a future MacBook Pro, even if it is larger. Apple has transitioned to all USB-C ports on its notebooks, which we don't expect will change.

Apple's MacBook Pro used a 1920 x 1200 panel, so while it's not quite as nice as the 2560 x 1600 display in the LG Gram, it's not too bad. The current 15-inch MacBook Pro uses a 2880 x 1800 display, and we expect Apple will use a similar pixel density expanded to the new 16 to 16.5-inch size.

We loved the larger size of the 17-inch LG Gram, and we're hoping those rumors of a 16 to 16.5-inch MacBook Pro are accurate. Apple probably isn't going to significantly increase the size of the MacBook Pro, but may instead cut down on bezel size to provide more available display area in a slim package. We wouldn't mind having a super large display in a bigger body, though.

What do you think of the 17-inch LG Gram? Are you hoping Apple releases a similar machine that's closer in size to its original 17-inch MacBook Pro? Let us know in the comments.