Review: LG Gram Pro 16 (2025)

Last year’s LG Gram Pro 17 was a classic study in laptop compromise. Incredibly thin and light, it was a veritable marvel of engineering that weighed in at half the heft of a typical 17-inch notebook. On the other hand, it was an unstable performance dud that ran so hot it nearly burnt the hair off my legs.

The compromise scales ultimately tipped against the Gram Pro in 2024, but I’ll give credit to LG for staying the course and continuing to iterate on this design, and fixing many of the flaws I remarked on previously.

Faster, Thinner, Cooler

Photograph: Chris Null

Summer 2025 sees the arrival of a new, 16-inch version of the LG Gram Pro. The slightly smaller laptop is a bit heavier than the old Pro 17 by a fraction of an ounce (now 2.9 pounds) but is 3 millimeters thinner with a girth of just 15 mm. As the name implies, it has a smaller touchscreen, at 16 inches diagonally instead of 17, featuring a resolution of 2,880 x 1,800 pixels. It no longer has an OLED panel, but it boasts an impressive 144-Hz refresh rate. While heavier than the old LG Gram Pro 17, it’s still up to a pound lighter than a typical 16-inch laptop.

The new system is designed as a 2-in-1, with a hinge that allows the LCD to fold flat against the back of the laptop so it can be used as a tablet. An active stylus is included in the box. The stylus can dock magnetically against the right side of the laptop and charge without a cable while it’s resting there, too.

Performance is the first place where things have picked up. While the unit I received for review is LG’s lowest-end configuration, featuring an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H CPU, 16 GB of RAM, 1 terabyte of storage, and integrated graphics, it ran rings around the older Gram Pro 17 and handily outpaced recent vintage systems from other manufacturers on common tasks.

Photograph: Chris Null

You wouldn’t know it from Intel’s arcane naming scheme, but the secret sauce seems to be the new 255H CPU, which has twice as many cores and double the cache of the 256V and 258V CPUs, which dominated the laptop market last year. Benchmark scores were up to 40 percent faster on CPU-focused tasks versus those systems, though most graphics and AI-focused tests were about even with other systems I’ve recently seen (this is a Copilot+ PC). The 17-inch Gram Pro had discrete graphics powered by Nvidia, so making apples-to-apples comparisons on graphics tests is difficult. In regular use, the system was snappy and responsive, and I rarely found myself waiting for apps to load or for complex tasks to complete.

LG has also figured out the heat situation that marred the 2024 Gram Pro experience so badly. Even under the heaviest loads I could muster, the system stayed wholly workable—slightly warm but never uncomfortable, in large part I presume due to the lack of a discrete GPU in the mix. I rarely got the fan to kick in, and when it did, the output was barely audible—and no match for the Pro’s solid speakers.

Port selection is fine, with two USB-C ports that support USB4 (one used for charging), two USB-A ports, and a full-size HDMI jack.

Compromises for Size

Photograph: Chris Null

What didn’t I love about the device? To keep the laptop thin, LG has shaved keyboard travel down to nothing. That makes touch-typing difficult, as does the heavy shift of the keyboard to the left, done to make room for a very slim (and only moderately usable) numeric keypad. Some keys, including the function keys and, especially, the arrow keys, are so small that it’s easy to mistakenly hit the wrong button, even when you’re trying to be careful.

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.