Acer offers a fantastic and varied selection of laptops, from budget-friendly Chromebooks to ultra-powerful portables. Bur which are the best Acer laptop options in 2022?
Our team of experts review a large selection of Acer laptops every year, so we’ve assembled this list of the very best to help you find the perfect one for you.
With these Acer laptops, we’ve made sure to focus on the features that people care about when buying a laptop. These can include how well a laptop is built, how good the port selection is, the performance speeds and whether the battery life is good enough to get you through a working day.
To get these real-world results, our team of experts uses each laptop as their main device for at least a week, using both a series of industry-standard benchmarks and specialist equipment such as colorimeters, as well as real-world experience to gain accurate and comparable results.
There’s no need to agonize over any incremental point differences if you’re taking benchmark results into your buying decisions, but it could still be useful to see which CPUs and GPUs perform the best.
If you can’t find an Acer laptop you like at the moment, we’d recommend bookmarking this list as we’ll be updating it frequently as more Acer laptops pass through the Trusted Labs. It’s also worth checking out our Best Laptop, Best Ultrabook, Best Student Laptop and Best Budget Laptop pages for a more general look if you’re happy to explore other brands, or our list of the best Dell laptops and the best Asus laptops for more brand-specific deep-dives.
How we test
Every laptop we review goes through a series of uniform checks designed to gauge key things including build quality, performance, screen quality and battery life.
These include formal synthetic benchmarks and scripted tests, plus a series of real world checks, such as how well it runs the most frequently used apps.
We also make sure to use every laptop we review as our primary device for at least a week to ensure our review is as accurate as possible.
Well-built design
Beefy performance
Generous SSD capacity
Arguably uninspiring design
Patchy keyboard backlight
Incredible display
Snappy performance for a Chromebook
Handy port selection
Backlit keyboard
Pricey
ChromeOS can be limiting
Superb colour depth
Well-designed, versatile display hinge
High-end Wacom EMR digitiser
Textured glass screen is a great stylus surface
Noticeable fan noise
Uses last-gen CPU/GPU
Expensive
Weak speakers
Eye-catching speckled design
Brilliant port selection
Respectable levels of power
Sub-par battery life
Display is a little dim
Thick chassis
Acer Swift 3 (2021)
Best overall Acer laptop
Pros
Well-built designBeefy performanceGenerous SSD capacity
Cons
Arguably uninspiring designPatchy keyboard backlight
The Acer Swift 3 (2021) is not only our favourite Acer laptop right now, but it’s also one of the best mid-range laptops money can buy.
At just 1.14kg, we found this 14-inch laptop to be incredibly portable. While its silver shell may appear a little plain to some, the metal and plastics used in its build also make this feel like a well-built laptop. We found the keys to be responsive with a good level of tactility. The fact it’s backlit is an added bonus, although the backlight itself did look a little patchy, with some keys seeming to be more lit up than others.
Inside, the Swift 3 is powered by an AMD Ryzen 5 5500U processor that, during testing, powered through basic productivity tasks and shined during our benchmark tests, beating off the likes of the Surface Laptop Go in more intense tasks. Its integrated Vega 7 graphics allowed us to engage in some casual gaming, and handled lighter workloads well. We also found the 1TB SSD to be reasonably speedy, and the capacity for a laptop this price is also generous, with a lot of the competition opting for 256GB or 512GB drives.
For its display, Acer hasn’t gone with anything too fancy for the Swift 3, opting for the tried-and-tested formula of a 14-inch FHD (1920×1080) IPS panel. The colours on offer looked good, and 300 nits of quoted brightness also made sure images look vibrant. As an IPS display, we also found the viewing angles here to be superb.
The Swift 3’s battery life also proved to be great during testing. In running our PC Mark 10 Modern Office benchmark, we found the Swift 3 to last for just shy of 11 hours. This means you’ll be able to get through a working day comfortably and have a fair bit of juice to spare.
Reviewer: Reece Bithrey
Full review: Acer Swift 3 (2021) review
Acer Chromebook Spin 713
Best Acer Chromebook
Pros
Incredible displaySnappy performance for a ChromebookHandy port selectionBacklit keyboard
Cons
PriceyChromeOS can be limiting
Acer also makes some of the best Chromebooks money can buy today, and the Chromebook Spin 713 is the very best one we’ve tested in recent years.
A lot of this comes from the fact its display is excellent. The Spin 713 sports a 13-inch Quad HD panel which, during testing, offered lovely detailed images and vibrant colours. In addition, the panel here features an unusual 3:2 aspect ratio, which offers more vertical space than a standard 16:9 aspect ratio – Acer says you get up to 18% more space.
Our review sample was packed with a 10th generation Intel Core i3 processor that offered a speedy performance for basic tasks during testing. However, the capacity of the 128GB SSD is a little stingy compared to Windows laptops in the same price bracket.
The Spin 713 looks the part with a darker, almost space grey-style metal shell that felt excellent, being both smooth to the touch and durable. At 1.5kg, this is a little bulkier than some other more compact laptops we’ve tested, but the sublime build quality is definitely worth the extra weight. The port selection is also decent, with a blend of legacy and current offerings including USB-A, USB-C and HDMI all represented in fine form.
