Acer Chromebook Spin 714 (Intel 13th Gen)

Verdict

The Acer Chromebook Spin 714 (Intel 13th Gen) is an excellent Chromebook with modern looks, zippy performance, handy software features and solid battery life. It may only offer modest upgrades over its predecessor with the same display and frame, but they remain fantastic options in their respective categories. This is a marvellous laptop, and the price cut makes it even better.

Introduction

The Acer Chromebook Spin 714 (Intel 13th Gen) marks Acer’s latest entry into what has previously been a highly impressive lineup of convertible Chromebooks.

Previous models have made for some of the best Chromebooks we’ve tested, with a sleek frame and lots of power, although have been marred by a higher price tag. This new model constitutes more of the same from Acer in most areas, with an upgraded Intel Core i3-1315U in the base model sample I’ve got here, as well as 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD.

With this in mind, this new model also brings the goodness of lower prices. A base-model Acer Chromebook Spin 714 will run you £599/$699.99 in their respective territories, although the US variant offers the mid-range processor in UK config with an Intel Core i5-1335U processor. That’s an interesting decision, but it nonetheless provides the new Spin 714 with some reasonable power for the price.

Design and Keyboard

• Modern looks with an aluminium chassis
• Reasonable port selection
• Wonderfully tactile keyboard and large trackpad

The new Acer Chromebook Spin 714 is similar to its predecessors by way of its looks with a modern and sleek aluminium frame that more than justifies the price tag of this base model, as well as with the more expensive and powerful choices in the lineup too.

There is minimal flex in the chassis, and the Spin 714 is a laptop that feels more akin to a Windows ultrabook than a simpler Chromebook. It also has thin bezels around the sides of the display, although they are large enough to accommodate a 1440p webcam, which offers solid detail for conferencing needs.

A 1.37kg weight is roughly equivalent to previous models too, meaning this Spin 714 retains its excellent portability. It’s easy enough to carry on its own, or sling into a bag with no trouble, while its compact chassis means it won’t take up much space in a bag, either.

With this newer model, the port selection remains unchanged, and while it is a little stingier than the price tag may suggest, it is still reasonable for a Chromebook that’s this thin.

You get a pair of Thunderbolt 4-capable USB-C ports, one on either side, with the one on the left being used for charging. The left-hand side is also home to an HDMI out for display, as well as a headphone jack and the power button. On the right is the other USB-C, as well as a USB-A for expansion. The lack of a secondary USB-A or a microSD is felt, and for those sorts of expansion ports, you will be left living the dongle life.

The Spin 714’s more compact chassis means that there is only room for a 65% layout keyboard, complete with arrow keys and a useful function row. With this in mind, it continues the trend of Acer’s Spin laptops offering some fantastic keyboards with marvellous tactility.

I’ve got no issues with the way the scissor-keys felt, and in using it for a few weeks for typing up a lot of words, it handled it admirably. There is some handy white backlighting preset, although it isn’t the brightest compared to other laptops. While the trackpad present is also large, being a Gorilla Glass one meant that it felt a little skittish at times.

In-keeping with Acer’s other laptops, the Spin 714 is packaged without much plastic, with the laptop coming wrapped in cardboard and a paper bag. The only piece of plastic used in the construction of the packaging is a small plastic bag that houses the charging cable and power brick. Otherwise, this is plastic-free, which is always excellent to see.

Screen and sound

• Solid detail and colours
• Responsive touchscreen
• Clear speakers, but don’t go too high with volume

As for the Acer Chromebook Spin 714 display, that also remains virtually unchanged from the previous model. This means you’re getting a sharp 14-inch 1920×1200 IPS touchscreen which is an excellent choice for the day-to-day tasks that this Chromebook is designed for.

Acer’s quoted 300 nits of peak brightness meets our target and allows the Spin 714 to offer vibrant images in my testing when either writing articles up, or kicking back and relaxing with content on Disney+ such as the new Indiana Jones film, or a range of videos on YouTube.

As an IPS screen, the Spin 714’s viewing angles were suitably excellent, as were its colours and solid, deep-looking blacks, too.

Elsewhere, its 16:10 aspect ratio provides more vertical space than equivalent-res 16:9 screens, making it an ideal pairing for modern workflows, while the 1200 pixel horizontal dimension also gives it a little more horizontal space compared to equivalent-size Full HD resolution screens.

The touchscreen itself is reasonably responsive when putting the Spin 714 into tablet mode, and pairs well with styluses too. What seems baffling, though, is that Acer doesn’t bundle a stylus in with this Spin 714 model, as they have done in the past. This is one change that isn’t for the better.

The upwards-firing speakers remain clear and offer solid body for a laptop at this price, and the fact the drivers aren’t downwards-firing also means that sound won’t be muffled even with the Spin 714 on softer surfaces, such as a bed. Volume here is pretty good too, although push towards the upper 20% and things begin to get quite harsh.

