LG Gram - My Escape from Mac

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Ew a Mac?

I had purchased my M1 Pro MacBook Pro when it launched. I was impressed with the claimed performance and battery life and pulled the trigger. My thought was if it would get me through my day job and school work, about 4 years, and made the experience not suck, it was a sound “investment”.

It is now almost 5 years later, and the device is still chugging along just fine! Battery health is even fairly good yet, but you can tell there’s some age.

The build quality and performance have been perfect, and honestly outside of wasting some time playing WoW, the Pro was probably overkill. It did what it needed to do though and got me from healthcare to now working in tech, all while being a painless experience.

So Where’s the Problem??

Firstly, cost. Apple has never been cheap, but that Mac I bought will likely work and function just fine up till Apple kills its updates, so I think the value for that purchase still works for me. A Mac mini is now $800 in the states, up from $500, which used to be the reasonable option for not only a Mac, but a computer in general. This scaling hit the laptops too. To replace my Mac with another equivalent it’s around $3,000. Granted I no longer need my laptop to do it all, but I can not justify that cost personally on a laptop anymore.

The main thing I wish I could do is upgrade the ram, and GPU (I realize the latter is not really a thing in laptops). Performance is still fine outside of games for my needs… but I do have a gaming/workstation rig now so just the ram would be nice.

Secondly, I’m not sure I trust Apple anymore. Not so much as in the tinfoil hat kind of way, we’ll save that for a later time, but more so in making good design choices. I don’t hate liquid glass like some, but in general Apple is now making sweeping changes to UI and UX that don’t always have opt out options.

Now before someone goes “no shit it’s an Apple product”…

Apple’s design for software and especially hardware is not bad. If you think it is bad please submit your full functional replacement guide for all apple products with the same level of warranty and performance per watt. The issue is more so the lack of control, which is a bit more of a new topic for me, the concept of data sovereignty and “own your shit”.

I want to take ownership back.

How the hell is an LG Gram a replacement?

It’s not! This keyboard is worse (imo) After some more time using the device, I’ve found that I actually like the further travel that this keyboard has. The force and travel feels more similar to my keyboard with banana switches, which I’ve found I prefer. The screen isn’t as high rez or as fast in refresh rate, but I’m not playing shooters on my Mac either.

Key difference is the Gram was 400 bucks, like-new in box. This may still be too much for some, but having spent $2000+ on a laptop before this feels sane. This laptop in the epic review period of.. 6 days, has confirmed a theory I’ve had for a while, and I think a lot of people may suffer from.

I don’t need the compute of the M1 and for most of the ownership never did. I think most people don’t. My workstation/gaming rig is made out of mainly 5-10 year old parts and is more than enough for my actual needs.

The Gram is roughly the same size as my MacBook. The Gram is quite a bit lighter. The Gram is also a 2-in-1, which is a nice option. The Gram browses the web, has a keyboard, can run Factorio, play videos, read email, write shitty code etc etc just as well as I could on the MacBook.

It’s a full replacement with no real loss, other than being an iPhone user (for now) and losing those features like handoff and such.

The Specs of the Gram

  • Model 14T90Q-K.AAB9U1

  • 14" 1920x1200 touchscreen, 60 Hz

  • Intel Core i7-1260P

  • Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics

  • 16 GB RAM soldered

  • 1 TB NVMe

Zero benchmarking done, but overall it’s about as snappy for browsing and other general tasks compared to the MacBook. Battery life has also been good so far. I have been able to go roughly 2 days between charging, having only used it in the morning for about 2 hours each day, with another 1 or so during the work day. It’s not even dead when I go to charge it, I just try and let the battery sit between 20%-80%.

Going to mention the price again, but for $400 bucks I find this value exchange to be more than ok with me.

CachyOS btw

I am new to Linux for desktop computing, and I do not currently care for whatever holy war you’re fighting for. I just need the OS to work so I can do the shit I need and want to do.

The install process was straightforward on the Gram. Not sure what issue it was on the first try that failed, because after a reboot the installer worked.

Amazingly, with zero work, the touch screen works along with the stylus (in some apps). Hell, even the suspend works right out of the box as well, which from what I understand is a feat.

Are We Happy?

Shockingly, despite many forums and people saying I’d miss the quality of Apple devices, so far it hasn’t been that noticeable. I think part of this comes down to the fact that most things have gotten better overall at a baseline compared to years past.

COSMIC desktop has been Mac-adjacent enough to be familiar to continue to just get stuff done that I need to get done. I think I should have possibly held out for a Lenovo that would’ve been more repairable, but I wasn’t expecting to go from Apple fan boy to repair/privacy advocate overnight in one go.

