I thought the LG Gram Book could be the perfect sensibly-priced laptop for work or school – and boy, I was wrong

Sometimes, even the best laptops can be a bit… boring. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, though; forgo some of the fancy features and the over-designed chassis, and you’ll often find yourself with a solid, minimal-frills laptop that comes with a sensible asking price.

That’s the case with the new LG Gram Book. It’s a new entry to LG’s iconic Gram laptop series, but designed to fill a hitherto non-existent position within the Gram ecosystem: a midrange laptop.

See, the LG Gram series makes for some pretty decent laptops, but they’re also rather expensive, typically sitting comfortably above the $1,000 / £1,000 / AU$1,500 mark. For that high price, you’re getting a premium-feeling laptop that LG has tried as hard as possible to keep at the 1kg weight point – hence the name. But what if LG stopped worrying so much about the weight, and just focused on making a good midrange laptop?

Enter the Gram Book. It weighs in at 1.65kg, which arguably means LG should’ve tried to find a different name for it, but to be fair, I do own some actual paper books that are heavier than this. Rather than going for ultra-premium hardware, this laptop sits more in the budget-to-midrange space, with a 1080p display and 13th-gen Intel Core i5 processor.