Chromebooks Shouldn't Cost $1,000

While I absolutely adore Google's Pixelbook, I can't reasonably expect anyone I care about to spend at least $1,000 to own it. This makes it difficult to consider Acer's Chromebook Spin 13, which borrows heavily from the Pixelbook while also introducing welcome improvements, increasing the power, and cutting the price by $100. This luxurious device is a tough sell.

Acer Chromebook Spin 13

What is it?

A luxury Chromebook.

Price

Starts at $700; Reviewed at $900

Like

The display is truly stunning.

No Like

It's a big, loud, $900 Chromebook!

This device is undeniably luxurious. The build quality is some of the best I've seen in a Chromebook. When closed, you could easily mistake it for a Windows machine. It's all metal and cool to the touch. The hinges are a shiny chrome, and its large 13.5-inch display with a wild 3:2 2256 by 1504 resolution display immediately catches the eye. It's decently bright, maxing out at 372 nits in our testing, and the battery life is pretty fantastic. In our battery test, where we stream a YouTube video after setting the brightness to 200 nits, the Acer Chromebook Spin 13 lasted 10 hours and 2 minutes. The Pixelbook lasted just 8 hours and 53 minutes, while the much cheaper Samsung Chromebook Plus v2 lasted just 7 hours and 42 minutes.

However, Samsung's tiny Chromebook also costs $500, and the Chromebook Spin 13 from Acer that I've been reviewing costs $900. That's a lot of extra money for a better processor, display, and a few more hours of battery life.

There is a cheaper Chromebook Spin 13 configuration. The $900 unit reviewed here has a 64GB SSD, 8GB of RAM, and an 8th-Gen i5-8250U CPU from Intel that seems to kick on the fans to cool it every time I watch Netflix for more than a few hours. Yet, for $800 you can get a more reasonable i3-8130U, and for $700 you can get that i3-8130U with just 4GB of RAM—maybe they'll engage the loud fans less. They'd also likely be a lot more appealing running Chrome OS. The point of Chrome OS machines is that they can run leaner. They don't need big storage drives, they don't need a lot of RAM, and they definitely do not need a processor like the i5-8250U. That'd be welcome in Windows 10 or macOS, but Chrome is supposed to be less demanding to begin with, and the i5-8250U can and should be overkill.

Okay, $900 does also get you a whole mess of ports, including USB-C, USB-A, and microSD. And another USB-C port! Plus a volume rocker that is dangerously close to the power button. As I learned the hard way.

A week with the Chromebook Spin 13 confirms this. Yes, it's technically faster than the Pixelbook, which uses a 7th-Gen Intel processor, but that extra speed isn't apparent when you're using the Chromebook Spin 13. It doesn't feel that much faster browsing, though in WebXPRT 2015, a synthetic benchmark that scores typical web-based tasks like image resizing and spreadsheet managing, the Acer performed better, scoring a 540 versus the Pixelbook's 453. Realistically, I only see lag when they score under 300—like the $500 Samsung Chromebook Plus v2 (260). And even with Samsung's much slower Chromebook, the performance lag wasn't awful. I never felt like pulling out my hair using it. So why would I want to spend $400 more for Chrome tabs that open a fraction of a second faster?

I wouldn't!

Acer isn't just focusing on bloggers with this though. The Spin 13 is a convertible