Acer Chromebook 715
Is Acer’s premium Chromebook too pricey even for Lord Jeremy Laird?
Is Acer’s premium Chromebook too pricey even for Lord Jeremy Laird? We put the fully-metal chassis Chrome OS system through its paces to see if it’s worth a buy.
Premium Chromebooks aren’t a new notion. It was Google itself that defenestrated the assumption that laptops running its Chrome OS were automatically budget devices. The Google Pixelbook was a $1,000 system with build quality and features to match.
So what makes this Acer premium? Highlights include all-metal construction, a powerful Intel quadcore CPU, 16GB of RAM, a 15.6-inch IPS touchscreen, a fairly beefy battery and a fingerprint reader.
With UK pricing of £899 for this configuration, the Acer Chromebook 715 puts itself against a wide range of fairly premium laptops. On the Chromebook side, there’s the Google Pixelbook which kicks off at £800, albeit with a lower specification in areas like the CPU.
The Acer Chromebook 715’s chassis is indeed allalloy, for instance, and feels robust. The broad keyboard complete with a full numberpad is a nice feature, too. But it’s a pretty anonymous and has the air of a mid-market rather than truly premium device.
The Intel CPU is likewise the powerful quad-core Core i7-8650u that turbos up to fully 4.2GHZ and is paired with a very healthy 16GB of DDR memory – just what you’d expect at this price. What you might not be so impressed by is a mere 128GB of local storage, and in low-performing EMMC format at that.
Admittedly, local storage is of much lower priority for a Chromebook, where the emphasis is on using Google’s various cloud-based services for storage. But if you’re going to have a lump of flash memory, having it hooked up via a faster interface would be welcome, especially at this price.
Connectivity is pretty good. Both of the USB-C ports, one either side of the chassis, support charging and display output, for instance. Similarly, the 56Wh battery bodes well for battery life given it’s supporting a lowvoltage Intel CPU. The fingerprint reader is another plus, especially for business users, and remains a relative rarity on Chromebooks at any price. There’s also a fairly generously proportioned trackpad with a Gorilla Glass surface for a slick, smooth feel.
It’s not normally part of our laptop test routine, but we extracted some synthetic numbers from the drive and found read speeds of around 250MB/S and writes of 190MB/S. That’s pretty poor when the latest M.2 SSDS are knocking out multiple GB/S of performance.
The biggest disappointment is the Acer Chromebook 715’s screen. If the core 1080p specs are merely OK, the reality isn’t even that good. The backlighting is weak, the colours dull, the pixel density relatively coarse. It’s not nearly good enough at this price.
Indeed, it was the Google Pixelbook’s high-res, high quality screen – complete with an unusual but arguably more ergonomic 3:2 aspect ratio – that helped smooth acceptance of what was then a new proposition: the premium Chromebook. Still, there’s better news when it comes to battery life, with the 715 delivering over 13 hours of video playback. The caveat is that our testing was completed at 50 per cent screen brightness, a level that’s probably unrealistically low given this laptop’s dingy screen. But even with a few hours shaved off, this laptop offers true all-day battery life.
Justifying a near four-figure price is a tough ask with any Chromebook – and we’re not convinced Acer has entirely pulled it off. The biggest problem is the disappointing screen: it’s just not good enough at this cost. All of which means the Acer Chromebook 715 is tough to recommend.