MacBook Pro 16-inch vs LG Gram: Price, performance compared – do phone

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The 2023 Gram 17 began delivery on February 1, although LG introduced the brand new laptop in January at CES 2023. It consists of the most recent applied sciences, corresponding to an Intel Core i7 processor and an Nvidia GPU.

The brand new 16-inch MacBook Pro mannequin was unveiled on January 17 and went on sale on January 24. It consists of most of the similar options because the earlier mannequin with a number of noticeable modifications — most notably the brand new M-collection processors and an upgraded HDMI connector. Additionally, battery life was prolonged by an hour.

Whereas related in measurement, the first variations between the LG Gram 17 and the up to date MacBook Pro lay inside with the CPU, GPU, and sound system. The MacBook Pro is best in some methods, however there are particular audiences which will find yourself wanting on the LG Gram.

We have each in our studio so we’ll be testing the excessive-finish LG Gram towards Apple’s M2 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro.

Right here is how the 2 notebooks stack up towards one another.

The casing of every MacBook Pro is made fully of recyclable aluminum, and the entire magnets are product of uncommon earth metals. Many parts make use of 35% or extra recycled plastic, whereas the principle logic board makes use of 100% recycled tin for soldering.

At 14.01 inches by 9.77 inches by 0.66 inches, the MacBook Pro weighs 4.7 kilos or 4.8 kilos with an M2 Pro or M2 Max chip, respectively. The LG Gram is lighter at 3.2 kilos and related in measurement at 14.91 inches by 10.19 inches and 0.7 inches.

LG Gram underneath the 16-inch MacBook Pro

LG makes use of a magnesium alloy materials for the pocket book’s physique, although it would not point out if they’ve recycled supplies. It has a wedge-formed design that’s typical of “ultrabooks,” a time period used to explain extremely-skinny, excessive-finish notebooks.

MacBook Pro on prime of the wedge-formed LG Gram

LG additionally has a variation of the Gram, 17Z90R-Ok.ADS9U1, weighing 2.98 kilos. Different variations on this mannequin embrace built-in graphics, a battery with decrease watt-hours, and decrease-wattage audio system.

The display screen on the MacBook Pro is provided with mini LED Liquid Retina XDR expertise with a decision of three,456 by 2,234 pixels and a pixel density of 254 pixels per inch. It allows professionals to make use of pre-set reference settings that management the show’s brightness, gamma, white level, and shade area.

MacBook Pro backlighting provides full-display screen brightness sustained at 1,000 nits and peak HDR content material brightness of 1,600 nits. Its most SDR brightness is 500 nits, and the utmost distinction ratio is 1,000,000:1.

The mannequin’s show has ProMotion, which permits it to robotically alter its refresh price to 120Hz or decrease ranges when energy conservation is required.

The display screen on the MacBook Pro additionally helps True Tone. This function robotically adjusts the show based mostly on ambient lighting circumstances to make sure that colours look the identical in several environments.

The MacBook Pro additionally has a notch within the prime-heart of the show, just like newer iPhones, that comprises the webcam.

LG Gram show

The 17-inch IPS LCD on the LG Gram comes at a 2,560 by 1,600 decision with a a lot decrease pixel density of 178ppi. It additionally has a typical brightness of 350 to 400 nits with a variable refresh price of as much as 144Hz, and the bezels are uniform with no notch.

The M2 Pro chip within the 16-inch MacBook Pro begins with 16GB of unified reminiscence, a 12-core CPU, and a 19-core GPU. Furthermore, it has a unified reminiscence bandwidth of 200GB/s, and consumers may select an M2 Pro chip with 32GB of reminiscence.

It has 40 billion transistors with eight high-performance cores and 4 excessive-effectivity cores. The extra highly effective M2 Max chip has 67 billion transistors.

