There’s nothing more frustrating than hardware that’s almost great. Whether it’s a phone with a subpar screen, a tablet with poor battery life, or a laptop with a lackluster keyboard, there is no disappointment quite like the product that does everything right—you know, if you ignore the one or two crucial things that it does poorly.
Acer’s Aspire S7 Ultrabook was one of those almost-great systems. For some time now, Acer has been trying to shed its image as a purveyor of bargain-basement laptops, and the well-built, attractively styled S7 was its most convincing effort yet. But two major shortcomings held the laptop back: a poor keyboard with a strange layout and shallow key travel, and a battery barely worthy of the name.
Now the S7 is back, and it’s packing Intel’s Haswell processors. The 2013 MacBook Air has already shown us what those chips can do for your battery life, but can they do the same thing for Acer’s Ultrabook? And does the Haswell version of the system have the same keyboard problems that the older version did?
Body, build quality, and screen
| Specs at a glance: Acer Aspire S7 (2013) | |
|---|---|
| Screen | 1920×1080 at 13.3″ (166 PPI) |
| OS | Windows 8 64-bit |
| CPU | 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-4200U (Turbo up to 2.6GHz) |
| RAM | 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 (non-upgradeable) |
| GPU | Intel HD Graphics 4400 (integrated) |
| HDD | 128GB solid-state drive |
| Networking | 802.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 |
| Ports | 2x USB 3.0, HDMI, mini DisplayPort, card reader, headphones |
| Size | 12.7″ × 8.8″ × 0.51″ (322.6 mm × 223.5 mm × 12.95 mm) |
| Weight | 2.87 lbs (1.30 kg) |
| Battery | 6280 mAh |
| Warranty | 1 year |
| Starting price | $1,399.99 |
| Price as reviewed | $1,449.99 |
| Other perks | Webcam, backlit keyboard, stereo speakers |
The Haswell S7 looks and feels pretty much the same as the Ivy Bridge version. That’s a good thing—PC designs are often changed for the sake of change, and it can be difficult to find a design you like one year that isn’t changed drastically a year or two down the road. The laptop is still very thin-and-light (2.87 pounds, compared to 2.97 pounds for Toshiba’s Kirabook and 2.96 for Apple’s 13-inch MacBook Air), so it’s no trouble at all to sling it in a shoulder bag and carry it around all day.
The computer is made primarily of three different materials: glass, which coats the screen and is used on the lid of the laptop; aluminum, which is used around the edge of the screen and for the palmrest and keyboard area; and plastic, which is used for the bottom of the computer. While it’s not quite as sturdy as the aluminum unibody construction of the MacBook Air—both the lid and the bottom of the laptop bend and flex under pressure—it’s still very good. In fact it’s good enough to make you forget about the cheap plasticky stuff that Acer (and, to be fair, every other PC OEM) put out at the low end of the market.
The laptop’s white glass lid is especially striking, and it’s unique among the mostly metal or plastic lids used by other similar laptops. The glass on both sides of the lid is Gorilla Glass 2 so it should stand up to scratches, cracks, and chips as well as most phone and tablet screens. However, using glass for the lid still makes me just a little nervous—I’ve seen enough screens cracked from rough handling during air travel that a lid made of the same stuff gives me pause.
Full Story: ArsTechnica