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Customer Review
Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2020
The only reason you'd want to buy this laptop, is because you're looking for a powerful CPU at the best price. Otherwise the rest of the laptop is mediocre at best. It's a weird beast. The internals punch above their weight class, while the rest of the laptop falls short.
Starting with one of the more controversial aspects, the screen. If you're only going to be indoors with very little natural light, it'll probably be serviceable at full brightness, but it's still pretty dim over all, but I will say that the matte screen does help, because if this was this dim and reflective it would be unusable. Many people won't notice the poor color and contrast in day to day use if this is their only computer, but coming home from my work MacBook makes this look like a crappy screen in 2007 much less 2020. If it weren't for the IPS viewing angles, I'd thing this was a cheap TFT screen from 2007. If you're going to be doing productivity work, its probably okay. I wouldn't recommend it for creative work and its not a great choice if a major use is going to be movie watching.
Next, just general build quality. I think the case may be a type of metal, but it's one of the cheapest metal shells I've seen if it is. It feels more like $400 Walmart special than the rest of its $600-$800 thin and light lower mid-range cohort. A plus of the super cheap build quality is that it is at least super light. The keyboard is mostly ok, with decent key travel and feel, though my space bar is pretty wobbly. My only complaints on the layout is I wish page up/down, home and end were function keys on the arrows leaving them alone, rather that the page up/home and page down/end being the top left and right corners of a 2x3 grid of half height keys with the arrow keys being the other four. The keys already being half height makes it's a bit harder to not accidently press page up/down. There is a fingerprint sensor which seems to work fine, though in another little Acer bit of lazy design, it's below the bottom right of the keyboard rather than integrated into the power button like most modern readers, but that's a minor issue. The track pad is okay, though it doesn't click very well at the top. It's also bizarrely off center, almost like at one point Acer planned to do and edge to edge keyboard with a number bad, but scraped the idea and forgot to move the trackpad back. Port selection about on part with its peers, nothing to complain about there. Even though it has a barrel jack power port and comes with the barrel jack power supply, it does charge via USB-C. Hopefully this is the last year companies offer USB-C charging, but ship with older style chargers.
Inside is where things get interesting. The RAM is the same 8GB you going to see in most machines between $500-$1000, so it fine, though sadly it's soldered and unupgradable. That's pretty common on modern thin and lights, so it's getting harder to get up set about it. Acer does go above and beyond by shipping a 512GB NVMe SSD. This is where a lot of companies are still cheaping out with 256GB drives on far more expensive systems. Maybe Acer's engineers are trying to make up for the lackluster build quality of the machine in general, if so the gesture is appreciated. And of course the star of the show is the Ryzen 7 4700U. It's basically the only reason to give this laptop a second look. It's super fast, especially with multithreaded work loads and seems to run relatively cool for me(though I've seen mixed reviews of heat for this laptop, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's some poor QA on Acer's part). The fans are pretty quiet, even under load. The GPU is about top tier for integrated, but it is still integrated. You're not going to run new AAA games at high quality settings at 1080p, but turn things down or run older games and you'll be fine. This isn't a gaming laptop, but it handle some lighter gaming.
Lastly, software. The bloatware on this thing is a real throwback. I've not seen the much garbage preinstalled on a computer in years. None of it is useful, it's all garbage. I wouldn't even waste my time trying to uninstall it, just get Window 10 USB and start from scratch. Beware if you plan to upgrade to the latest Windows 10 2004 to use WSL2 and/or docker. There's a bug(that isn't unique to Acer, but affects other Ryzen 4000 mobile CPUs) that causes the laptop to crash and reboot during sleep of the Virtual Machine Platform is enabled. I also had problems with the stock install of the laptop not waking from sleep at all, but was resolved when I nuked the preinstalled Windows install and installed clean, but still can't have virtualization apparently.
Overall the only people who I can really recommend this to is people who want bang for their buck in CPU performance in a thin and light form factor. There might be some different options out there, but this was at least in stock when I was looking and the 512GB SSD is what pushed me over the top, because at least for me, a 256GB SSD was going to need to be replaced day one for my work load on competitor models. So if you need a fast laptop with better than average storage for a not much money, go for it.