With a 12-core CPU, the M2 Max has 400GB/s of unified reminiscence bandwidth and helps as much as 96GB of unified reminiscence. Apple’s 16-core, subsequent-era Neural Engine, which may carry out 15.8 trillion operations per second, is part of the M2 Pro and M2 Max.

M2 Pro helps {hardware}-accelerated H.264, HEVC, and ProRes video encoding and decoding. The M2 Max, as compared, has twice as many video encode engines and double as many ProRes engines because the M2 Pro.

The LG Gram 17 has a thirteenth-gen Intel Core i7-1360P processor with twelve cores — 4 for performance and eight for effectivity. The performance cores run at 2.2GHz as much as 5.0GHz, whereas the effectivity cores are 1.6GHz as much as 3.7GHz.

Our MacBook Pro with an M2 Max chip has a Geekbench 6 score of two,737 for a single-core and 14,603 for multi-core performance. In the meantime, the LG Gram trails behind — by so much. It has a rating of two,328 in single-core performance and 9,842 in multi-core.

Working benchmarks on the LG Gram and MacBook Pro

Though all chips have twelve cores, Apple has a transparent edge over Intel. Even the 2020 MacBook Air with an M1 chip beats the Intel GPU in single-core performance, though it trails barely behind in multi-core.

The GeForce RTX 3050 GPU comes with 4GB of GDDR6 reminiscence, second-era ray tracing for higher graphics, an encoder constructed for dwell streaming, and options powered by synthetic intelligence to boost voice and video options. It has 2,560 NVIDIA CUDA cores.

The M2 Pro chip on the 16-inch MacBook Pro in the meantime has a 19-core built-in GPU, and the M2 Max chip has two choices to decide on a GPU with 30 or 38 cores.

It is not simple to straight examine a discrete GPU just like the GeForce towards a system-on-a-chip like Apple Silicon. Nevertheless, Geekbench nonetheless lists OpenCL scores for every.

The RTX 3050 has a rating of 65,751, whereas the M2 Pro is at 46,118. Nevertheless, a minimum of on paper, the M2 Max is the winner right here at 79,659.

The 17Z90R-Ok.ADS9U1 variant of the LG Gram 17 has built-in Intel Iris Xe graphics.

The 16-inch MacBook Pro has a 1080p webcam housed in a notch on the show, and the chips can improve the sharpness and video high quality.

The Full HD infrared webcam on the LG Gram 17 consists of two microphones and 1080p decision. The webcam is able to facial recognition with LG Look, which makes use of superior face, eye, and gaze sensing from Mirametrix for enhanced safety.

In the meantime, as Apple’s Face ID facial recognition expertise has but to make its means on the Mac, the corporate features a Contact ID fingerprint sensor on the keyboard.

The MacBook Pro has storage capacities of as much as 8TB, with configurations beginning at 512GB. The three LG Gram notebooks begin at 1TB of storage and maxes out at 2TB.

Three USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports with assist for charging, DisplayPort, and Thunderbolt 4/USB 4 as much as 40Gb/s are discovered on the MacBook Pro, whereas the LG Gram has two Thunderbolt 4/USB 4 ports with Energy Supply and DisplayPort, two USB-A 3.2, one HDMI, a Micro SD slot, and a 3.5mm audio jack.

One other port on the MacBook Pro — MagSafe 3 — permits for a magnetically-connected charging cable that may shortly disconnect if somebody journeys over it.

Ports on the LG Gram

The MacBook Pro additionally connects with Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax) and Bluetooth 5.3. Connectivity on the LG Gram consists of Bluetooth 5.1 and Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax).

The LG Gram has a 90Wh battery which the company says can last as long as 20 hours of video playback. The MacBook Pro has a comparable battery lifetime of as much as 22 hours, which Apple examined by taking part in HD 1080p content material within the Apple TV app with the show brightness set to eight clicks from the underside, although it might differ by use and settings.

Testing circumstances for the LG Gram’s battery concerned a show brightness of underneath 150 nits, a wi-fi-off setting, content material performed in Microsoft Films & TV, and headphones plugged in.

