LG Gram 14" review: good display, most portable laptop for its size, but awful battery life, flimsy build, no backlit keyboard, and screen wobbles as you type
Vlad Savov / The Verge : Tweets: @lachlikesathing Tweets: Lachlan / @lachlikesathing : “LG's industrial design is characterized by a great deal of effort and very little effect.” Ouch. http://www.theverge.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
LG only entered the US laptop market three weeks ago with 13-inch and 14-inch Gram ultrabooks starting at $899, betting that extreme lightness would be its wedge against established Windows OEMs. The Verge's first long-form verdict confirms the weight advantage is real — most portable laptop in its size class — but lists a stack of compromises (battery, build, keyboard backlight, screen wobble) that undercut the premium-portable pitch.
The review also plants a pattern the corpus keeps confirming: LG's battery claims later drew scrutiny when CNET found the 24-hour figure came from a decade-old benchmark run without Wi-Fi at low brightness, and the flimsy-chassis complaint resurfaces verbatim years later in the Gram 17 review and the Gram Style's bendy body.
First-order effects
- Buyers considering the $899 Gram 14 now face an explicit trade-off sheet — best-in-class portability against awful battery life and a chassis too flimsy to type on without screen wobble — directly pressuring LG's launch positioning.
- LG must defend both its hardware quality and its claims: the same review pipeline that praised the display is documenting defects competitors' marketing will cite.
Second-order effects
- Rivals can neutralize LG's weight advantage by matching grams while keeping rigid chassis and backlit keyboards, shifting the comparison from 'lightest laptop' to 'lightest laptop that doesn't feel cheap.'
- Battery-life skepticism becomes a recurring cost: once one Gram claim was traced to favorable benchmark conditions, every subsequent Gram runtime number gets audited rather than quoted.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — flimsy chassis flagged again on the Gram 17 in 2022 and the Gram Style in 2023 — LG's Gram line structurally settles into a niche of buyers who rank weight above durability, ceding mainstream share to OEMs that balance both.
- The episode illustrates how a new entrant's flagship spec (weight) can become a liability when reviewers treat it as evidence of cut corners elsewhere, shaping how ultraportable laptops get evaluated industry-wide.
The trend: LG's Gram line is converging on a durable identity — record-low weight bought at the price of chassis rigidity — with each generation's reviews testing whether that trade-off still wins customers.