Similar things can also be expressed for the Spin 713’s battery life. During testing, we found it to last for 12 hours when looping a 1080p test. This means you’ll be able to comfortably get through a working day without any hitches, and even if you do forget to bring your charger into the office, you won’t have to worry about your laptop battery going flat with the Spin 713.
Reviewer: Reece Bithrey
Full review: Acer Chromebook Spin 713
Acer ConceptD Ezel 7
Best Acer laptop for content creation
Pros
Superb colour depthWell-designed, versatile display hingeHigh-end Wacom EMR digitiserTextured glass screen is a great stylus surface
Cons
Noticeable fan noiseUses last-gen CPU/GPUExpensiveWeak speakers
If it’s a powerhouse laptop you’re after to edit the likes of photos and videos, the Acer Concept D Ezel 7 is one that should be on your radar.
It features a clever hinged display that you can tilt forwards and position for up-close working. The screen itself is one of the best LCD panels we’ve seen in a laptop with OLED-levels of contrast, as well as some immense colour accuracy. With a colorimeter in hand, we measured it to be nearly 100% coverage of sRGB, DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB. Intriguingly, the display also works with a stylus and features the same digitizer tech that’s present in some of Wacom’s high-end drawing tablets. This means the Ezel 7 is a fantastic choice for illustrators too, given the stylus support and the responsive nature of such a light stylus.
At 2.5kg, this is a heavy laptop, but that results in terrific build quality with sturdy metal outer frame. The port selection of the Ezel 7 is also brilliant, with support for HDMI out as well as Thunderbolt 4, Ethernet, and DisplayPort. The only iffy thing here is that the keyboard on the Ezel 7 is a little shallow compared to the Ezel 3 Pro and it also has a garish and dim orange backlight.
Under the hood, the Ezel 7 packs an awful lot of power with both a Intel Core i7-10875H processor and an Nvidia RTX 2070 Max Q GPU that we found to offer an incredible performance for professional workflows. Some may complain that its hardware is now a generation or so old, but it should still be perfectly fine for content creation workloads. The Ezel 7’s SSD also proved to be speedy in our tests, and we also found this laptop’s thermal performance to be decent enough, even if the fans can spin up at times.
Reviewer: Andrew Williams
Full review: Acer ConceptD Ezel 7 review
Acer Aspire Vero
Best eco-friendly Acer laptop
Pros
Eye-catching speckled designBrilliant port selectionRespectable levels of power
Cons
Sub-par battery lifeDisplay is a little dimThick chassis
If having an environmentally friendly laptop is of paramount importance, the Acer Aspire Vero should be on your shortlist.
It’s comprised partially of PCR (post-consumer-recycled) plastics. This means the Vero offers quite the eye-catching grey frame with flecks of different shades of green dotted around the chassis. There’s no doubt it’s a fantastic looking laptop, as well as one we found to be pleasingly sturdy too. A weight of 1.8kg also means it carries plenty of heft, but remained just light enough for us to sling into a bag with no trouble. This isn’t the thinnest of laptops either, but it does mean the Vero has a generous port selection that includes everything from USB-C to HDMI and Ethernet. The keyboard on offer here is responsive and tactile, while featuring great backlighting, too.
Inside, the Vero packs a great set of components for a mid-range laptop, including Intel Core i7-1195G7 CPU, alongside Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics, 16GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD. All of these components resulted in a snappy performance, as we found the Vero to perform well in the benchmark tests, as well as during day-to-day use, too. The SSD’s read and write speeds also proved to be quick during testing and made for one of the snappier mid-range laptops we’ve tested; its 512GB capacity is pretty big, although looks to be the largest storage option you can opt for with the Vero, which may not be enough for some.
Acer hasn’t sprung any surprises with the Vero’s display – it’s a plain and simple 15.6 inch FHD display that we found to offer great colours and also to be of a good size for day-to-day tasks. The brightness did fall short of our 300-nit target, which meant this laptop is ideally best for indoor working only.
The battery life with the Vero was a little underwhelming by comparison to the rest of the package. In testing, it lasted just shy of 7 and a half hours, which falls short of the 10-hour target you can usually expect to get from mid-range machine like this one. You’ll be able to get through a working day just about with the Vero, but for anything longer, you may want to keep it plugged into the mains.
Reviewer: Reece Bithrey
Full review: Acer Aspire Vero review
We also considered…
FAQs
There isn’t really a ‘best’ Acer series, as each laptop brand appeals to different audiences. The Swift includes productivity laptops with ultra-portable designs; the Spin laptops have 2-in-1 form factors and so can be flipped into a tablet; the ConceptD range target professional content creators; and lastly, the Predator and Nitro ranges are designed with gamers in mind.
It really just depends on your intended workloads. 8GB of RAM should be perfectly fine for general productivity tasks, but gamers and content creators may want to try out 16GB or beyond.
Yes, Acer is has a great reputation and is one of the leading laptop brands. It offers a wide variety of options, and arguably produces more budget-friendly laptops than most other manufacturers. However, it rarely launches a laptop with enough quality to rival the likes of the Dell XPS 13 or MacBook Air.
Trusted Reviews test data
Comparison specs
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