Acer Spin 7 Review

VERDICT

Acer’s first go at crafting the thinnest convertible in the world is held back by the world’s most antiquated trackpad and charger, but it makes up for it with a satisfying keyboard, the ideal amount of USB-C ports and a subtle design that works in its favor.

PROS:

Cozy keyboard,Classy design,Two USB-C ports

CONS:

Trackpad requires too much force,Poor speaker placement,Goofy power brick,Somewhat short battery life

If nothing else, the first of Acer’s “Spin” convertible lineup was a feat to pull off. Though it just so happens to be the world’s scrawniest hybrid notebook, it still fails to beat Acer’s own Acer Swift 7 of this year in terms of thinness alone.

Despite being sleek and versatile, boasting four different modes to put its 14-inch screen on display, the Spin 7 succeeds in more than just appearances. The rebranded Intel Y-series processors show up in the form of the 7th-generation Kaby Lake Intel i7-7Y75 processor, complete with the fanless designs of the former Core M-series chips.

While you shan’t expect it to fly nearly as fast as the full-on i7-7500U featured in the likes of the Dell XPS 13, you should have your battery to thank you for it. Unfortunately, we find the Spin 7’s longevity to be middling, but it offers a gorgeous 2-in-1 experience all the same.

Price and availability

The cost of the Acer Spin 7 – $1,249, £1,099 or AU$1,999 – lands about where it should for a notebook of its stature. Seeing as there’s only one configuration to choose from, bearing a 7th-gen Core i7 processor and stunning appearance, it seems appropriately priced. That is, of course, until you dive into some details in the nitty gritty.

Keep in mind, the Acer Spin 7 is available across the US, UK and Australia at the aforementioned respective price tags and comes exclusively furnished in a black all-metal finish. It can be purchased directly from Acer’s website, on Amazon or practically anywhere else laptops are sold.

Design

In addition to the obvious convertible design aspects, the Acer Spin 7 is graced with an all-metal chassis, a lean, albeit comfy keyboard and even a wide-angle glass trackpad embellished with decorative chamfered edges. Acer even went as far as to match the border of the trackpad with its pair of silvery hinges.

The keyboard exhibits travel that’s far superior to the MacBook’s infamous butterfly switches. Instead, it feels like a normal chiclet keyboard you would use for a work desktop in 2017.

Even so, it’s not without its faults. The absence of LED backlighting could be read as an oversight for a laptop in this price range.

Unfortunately, regardless of whether you decide to use the Acer Spin 7 as a traditional laptop, a tablet or a multimedia tent, you’ll be disappointed to discover that the speakers are placed on the device’s underside. This makes for a rather inconvenient way to listen to music or watch videos considering they’ll pretty much always be in contact with another surface.

Trackpad ennui

Though we’re blessed to have a keyboard that is this damn pleasing on the fingers, the same cannot be said of the Acer Spin 7’s trackpad. As much as we wanted to love it for its sheer latitude, we suppose it couldn’t be helped that, when moving from this to a MacBook, performing clicks made the 2-in-1’s touchpad feel like a chore in comparison.

It’s nice to have a wide-angle touchpad, but it’s definitely a burden to fully press down on every time you need to click on or highlight something, and it doesn’t help that it’s distractingly loud when you do so. At least, at the same time, there’s a touchscreen in place to emulate the trackpad functionality more quietly.

Because it goes the non-traditional route of honing in on a mobile processor, the Acer Spin 7 doesn’t need fans to keep cool, nor does it need to be plugged in at all times to stay productive. It exercises an acceptable battery life, despite failing to live up to the company’s eight-hour promise.

You may also be shocked to learn that opting for a mobile processor in the Acer Spin 7 makes it, dare we say, more portable (gasp). You can’t make the world’s thinnest convertible without sacrificing some of the chunkier components. That means no full-size CPUs and, thankfully, no spinning hard drives.

In fact, storage space is rather limited, and not the fastest, with the Acer Spin 7. It’s a bit disgruntling to see that not only is it limited to just shy of 256GB of SATA SSD space, but there’s only one configuration priced at $1,249 (£1,099 or AU$1,999).

What you see is what you get with the Acer Spin 7, and there’s no room for additional storage; at least with the Macbook, there’s the option of a more capacious – and faster, PCIe flash – disk drive, even if it costs an arm and a leg to add on.

