LG Gram Style review: Beautiful disappointment

I’ve always been a fan of LG’s Gram laptops, largely because of how absolutely light they are (as well as thin, in the case of the Gram SuperSlim). But the Gram Style is a special piece of hardware. It’s the first LG Gram laptop that’s actually beautiful, and not just that, I’d argue it’s the most beautiful laptop on the market.

The use of glass on the lid and the interior, combined with the white colorway and a design that’s still impressively light, make for what’s easily one of the best laptops to just look at and hold. It also has a fantastic OLED display, too, so it’s really set up to be a great laptop.

However, it ultimately falls short in performance, to the point where it’s really noticeable in real-life use. It’s possible this is only the case with my review unit, but it’s important to mention all the same.

LG Gram Style: Pricing and availability

The LG Gram Style was announced right at the start of 2023 during CES, and it became available to purchase on March 20. Today, you can find it at a wide range of retailers, including Amazon, Best Buy, the LG website, and more. Prices start at $1,500 for the 14-inch model, but the review unit I have is for the 16-inch version, which has a few upgrades and starts at $1,800.

LG actually sent me the top-tier model with 32GB of RAM, and that costs $2,000. All the configurations include a Core i7 processor and the same high-end display, which is why the starting price is so high. That’s something LG usually does; you don’t really get to choose a configuration that isn’t premium, but that ensures you do get a premium experience. If you spend over $1,000 and only get 8GB of RAM, that wouldn’t be a super premium experience, and LG knows that.

Design

This thing is absolutely gorgeous

I’ve said this a few times already, but the LG Gram Style is an absolutely beautiful laptop, and that’s easily the most striking thing about it. As soon as you take it out of the package, you’re greeted by a smooth glass surface that covers pretty much the entire lid and shifts colors depending on the angle and lighting. Its natural state is white, but it will always have some sort of hue to it, and it’s always different due to the iridescent glass. LG calls this colorway Dynamic White, and I think that makes a lot of sense.

That look permeates inside the laptop, too. LG uses a single, large piece of glass for the wrist rest and touchpad area that looks just as great as the one on the outside. There are also light strips on the sides of the touchpad area, so you know where to find it, and it looks both beautiful and modern, like an evolved form of the Dell XPS 13 Plus.

Otherwise, the laptop uses a magnesium alloy that’s all white, but that’s great, too. With so many laptops being silver, gray, or black, I love seeing anything that’s different, so this is welcome. Because it uses magnesium, it’s a super light laptop, weighing just 2.76 pounds. That’s not the lightest I’ve seen, but it’s definitely pretty close, and it’s really impressive that this was achieved, considering there’s a lot of glass here.

Glass does bring durability into question, so this is a laptop you really don’t want to drop. On LG’s promotional materials, you’ll see claims about it passing military durability tests, but those tests only include vibration, high and low temperature, and low pressure. There’s nothing about drop resistance, and it makes sense considering it’s made of glass. I wouldn’t imagine most people drop their laptops anyway.

There’s a decent supply of ports

The LG Gram Style is also pretty solid when it comes to connectivity. Since it’s thicker than something like the Gram SuperSlim, it does fit a USB Type-A port, which sits alongside a microSD card reader on the right side of the laptop. On the left, you get two Thunderbolt 4 ports and a headphone jack.

That’s pretty solid, though, for a 16-inch laptop. However, I would have expected to see an HDMI port, too. I’ll always take more ports if I can have them, but this setup is pretty good for a modern ultrabook.

Keyboard and trackpad

A solid typing experience

The keyboard on the LG Gram Style is a pretty solid one. The 16-inch model even includes a numpad on the right side, which I appreciate. I also like that the arrow keys use an inverted-T layout rather than the common approach to have the up and down arrows squeezed between the left and right arrows.

The typing experience itself is good, too. The keys have the right travel distance, in my opinion, and they don’t bottom out harshly, so it feels pretty comfortable to type away. It’s not quite on the level of a Lenovo keyboard, but most laptops aren’t. I was still quite satisfied with the keyboard.

You do have to get used to the touchpad

Where things get a bit more complicated is with the touchpad. As I’ve mentioned, LG used a single piece of glass for the wrist rest area, and because there are no cutouts, that means the touchpad is seamless and invisible. LG addressed the visibility part with light strips on the sides, but the fact that the touchpad is seamless means you can’t actually click it. Instead, LG is using haptics to simulate the feeling of a click whenever you press down on it.

To LG’s credit, the haptics are quite good. At the default setting, it definitely felt pretty close to what clicking a traditional touchpad would feel like, and the experience felt fairly natural, for the most part. It’s when you have to click and drag that the touchpad becomes a problem. With a physical touchpad, there’s a little more feedback when it comes to how far you’ve pushed down the button, so you develop a good sense of where the actuation point is and how much pressure you can release without letting go of a click. With a solid surface, it’s a bit harder to tell, and I find myself pressing harder than I usually would to make sure I don’t accidentally release the click.

Otherwise, though, the touchpad feels great. It’s entirely glass and super smooth, so I have no complaints there.

Display and sound

A super-sharp OLED panel

LG’s Gram laptops have always had very good displays, but it was only this year that the company finally decided to embrace OLED. I saw it first with the Gram SuperSlim, but the Gram Style’s is much improved. For one thing, the 16-inch Gram Style comes with a super sharp 3.2K panel, meaning the resolution is 3200×2000. That’s not something we’ve seen a lot of, as most high-end OLED panels are 2.8K (2880×1800), which is a shorter aspect ratio. It’s incredibly sharp, and it means you can fit quite a bit more on the screen if you change the display scaling, which I always tend to do. It’s great for productivity.

