LG enters laptop market in U.S.

NEW YORK — LG Electronics is a recognizable and respected tech brand in the U.S. for its TVs, smartphones and home appliances. Now the U.S. arm of the South Korean tech giant hopes to make a name for itself in a market it has thus far avoided in the U.S.: Laptop computers.

On Monday, LG Electronics launched a line of premium and lightweight Windows 10 laptops under what it calls the LG gram series. The three models under the new series will be sold initially in physical and online Microsoft stores and at Amazon.com. Starting price: $899.

The top of the line, half-inch thick, $1,399, LG gram 14 model, weighs in at just 2.16 pounds, which LG brags is lighter than Apple's MacBook Air. It runs Intel's fifth generation i7 processor, comes with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, and is constructed of carbon-lithium and carbon-magnesium materials that LG says have been used in race cars and space craft. There's an onboard full-sized HDMI port as well.

There's also an instant boot system that promises to wake up the operating system right when you open up the display.

LG says the computer will have about 7.5 hours of battery, well under the 12 hours Apple claims for the largest of the MacBook Air models.

Of course beyond the Air, LG has to contend with all the many companies that have been producing Windows laptops for years, not an easy challenge.

"We recognize this is an extremely competitive category, and are confident consumers will respond well to this product that combines powerful performance with lightweight design." LG Electronics USA vice president of marketing David VanderWaal said in a statement.

While the choice of "gram" as the name for the series is meant to reflect the fact that these are lightweight machines, LG had better hope that the computers have a greater presence than the metric system has in the U.S.

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