Starting with one of the more controversial aspects, the screen. If you're only going to be indoors with very little natural light, it'll probably be serviceable at full brightness, but it's still pretty dim over all, but I will say that the matte screen does help, because if this was this dim and reflective it would be unusable. Many people won't notice the poor color and contrast in day to day use if this is their only computer, but coming home from my work MacBook makes this look like a crappy screen in 2007 much less 2020. If it weren't for the IPS viewing angles, I'd thing this was a cheap TFT screen from 2007. If you're going to be doing productivity work, its probably okay. I wouldn't recommend it for creative work and its not a great choice if a major use is going to be movie watching.
Next, just general build quality. I think the case may be a type of metal, but it's one of the cheapest metal shells I've seen if it is. It feels more like $400 Walmart special than the rest of its $600-$800 thin and light lower mid-range cohort. A plus of the super cheap build quality is that it is at least super light. The keyboard is mostly ok, with decent key travel and feel, though my space bar is pretty wobbly. My only complaints on the layout is I wish page up/down, home and end were function keys on the arrows leaving them alone, rather that the page up/home and page down/end being the top left and right corners of a 2x3 grid of half height keys with the arrow keys being the other four. The keys already being half height makes it's a bit harder to not accidently press page up/down. There is a fingerprint sensor which seems to work fine, though in another little Acer bit of lazy design, it's below the bottom right of the keyboard rather than integrated into the power button like most modern readers, but that's a minor issue. The track pad is okay, though it doesn't click very well at the top. It's also bizarrely off center, almost like at one point Acer planned to do and edge to edge keyboard with a number bad, but scraped the idea and forgot to move the trackpad back. Port selection about on part with its peers, nothing to complain about there. Even though it has a barrel jack power port and comes with the barrel jack power supply, it does charge via USB-C. Hopefully this is the last year companies offer USB-C charging, but ship with older style chargers.
Inside is where things get interesting. The RAM is the same 8GB you going to see in most machines between $500-$1000, so it fine, though sadly it's soldered and unupgradable. That's pretty common on modern thin and lights, so it's getting harder to get up set about it. Acer does go above and beyond by shipping a 512GB NVMe SSD. This is where a lot of companies are still cheaping out with 256GB drives on far more expensive systems. Maybe Acer's engineers are trying to make up for the lackluster build quality of the machine in general, if so the gesture is appreciated. And of course the star of the show is the Ryzen 7 4700U. It's basically the only reason to give this laptop a second look. It's super fast, especially with multithreaded work loads and seems to run relatively cool for me(though I've seen mixed reviews of heat for this laptop, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's some poor QA on Acer's part). The fans are pretty quiet, even under load. The GPU is about top tier for integrated, but it is still integrated. You're not going to run new AAA games at high quality settings at 1080p, but turn things down or run older games and you'll be fine. This isn't a gaming laptop, but it handle some lighter gaming.
Lastly, software. The bloatware on this thing is a real throwback. I've not seen the much garbage preinstalled on a computer in years. None of it is useful, it's all garbage. I wouldn't even waste my time trying to uninstall it, just get Window 10 USB and start from scratch. Beware if you plan to upgrade to the latest Windows 10 2004 to use WSL2 and/or docker. There's a bug(that isn't unique to Acer, but affects other Ryzen 4000 mobile CPUs) that causes the laptop to crash and reboot during sleep of the Virtual Machine Platform is enabled. I also had problems with the stock install of the laptop not waking from sleep at all, but was resolved when I nuked the preinstalled Windows install and installed clean, but still can't have virtualization apparently.
Overall the only people who I can really recommend this to is people who want bang for their buck in CPU performance in a thin and light form factor. There might be some different options out there, but this was at least in stock when I was looking and the 512GB SSD is what pushed me over the top, because at least for me, a 256GB SSD was going to need to be replaced day one for my work load on competitor models. So if you need a fast laptop with better than average storage for a not much money, go for it.