On top of that, this panel has a 120Hz refresh rate, so motion and transitions all look super smooth. Of course, you also get the usual benefits of OLED panels, with super vibrant colors and deep blacks, since pixels can just be turned off on demand. There’s no viewing experience like an OLED display.

That becomes very apparent when we actually test the display. I measured the colors with the SpyderX Pro and found the LG Gram Style covers 100% of sRGB and P3, 96% of Adobe RGB, and 95% of NTSC. That’s one of the best results I’ve ever seen.

As for brightness, my tests show that it hits 408 nits, slightly exceeding the 400 nits expected for SDR content, though it should be able to hit 500 nits in HDR content. The SpyderX measurement tool isn’t ideal for testing HDR brightness. Contrast is, of course, incredibly high because the black levels are consistently close to zero.

All in all, this is a terrific display, and it’s easily one of the best on the market.

1080p webcam and solid speakers

Looking above that display, we find the webcam, which is a solid 1080p sensor. Like most laptop webcams, it won’t rival anything like the Obsbot Tiny 2 I recently reviewed, but the quality here is pretty good, and it even holds up decently in low light. Plus, it supports Windows Hello facial recognition, one of my favorite features in any laptop.

Otherwise, the media experience is adequate. The two 3W speakers do a solid job of delivering good audio. They do face down, but they’re loud enough to provide an immersive experience, especially if you’re using the laptop on a table that can reflect the sound back at you. You can hear a bit of distortion at max volume in some cases, but for the most part, the audio quality is very clear.

Performance

High-end hardware held back by poor thermals

One of the biggest disappointments I faced with this laptop came with performance. It’s not just that it’s bad — it is — but there’s no reason why it should be this way. The LG Gram Style is powered by an Intel Core i7-1360P, a 12-core, 16-thread processor that can boost up to 5GHz, and features Iris Xe integrated graphics. That should tell you performance is pretty great for day-to-day tasks, and usually, it is, especially with 32GB of RAM backing it up. But this laptop, in particular, falls way behind others with similar hardware, even hardware that should be worse.

When I was just writing and browsing the web, the LG Gram Style held up just fine for the most part. However, plugging in my dock to use multiple displays while playing multiple videos or being on a video call at the same time often resulted in slowdowns. Sometimes there seemed to be bugs where the laptop was inexplicably slow when connected to a dock, too, but even at the best of times, performance wasn’t ideal.

That becomes very apparent when we look at benchmark scores, where the LG Gram Style not only trails other laptops with comparable hardware but also last-gen laptops and even a U-series Core i5 in some cases.

The reason why this seems to happen is thermal throttling, and while that’s somewhat common for P-series laptops, this is the worst case I’ve seen of it so far. This laptop gets very hot. I ran a quick test with HWiNFO, and as soon as I began the Cinebench test, the app immediately lit up to tell me the processor was throttling. I don’t know why the thermal design here is so bad, considering the Gram SuperSlim is much thinner and still manages to be far ahead in terms of performance.

LG has told me it has different scores for the laptop in its own testing, but frankly, the difference isn’t big enough to change the conclusion. This laptop was not made for this processor, which is surprising considering this is a brand-new design, and it’s coming out when we’ve already had a full generation of P-series processors to identify and solve these problems.

Battery life is alright

As for battery life, the LG Gram Style does about as well as you could have hoped for with a processor like this and such a sharp display with a high refresh rate. Typically, I use my laptops in the Balanced power plan for testing, and when I did that here, I got close to six hours of battery life on a charge. However, I spent most of the time in the Best performance power plan to try and avoid performance hiccups, and at that setting, I got between 4 hours and 8 minutes and 4 hours and 33 minutes. It was actually fairly consistent. As usual, brightness was typically set to 30% during my testing, and the battery saver kicked in at 20% battery.

I also ran my typical 720p YouTube video playback test at 50% brightness and 50% volume, and that got me 8 hours, 35 minutes, and 47 seconds. This was with the battery saver disabled.

Should you buy the LG Gram Style?

You should buy the LG Gram Style if:

• You want one of the most beautiful laptops on the market
• You want a great laptop to watch movies on
• You want something very portable
• You don’t mind sacrificing some performance

You should NOT buy the LG Gram Style if:

• You need to multitask heavily or perform demanding tasks
• You want all-day battery life
• You can’t get used to a haptic touchpad
• The starting price is too high for you

I really wish I could recommend the LG Gram Style to as many people as possible. This is the laptop I want to use and take everywhere with me. I love how beautiful and light it is, I love the display, and the webcam and sound are all excellent too. Even the typing experience is solid compared to other LG Gram laptops I’ve tested.

But if you need reliable performance or great battery life, this is a laptop that’s hard to count on for more demanding tasks. It does fine for text-based and web-browsing tasks, but it can start to chug during heavy multitasking. Thermal throttling is a major issue here, and it makes this laptop hard to recommend to everyone. That said, if you don’t have anything too demanding you want to do, I’d say you can probably overlook the performance and focus on the stunning design and display here. Really, though, I just hope LG improves the thermal design for the next iteration, as this would be one of my favorite laptops if it weren’t for that specific problem.