The 360-degree hinge could use a bit of tightening. I found its looseness caused the screen to flop and bounce quite a bit when I tapped on it with a fingertip, threatening to cause motion sickness after repeated use.
Battery life is downright poor too. While LG claims “AI-optimized battery efficiency” that can span more than 24 hours, I got just over eight hours on a full-screen YouTube playback test. (Typical battery scores for 16-inch laptops run 12 to 14 hours on this test.) Normally, I run that test at full brightness, but LG seemingly has some buried setting that I was unable to locate, which auto-dims the display periodically. Even this advice, which I found by scouring the web, was unable to disable the feature. The bottom line is that the aforementioned eight-hour battery mark isn’t just low, it’s probably better than it would normally have been due to the dimming feature being active. To that end, even at its maximum brightness, the Gram Pro’s LCD is remarkably short on brightness.
I also encountered some lingering operational bugginess, namely around the laptop’s Wi-Fi implementation. The system repeatedly disconnected from Wi-Fi during initial setup and would occasionally drop its connection during regular use, though never as egregiously as I experienced during first-time Windows configuration.
That may sound like a lot of negatives, but aside from the battery issue and the keyboard, the problems are largely manageable. However, at $1,500 for this configuration (it’s even pricier from LG!), the Gram Pro 16 is getting up there, and the upgraded version featuring a Core Ultra 9 CPU, 32 GB of RAM, and a 2-TB SSD, is even more difficult to swallow. LG still has a few kinks to work out of the Gram Pro design, but it’s covered a lot of ground since 2024—enough to merit a qualified recommendation of this 2025 update.
Great Job Christopher Null & the Team @ WIRED Source link for sharing this story.
