Acer Aspire Spin 7 review
ACER’S ASPIRE SPIN 7 2-IN-1 MIGHT NOT SPIN ANY HEADS, BUT IT’LL CERTAINLY TURN THEM.
THERE’S NO DOUBT about it: the Aspire Spin 7 is one of the most attractive 2-in-1s to have passed through the TechLife labs. Weighing 1.6kg and measuring just 22mm thick when closed, this 14-inch convertible is made up of two thin and flat rectangular metal slabs that make the whole package pleasingly symmetrical. Those two halves are just 11mm thick a piece, and conjoined on one edge by a pair of sturdy silver hinges that lets the screen keep folding around a full 360º, until the back of the display and underside of the keyboard segment are touching. That lack of width does mean you only get USB Type-C ports, although there is a adapter-dongle included so you can still get a regular USB-A port in a pinch.
Acer’s only offering one version of the Spin 7 in Australia so far — an upper-mid model in a matte-black finish that has a 1080p IPS display (protected by Gorilla Glass), a Core i7 CPU (there’s a caveat to that, which we’ll get to), 256GB SATA SSD and 8GB of memory for $1,999. That’s a fair deal for that mix of specs and price and the fact that the keyboard and ultrawide trackpad are both super-responsive and comfortable in use helps the appeal too.
Did we mention this really is a very thin device? And yet despite that, it’s also passively cooled — there are no fans inside to help dissipate heat. There aren’t even any vents. The upside to this is that it’s completely silent at all times: you won’t hear a peep out of it, even when it’s doing serious number crunching. There’s still a price to pay, though, in that if you do anything moderately CPU-intensive the chassis area behind the keyboard heats up to scorching levels that are literally too hot to touch — and it’s the same on the underside, too.
Causing most of that heat is Intel’s deceptively named Core i7-7Y75 processor. Don’t let the ‘i7’ moniker fool you: last year, this ultra low-voltage CPU would have carried the ‘Core M’ name, but for some reason, Intel has decided to rebadge its new Kaby Lake Core M chips so they get the same ‘Core i3’, ‘i5’ and ‘i7’ identifiers as its mainstream parts... even though they’re substantially less powerful. (You can generally spot these chips because they have a Y in their four-digit identifier number). That’s not to imply that the Spin 7 is slow — it holds up very well for day-to-day tasks — but we wouldn’t want to be doing taxing tasks like editing or encoding 4K video on it, and it’s only capable of very basic gaming.
The Spin 7’s battery life was just fair in our testing — about what we’d expect from a laptop this thin. It eked out a passable 4 hours in PCMark 8’s Home benchmark, which is a moderate-use test that includes web-surfing, video chat and office document editing, and that stretched to 6 hours when we were just watching 1080p videos. (As always, our battery tests are run with the screen at 50% brightness.)
We did experience one niggling issue — its matte-black metallic finish is a massive fingerprint magnet. It becomes grubby very quickly, which undermines the otherwise premium look and feel of the device. That’ll bother some people more than others, but regardless, it’s an issue that means we’d suggest seeing and testing this 2-in-1 in person before deciding if it’s right for you.