The MacBook Pro and LG Gram have backlit keyboards so customers can comfortably sort in low-mild environments. They every additionally provide trackpads that assist multi-contact gestures for managing apps and navigating by means of the working programs.

An array of three “studio-high quality” mics with a excessive sign-to-noise ratio and directional beamforming to file audio is discovered on the MacBook Pro. It additionally boasts a power-canceling six-speaker excessive-constancy audio system.

The audio system on the MacBook Pro helps huge stereo sound, spatial audio, and Dolby Atmos. Excessive-impedance headphones can be utilized with the three.5mm headphone jack, and the HDMI port helps multichannel audio output.

Audio on the LG Gram consists of two stereo audio system at 3W, although the 17Z90R-Ok.ADS9U1 variant has HD audio with Dolby Atmos Stereo, two audio system at 2W, and a Sensible Amp with a most of 5W.

The 16-inch 2023 MacBook Pro starts at $2,499 with a 12-core CPU and 19-core GPU on an M2 Pro. Prospects can improve to an M2 Max with a 12-core CPU and 30-core GPU for $200 additional or one with a 38-core GPU for $400, that is $200 extra once more than the 30-core GPU.

Relying in your chip selection, the reminiscence upgrades accessible to you may differ. For a begin, the M2 Pro ships with 16GB of Unified Reminiscence, however going for 32GB prices an additional $400.

The M2 Max lineup begins at 32GB, with a $400 improve accessible to achieve 64GB. If you happen to go for the highest M2 Max choice, 96GB of reminiscence turns into accessible as an $800 improve from the 32GB starter.

The MacBook Pro has extra choices for reminiscence and storage

The MacBook Pro prices $200 extra to improve its storage from 512GB to 1TB and one other $400 on prime to develop it to 2TB. The price will increase by $600 to go from 2TB to 4TB, and 8TB is $1,200 greater than 4TB.

LG Gram light-weight ultrabook

LG sells the Gram 17 pocket book in three variants, beginning with a $1,999 model (17Z90R-A.AAB7U1) that has 1TB of storage and 16GB of DDR5 RAM.

The opposite two are $2,099 (17Z90R-Ok.ADS9U1) and $2,299 (17Z90R-A.ADB9U1) which offer 32GB of DDR5 reminiscence and a 2TB SSD on every mannequin.

Selecting the costliest MacBook Pro that gives the highest {hardware} upgrades prices $6,499, which incorporates an M2 Max with twelve CPU cores and 38 GPU cores, 96GB of unified reminiscence, and an 8TB strong-state drive. The highest-tier LG Gram in the meantime gives an Intel i7 chip with twelve CPU cores, a 4GB Nvidia GPU, 32GB of reminiscence, and a 2TB SSD.

The LG Gram 17 is a perfect gaming laptop computer with Home windows, a big show, and a devoted GPU. Then again, Apple sometimes markets its notebooks for productiveness and creativity.

The MacBook Pro provides extra choices for storage and reminiscence, and the M2 Pro/Max chips handily outclass Intel’s providing on this case. Apple’s providing additionally has higher audio system that ship greater-high quality audio.

Whereas the LG Gram is, by far, higher suited to video games and people who want Home windows, the MacBook Pro is a more sensible choice in practically all different elements. Whereas related in measurement, the LG Gram is lighter than the MacBook.

The MacBook Pro will discover a good residence on a desktop, however vacationers could discover it too heavy to hold in a bag the place weight is an element. The LG Gram weighs much less however is barely bigger in dimensions.

However, it would not beat Apple’s pocket book in benchmarks, although that is not essentially reflective of actual-world performance.

Apple’s 2023 MacBook Pro is on sale now, with unique offers accessible within the AppleInsider 16-inch MacBook Pro Price Guide. At press time, each configuration is as much as $300 off.

The LG Gram 17 begins at $1,999, with Amazon.com stocking all three fashions.