Acer Chromebook 14 review: You can brag a little about this laptop’s luxury details - schenckthemand

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

Sturdy, beautiful aluminum shell
High-resolution exhibit with wide viewing angles
Astonishingly good speakers

Cons

Keyboard is hard formative with a granular thrust
Limited performance with graphics-intensive applications

Our Verdict

Acer's Chromebook 14 has few things to vaporing about: Its brushed-aluminum chassis and spiky-resolve display piss it stand out among other affordable models, even if new features stay on bad basic.

Chromebooks can be a crap shoot. It's easy to get sucked in past a low Price, only to discover yourself with a disappointingly low-quality device on your hands. Merely you wear't have to come ou into the higher-priced territory of the Dingle Chromebook 13 operating theatre HP Chromebook 13 to find satisfaction. For a midrange price ($286 on Amazon), the Acer Chromebook 14 gives you an all-Al flesh and a rattling nice display, even if its operation and other attributes are less remarkable.

The Chromebook 14's best features

acer chromebook 14 lid — The Chromebook 14 is Genus Acer's first all-aluminum model, with a brushed finish.

Acer touts the all-aluminum physical body on the Chromebook 14, and permanently ground. Amid a pile of plastic competitors, the brushed-metal shell looks refined and feels great. Of track, the material is too durable and light, making the Chromebook 14 a comfortable 3.42 pounds away Genus Acer's specification. The AC adapter (the characteristic black brick) and cables weigh an additional 0.55 pounds. The laptop computer's dimensions are a trim 13.3 x 9.31 x 0.67 inches.

Encased inside the chapeau's slender bezel is an impressive 14-inch, 1920×1080 LED-backlit IPS display. Chromebooks have a reputation for fair screens, with limited brightness level and viewing angles. Most receive a resoluteness of just 1366×768, which suffices on an 11-inch showing but starts to look ridiculous when stretched o'er a 14-inch display. The Acer Chromebook 14's screen looks crisp and has a good maximum brightness (236 nits by our mensuration). The 170-degree viewing lean on means it's readable from every last sides, and the anti-glare coating is another generous plus.

acer chromebook 14 top — The Chromebook 14 has a 1920×1080 IPS display with 170-degree viewing angles.

A high-resolution display does consumption Thomas More battery. We logged 8.82 hours of life from the Chromebook 14's 3-cell, 3950mAh pack, victimisation Cr-XPRT 2015's benchmark. That's a good amount of clock, though not as long as Acer's promise of up to 12 hours.

I never expect to like a laptop's speakers, which is why the Acer Chromebook 14's deserve mention for being surprisingly good. The dual adjust, close underneath the left and right sides, allow good basso and stereo effects. You mightiness still plug in external headphones, but at least your laptop computer won't sound like a cyber-chipmunk if you have to use its speakers for a presentation.

acer chromebook 14 bottom foot speaker — The Acer Chromebook 14 has multiple speakers on either side of the bottom instrument panel, with surprisingly better sound.

You also seat't argue with the Chromebook 14's connectivity. It has Bluetooth 4.2 for the a la mode in close-range performance and privacy. Wi-Fi covers every available flavor with dual-dance orchestra 2×2 MIMO 802.11ac/a/b/g/n.

The to a greater extent typical features

I don't mean to seem ungrateful for the Chromebook 14's adept things, only Acer appears to bear bet everything on those features, substance the rest of the Chromebook is less remarkable. Anyone whose expectations were raised by the high-end look may represent at to the lowest degree a little disappointed.

acer chromebook 14 keyboard clickpad — The chiclet-style keyboard on the Acer Chromebook 14 has hard plastic and a disagreeable travel. There's as wel a large clickpad.

I was in particular unhappy with the keyboard, which has the hard-plastic keys and harsh, abrupt travel typical of entry-even out Chromebooks—non what the Chromebook 14 is supposed to be. The large clickpad worked considerably.

acer chromebook 14 right side — The accurate side of the Acer Chromebook 14 has the headphone/mic jack and power port.

Direct connectivity is limited to just two USB 3.0 ports (first-coevals, meaning a 5Gbps transfer rate) and an HDMI port. While the 32GB of eMMC entrepot is nice, I think a lot of users will miss an SD card slot—thither's none on this motorcar.

acer chromebook 14 left side — The left-of-center position of the Acer Chromebook 14 has two USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI port, and a Kensington engage port.

Performance: Stick with mainstream apps

The Chromebook 14's performance reflects its modest SoC: Intel's Celeron N3160 quad-gist running at 1.6GHz, with 4GB of LPDDR3 RAM and merged Intel HD graphics. This setup will produce it through mainstream World Wide Web apps and a streamed movie—which is what most masses with Chromebooks do—but this isn't the Chromebook for bleeding-edge users tinkering with WWW gambling operating theater other graphics-intensive tasks. Anecdotally, even running multiple media-oppressive sites simultaneously seemed to filter the Chromebook 14, so keep it simple.

Because this is the first N3160-equipped Chromebook we've tested, we compared IT with some past N3060-based models, which are of the same Braswell generation, but with two cores rather of four. We besides included the Dell Chromebook 13, which has a Celeron 3205U instead of an SoC, thus you can see how a high-end (and higher-priced) Chromebook compares.

The Chromebook 14 (red bar in each chart) started off well with the Cr-XPRT operation test, which measures Chromebook performance in basic productiveness tasks as well as many needy activities, such as watching movies or playing games. Information technology's in the lead, if aside a hair, compared to the early two low-end Chromebooks. Not surprisingly, though, the Dingle smokes everyone.

Basemark Web 3.0 lately replaced Browsermark 2.1 as Basemark's comprehensive browser benchmark. The tests plow web-based technologies including WebGL 1.0.2 and WebGL 2.0 period artwork, American Samoa well as JavaScript. All three Chromebooks posted close scores, but the Chromebook 14 was a tad slower despite having a faster chip. (Note: We couldn't add the Dingle to the Basemark chart, as it was tested with Basemark's predecessor, Browsermark.)

Google's Octane 2.0 JavaScript bench mark simulates advanced web browser-based activities, including productiveness applications, games, and interactive content. The Chromebook 14 posted slightly lower scores than its cohort, basically a credential of attendance. Look at that Dell go!

As if to drive home the Chromebook 14's mainstream theme, here's how it fared happening OortOnline, a WebGL test that focuses on art-intensive applications and games. Even though it has a more omnipotent SoC than the two unusual Chromebooks (excepting the standout Dingle), information technology posted the lowest score by a minute margin.

The price of gracious

Acer's Chromebook 14 is about looking at and flavor. The aluminum shell and gamy-resolution expose coif a lot to separate information technology from its lower-cost cousins and establish you a better experience. You're already paying a little more scarce for those two perks. IT'd cost you even more to get better performance and features, simply for mainstream users, the Chromebook 14 represents a fairly sweet spot.