Performance

• Nippy performance in day-to-day tasks
• Good quantity of RAM and storage
• No real fan noise, apart from when under load

The big change with this new Spin 714 model is the upgrade to Intel’s 13th-gen chips. This base model utilises a six-core and eight-thread Intel Core i3-1315U, which powered it to some solid results in the Geekbench 6 benchmark suite.

These results matched well against similarly-priced and specced Windows laptops such as the Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 3 in single-core workloads, proving the efficiency of Intel’s newer chips. Its multi-core results were, understandably, lower than equivalent Windows laptops due to some competitors simply featuring chips with more cores and threads to work with.

Nonetheless, this Spin 714 felt snappy in day-to-day workloads within ChromeOS and was nippy for the lighter workloads ChromeOS is designed for. 8GB of RAM provides enough headroom for some more intensive workloads if you want to give that a go, although it also allows for lots of Chrome tabs and apps to be open without the Spin 714 faltering. A 256GB SSD is a little stingy at this price, but provides enough storage for installing a fair amount of apps.

As for thermals, the Spin 714 didn’t get too hot when under load, and in general use was comfortable on my lap for extended periods. There also isn’t too much in the way of fan noise when you aren’t pushing this laptop to its absolute limits, which is convenient if you’re working in a quieter environment and you don’t want to annoy those around you with a laptop that sounds like a jet engine.

Software

• ChromeOS is lightweight and easy to use
• Chromebook Plus features are present with updated OS
• Magic Eraser and Offine File Sync are especially helpful

The Acer Chromebook Spin 714, by virtue of being a Chromebook, runs ChromeOS, and therefore offers a lightweight and snappy experience. There isn’t any bloatware on this particular install, and the only perhaps unwanted app for some is Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud gaming service.

Otherwise it’s a clean and simple ChromeOS installation and comes with shortcuts to Google’s G Suite of applications including Docs, Slides and Sheets. The likes of Microsoft Word and other productivity apps are available on the Play Store, but G-Suite is convenient if you’re already immersed in the Google ecosystem.

Interestingly, this Spin 714 also benefits from the Chromebook Plus features, given it meets Google’s new minimum specs for its new class of Chromebooks. Some of these have specifically been released as Chromebook Plus models such as the Acer Chromebook Plus 515, but others, the Spin 714 included, have received Chromebook Plus features from that update.

These features include convenient additions including Magic Eraser, the photo-editing trickery previously found on Google Pixel phones. This automatically erases unwanted things from photos, working the same way on both devices. You select an image, and it recognises potentially unwanted items to remove by placing a white and grey outline around it. To remove it, you press done.

It’s very clever and works well, even on images where you need nothing removed. For instance, from a photo I took when I went to see Paul Weller a couple of weeks ago, Magic Eraser picked out Weller himself to remove, even if I didn’t want him removed. Nonetheless, it did a good job in removing him from the image.

Other features that the Chromebook Plus software update has brought with it are more focused on a Chromebook being a useful device for productivity workloads including working with G-Suite apps and Google Meet. For instance, it offers Offline File Sync, which backs up files usually saved in the cloud to be saved on the device’s internal drive. This is hidden away in the settings menu a little, but is nonetheless useful for saving documents offline if you don’t have constant internet access.

For Google Meet workloads, Chromebook Plus also adds AI video calling features designed to optimise call quality. The two separate buttons are designed to combat two common issues, with uneven lighting and too much background noise. For their respective purposes, they both do a reasonable job of improving poor lighting and cancelling out any unwanted noise. The handy thing here is that they are cross-platform and work on both Zoom and Google Meet, among other platforms, so no one is left out.

The last notable thing with Chromebook Plus is that it has brought web-based Photoshop to proceedings at long last, so you can conceivably use a Chromebook for some more intensive workloads if you so choose. It may be a cut-down version of Photoshop, but provides convenient features that most people will likely use, including marquee tools and those for light adjustment. Being modern Photoshop also means you get AI goodness including Generative Fill and Generative Expand if you want to use them.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 11 hours 20 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for between one and two working days

The good times keep rolling for this new Acer Chromebook Spin 714 with solid runtime in our battery test. With a video loop running with the Spin 714’s screen at 50 percent, and with the keyboard backlight at its default level, Acer’s latest convertible Chromebook managed to last for 11 hours and 20 minutes on a charge before cooking out.

This smashes our 10 hour target for laptops, and is typical of Acer’s Spin Chromebooks, although it isn’t as extensive as last year’s model, which kept on going for another two hours.

With this in mind, the 11% battery drain over an hour is manageable, and you also won’t be waiting around for a long time while the Spin 714 recharges. From empty to full, it took 64 minutes to recharge its 56Whr battery thanks to a snappy 65W USB-C wall charger.

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