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LG’s featherweight Gram may stretch to a MacBook-beating 17 inches

LG’s featherweight Gram may stretch to a MacBook-beating 17 inches

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Bigger battery please

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The current LG Gram lineup advertises strong battery life. Maybe not this strong, though...
The current LG Gram lineup advertises strong battery life. Maybe not this strong, though...
LG

The LG Gram is one of the thinnest, lightest Windows laptops you can buy — also see: Acer’s Swift 7 — but now, it may be going places the new MacBook Air and its featherlight Windows rivals haven’t. Namely, all the way to 17 inches.

Today, LG offers 13.3-inch, 14-inch, and 15.6-inch variants of the Gram laptop, but an FCC filing may have just clued us in on LG’s laptop strategy this CES — a 17-inch version that’d offer a bigger screen than any of Apple’s MacBooks. (Apple discontinued its 17-inch MacBook Pro way back in 2012.)

Roll that laptop even thinner — or add a bigger battery?

Mind you, the evidence we’ll see a 17-inch model from LG isn’t overwhelming — just a US certification for computers with the model numbers “17Z990,” “17ZD990,” “17ZB990,” “17ZG990,” and “LG17Z99.” But because LG has been pretty consistent with its model numbers in the past — starting them with the number “13” for a 13-inch laptop, and so on — it’s a pretty safe bet.

I probably don’t need to explain the potential benefits of carrying around such a huge screen without the typical corresponding weight and heft. But according to the FCC filing, one thing you won’t see is more ports: you’ll get the same array of three full-size USB, one HDMI, one microSD, one USB-C, and a headphone jack as in today’s 15-inch model.

And I do hope that if LG’s building such a laptop, it uses the extra width to fit an even bigger battery. Because battery life has been another one of the Gram’s strong points, despite the typical overblown claims and some benchmarking ridiculousness in the past.