I did lose out on being able to upgrade the RAM, but removing myself from macOS got me back down to a lower baseline. With no GPU heavy automations hitting the unified memory, nor the bloat of modern operating systems, the ram is less of a concern. While I still wish it was upgradable, I’ll take the sacrifice for a bit better performance and lower power draw of soldered vs non-soldered.

I’d challenge a lot of people to reevaluate what they need from their devices, and to actually look at what is now available from other providers. You might be able to escape from whatever has a grip on you too.

Next step of my escape:

iPhone/Apple watch

Thanks for reading my rambling.

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Don’t you miss the better screen, mic, speakers, touchpad?

Currently running a M3 (was 600 bucks) but I am also thinking about switching to fedora in the future.

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So far I don’t miss any of those things, but my use case of the laptop has shifted. (it’s not my “everything” computer anymore)

For the screen, it’s bright enough for my use case, and crisp enough that text is sharp and clear. I do sometimes feel bothered by the lack of promotion, but for things like typing this message or other work, it’s more than fine.

I have not tired the mic, I’m sure it’s awful. I normally use headphones anyway, such as my airpods, so that’s fixing that part.

Speakers arent bad for spoken word, I wouldn’t use it for movies or blasting music though.

Touchpad was strange to get use to, but I haven’t been too bothered by the change. I also have been trying to keep my hands on the keyboard more when using the laptop rather than the trackpad.

What’s making you think about switching?

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I thought MacOS is BSD Unix, or a flavor thereof.

is this not the case with the M1’s?

I still use my 2019 MBP, makes a great thin client, plus heats up yer lap in the winter when yer playing Myst, almost light a cig off of it too.

I also have a couple of G4’s in my museum. They work great there.

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By no means do I think I am fully qualified to offer a real answer, but from what I understand there’s bits and pieces from BSD, and I don’t believe that changed when switching to Apple’s own ARM silicon.

That was part of the swap, I can RDP or similar to the workstation for any further power needed that this little laptop can’t provide.

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No worries about your knowledge base, mine’s from the school of hard knocks. I learn by what ticks me off not working :rofl:

Someone said that to me years ago and was wondering if that holds true still.

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It’s based off of a unix like os called Darwin.

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I am in the same boat as you as I’m looking into escaping apple eventually hopefully, but I don’t use Mac because I’ve worked with them and the lack of repairability and macOS have driven me to the point of insanity. but please do share how your leaving macos experience is in like a month or 2.

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I realized after posting I should’ve just made this a thread on my thoughts and feelings of moving from being heavily ingrained in Apple to moving to more open and free options.

I’ll either start another thread covering more of the full transition, or just add on here.

It’s the damn apple subscriptions and family that are on my plan that I think will be the biggest pain in the ass. That and swapping phones…. problems for another day.

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Some applications that may help ease your transition :slight_smile:

For your AirPods, but fair warning, I found it wasn’t totally straightforward to install on Fedora with Gnome. It needs the AppIndicator extension, which the repo doesn’t mention. Probably works out of the box in KDE. Not sure with COSMIC. Repo also recommends nightly builds but there aren’t any recent enough that still have downloadable artifacts, so I have concerns about maintenance going forward.

If you’re invested in Apple Music, this one is a paid application but it’s not expensive and it “just works” for most everything you’d expect.

There are some open source applications that promise support as well but I haven’t had good luck. Installing the website as an app is always an option too, I just find it clunky.

AirPlay support isn’t built in, but PipeWire does have a native RAOP module, and a Pulse RAOP module that both support AirPlay streaming. You can configure those to always be enabled, or the Pulse module can be enabled/disabled on demand via a CLI command. Several PipeWire GUIs exist as well that surface that feature. (I have a Gnome extension that can toggle it also, but since you’re using COSMIC, one of the other options should work if you need AirPlay audio). Just don’t expect multi-room streaming out of the box.

There’s also now BlueFerry for Messages. I haven’t tried it out though, I can’t be bothered to go through installing it. It’s not important enough of a feature for me and it has limitations. Just the same, something you can check out.

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It’s Unix, yes.

It is Darwin:

Screenshot 2026-09-11 at 12.00.41 PM
Screenshot 2026-09-11 at 12.00.41 PM928×102 14.9 KB

That’s what the kernel is called. Like how Linux is built on the Linux Kernel, Windows on the Windows NT kernel.

