Luxury Gold Acer Chromebook 14 14 Inches Laptop Review

As I write this, the Acer Chromebook 14 is sitting with 13 reviews, all of which are 5 stars... and I do feel a little bit bad here breaking up the perfect game, but after using this Chromebook for a few days, I feel I have an obligation to point out both its strengths and its drawbacks. Even writing that, I can't say I'm completely surprised by all of the 5 star reviews, as there are a lot of things that this Chromebook gets right.

There are five key things worth highlighting here.

First: the screen. Many of Acer's Chromebooks have, historically, been hampered by their poor displays. Thankfully, this time, Acer has gotten that part right. The Chromebook 14 has a 1080p IPS display with fantastic viewing angles and excellent brightness. I keep it at about 60-70% and it looks fantastic. It feels wonderful to finally say that about an Acer display.

Second: the build materials. Chromebooks have generally been budget-friendly devices, but recently we've... Read more

For Chromebook fans, one persistent nagging issue has been the generally under-powered hardware for users who really push their machines - once you have a dozen or so tabs open with a half dozen extensions, many Chromebooks can start to slow down noticeably. Until now, the only option available has been the $1000 Pixel which is a beautiful PC but way beyond the budget for this kind of device.

Acer has identified the Chromebook market gaps and solved almost everything in this extremely solid offering - a thin, metal, almost Mac-like build, armed with 4GB of RAM, a full 14" HD display and a Quad-core CPU. Even the touchpad and keyboard perform as well as the very best Chromebooks currently available (which, until now, I would have said were built by Dell and Samsung). The performance never lags, it meets the 10-12 hour battery life promise in my usage tests, and it's quickly become my go-to computer for both home and work.

If you're new to Chromebooks, here's... Read more

I'm a Software Engineer, and wanted a relatively cheap laptop that I could take with me, and at the same time, not have to worry about like I do with my $2000+ Mac Pro book. I do a lot of development in the cloud, and make use of a lot of resources on the net, and so reasoned I didn't need to cart around a regular laptop. Since I obviously do a lot of typing, I hoped for decent keyboard-- and was pleasantly surprised. The keyboard on this unit is actually quite nice. And let's be real. The majority of things we do everyday on a computer is covered by a Chromebook, and it's large array of available apps and extensions (to Chrome). Certainly for specialized uses, we can't completely untether ourselves from a full on laptop or desktop running Linux, OS X, or Windows. But Chromebooks do fill a niche.

I just received delivery of this, and set it up. One thing I didn't like about Chromebooks that I've looked at in the past was their cheesy shells and keyboards, and the... Read more