Arguably, the Acer Spin 7’s strongest advantage over the comparably-specced MacBook is the inclusion of a second USB-C port. Finally, you can charge your laptop while also connecting it to an external monitor over DisplayPort connection through USB-C. Revolutionary, we know.

Aside from the pair of USB-C twins and a 3.5mm headphone/mic jack, the ports are kept to a minimum. It does, however, come with a couple of Acer-branded dongles for connecting HDMI or USB Type-A peripherals, a pleasant surprise by today’s standards.

As far as screen resolutions go, the Acer Spin 7’s isn’t anything special; it is, after all, just a plain old, 1080p display. Still, the Corning Gorilla Glass-coated IPS panel bears enough brightness and saturation that the difference in 1080p and 1440p is negligible. Plus, text is generally big enough to be legible by default, an added bonus.

Performance

The Acer Spin 7 is by no means a power hog. Yeah, it packs a Kaby Lake Intel Core i7 processor and Intel 620 Graphics, but you can tell by looking at our DirectX 12 stressor alone, Time Spy, that this isn’t a machine meant for rigorous media editing or high-end 3D games.

If we had to categorize it, we might say this is a laptop designed for writing in coffee shops. You don’t have to plug it in often, thanks to a battery life that exceeds 5 and a half hours of regular use, and it’s snappy enough to get the job done.

At the time writing of this review, we have eight Chrome tabs open and two other windows off to the side, and it’s running seamlessly.
On its own, the Acer Spin 7’s battery isn’t entirely a letdown, but when compared to similarly specced models, its longevity becomes curious. The Asus ZenBook Flip UX360, for instance, performed in PCMark8 tests for a whopping 5 hours and 51 minutes. The Acer Spin 7 on the other hand? A measly 3 hours and 37 minutes.

While its result in our anecdotal battery life test was a much longer 5 hours and 33 minutes, that’s still a far cry from Acer’s promised 8 hours of juice.

Luckily, the Acer Spin 7 gets its power from USB-C, which you would expect to make the charging hardware more portable. That would be the case, too, were it not for the horrific oversight that is the Acer Spin 7 power cable, essentially a sizable, ugly power brick caught between two cables (see also: photos of snakes digesting rats).

Ultimately, the Acer Spin 7 is a laptop that’s full of silver linings, but only because it needs to be in order to justify the premium. The $1,249 (about £999, AU$1,998) tag isn’t too much to ask for a notebook of this build quality, especially considering it can be used as a tablet with 10 points of touch recognition too, but there are also a handful of ways the Acer Spin 7 falls short of justifying that price.

We liked

As a general concept, there is a lot to love about the Acer Spin 7. The metal unibody chassis is hardened and sleek, complemented by one of the great laptop keyboards in recent memory. Despite helming a Y-series processor, we’re thankful it’s the top-end model and not a new-gen Core m3.

For your cash, it’s a comparable deal to one of its closest competitors, thanks to 2-in-1 functionality; and, you know what they say: two USB-C ports are better than one. The 360-degree hinge is both attractive and functional, but again, there certainly isn’t any spinning involved.

We disliked

While it passes with flying colors in many regards, the Acer Spin 7 is not entirely without flaws. The company should have made the trackpad, presumably a must for productivity tasks, a priority input over the touchscreen. Sure, it’s big and shiny, but it’s not easy to dismiss the very forceful push required to click things.

That goes without mentioning the keyboard which, while fantastic in its own right, is missing the LED backlighting we would expect from a notebook of this price. Plus, between middling battery life, slower storage and not quite as sharp a screen in comparison, the Spin 7 struggles to position itself against key rivals, like the MacBook.

Final verdict

The Acer Spin 7 is a lavish 2-in-1 device to its core, but aimed at a wider crowd. Highlighting four different modes – laptop, tent, display and tablet – it’s treated to a flashy design with patches of silver placed about. The Acer Spin 7 keeps it simple with only a small selection of ports complementing its rounded edges and a punchy keyboard that, besides the lack of keyboard lighting and average battery life, is otherwise impressive.

All things considered, this is a respectable introduction to the Acer Spin franchise. Hopefully the sequel doesn’t make us want to buy a mouse and a pair of headphones. And, maybe, just maybe next time we’ll catch a glimpse of the utopian future wherein all super-thin laptops can last for a full day.