Because Linux is Unix-like, switching from macOS → Linux or vice versa is super easy, since most of the commands and file locations are the same (or similar enough). I use Macs at work and Linux at home, so I switch daily. I do have a MacBook Air of my own, but I am becoming less satisfied with it.

^ this is exactly why. I don’t want Apple Intelligence, it’s useless (it’s slower at reading and summarizing my emails than I am at reading and summarizing them in my own head, it tries to summarize notifications but I could just…. read them and summarize them in my own head…). I don’t like the models being hard to remove, and macOS will usually try and put it back (it’s 8GB of storage gone to something I never use, and storage is a premium on Macs). I also couldn’t stop the software update daemon on my MacBook Air the other day. It was eating all my cell hotspot bandwidth so I could barely load web pages, but it’s unkillable because macOS considers it an “essential system service” and won’t allow any type of kill command against it.

I really like macOS outside of that, the window management works for what I do, and it supports more industry software than Linux does. And the performance and battery life are nigh untouchable by anything else. But open source alternatives are getting really good (LibreOffice no longer mangles Excel sheets, for example) so I have less and less ties to macOS. I don’t even use AirDrop as much as I used to, because it’s been kinda janky lately (same with handoff). My next laptop… whenever that is, is unlikely to be a Mac at this point.

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Thanks for these! Librepods sounds familiar, but the others are 100% new to me. The airplay support would be nice till those devices eventually die and are replaced with something else.
That on an android if/when I switch will be nice. I really do like the airpod pros and conversation awareness and some of the other little features are nice for QOL.

I might give blueFerry a try… kinda like the idea of just keeping everything a bit more separate, but we’ll see how long that lasts!

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My personal laptop still is a LG Gram 14 with a 10th gen i5, and I really love it. However, the battery is already not in great shape anymore (only lasting 4~8 hours instead of the 6~12 hours it used to do), and the CPU is already showing its age.

I do have a MBP 14 with a M3 Max as my work laptop, performance is nice for a laptop. However, RAM is a bit lacking for my personal use at 36GB, the battery is somewhat poor - but that’s a given since it’s the Max model is a power hog (I much preferred my previous M3 Pro and M2 Pro in that regard) -, and it’s also heavier than my Gram.
I personally dislike MacOS and prefer Linux a lot more, but for me MacOS is still MILES better than Windows, so living with Apple’s shenanigans has been doable.

It saddens me that LG stopped making 14" models, there are only 16" ones. I’m still on the lookout for a new personal laptop, I’ve been eyeing options such as the XPS 14, Framework 13 Pro, and the Asus ExpertBook Ultra, but the current price craze makes it hard to swallow that idea.

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I didn’t even mention it in the original post, but I have a framework 13 pro preorder for the ultra5 that would arrive in November. I’m actually considering canceling it, as the Gram seems to be enough so far, but I do love that the Framework is repairable.

The price though, hurts my soul.

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I’d try running Linux on it. Not everything is supported, but it might work well enough?

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You don’t have to change everything. It’s not an all or nothing thing, that’s just the way Apple positions their devices; you have to have matching luggage.

You really don’t. I use Linux desktop, laptop and an iPhone just fine.

The iCloud family plan stuff can be genuinely good value so there’s no need to throw it all away just because one part of it isn’t working for you.

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I’ve tired this awhile ago and it worked, but it loses some of the polish that I consider to be part of the value of buying and using an Apple product, with the sacrifice of control.

Being that it’s no longer my main device, it’s most certainly worth a revisit!

Not sure that’ll be a this weekend project, but next weekend for sure.

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I appreciate the reframing, as a lot of this comes from my own perspective isolated from the family’s. It also gave me pause to think about what’s easier to deal with when I’m gone, the apple "digital legacy” feature, or a bunch of random half assed documentation I have… at least for the important stuff.

I’ve really enjoyed the QOL of Apple and all it’s offered, even at the price. I just see things heading towards a place I don’t like at an even more rapid rate than before, and I’m trying to lessen the blast radius, as the corporate world would have me say.

That said, I think I will slow down on solving the phone, and finish some other projects that’ll probably be more fun. Thank you for that reminder.

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Genuinely wondering if the op is blind and deaf.

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mainly because I used to have a 12" MacBook and it was magical. I don’t know why, but under 1kg something changes. Like it is not even close, it becomes a whole new device. Unfortunately, Apple gave up on that, but I now finally see others stepping in.
Only people who owned one can understand.

Biggest things I would miss are some integrations stuff. Like AirPods and answering incoming calls from my iPhone on my MacBook. Also, Photos works pretty great and I would have to switch to Imich. And I like the on-device proofreading Apple intelligence.