Acer unveils premium Porsche Design laptop and a Snapdragon-based Chromebook

Acer’s annual Global Press Conference normally happens just once a year but in pandemic-hit 2020 the firm has split affairs in two. Part deux sees the firm unveiling another slew of new laptops headed by a premium ultrabook designed with the help of German design house, Porsche Design.

We’ve seen plenty of tech products with the Porsche Design badge stamped upon them over the years, including a couple of Huawei phones and a handful of audio products, and one thing all these shares is that they always command a hefty premium.

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In this case, the Porsche Design Acer Book RS will set you back a whopping £1,899. For your money, you’re getting a suitably racy carbon-fibre lid, a 16mm-thin all-metal body with a matte-silver finish and low weight of just 1.25kg.

With a 14in IPS touchscreen display with an anti-microbial coating, it’s a handsome beast and ideally suited to commuters with extra cash to burn.

Inside, the Book RS comes with the latest 11th-Gen Intel processors (up to Core i7) and optional Nvidia GeForce MX350 discrete graphics, and you can bump the price up even further if you include the swanky new Porsche Design accessories.

You’ll have to wait until December if you want one, though, because the Porsche Design Acer Book RS won’t arrive in the UK until then.

Acer Chromebook Spin 513 comes with a low price and 4G

In a move that’s perhaps more interesting – and definitely a whole lot cheaper – Acer also took the wraps off its latest Chromebook: the Acer Chromebook Spin 513.

This new laptop is notable, not for its looks or its design heritage but for the fact that it’s the first Chromebook, or laptop of any stripe for that matter, to come with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c CPU.

Launched at the end of 2019 during Qualcomm’s annual tech summit in Hawaii, the 7c has taken some time to come to laptops and it looks like it’s going to find a home in reasonably priced models like this. The 7c is an eight-core CPU that runs at clock speeds up to 2.4GHz and has an integrated Adreno 618 graphics processor. Its closest equivalent in the smartphone world is the 700-series Snapdragon chips.

Alas, the Snapdragon 7c doesn’t have integrated 5G connectivity like the Snapdragon 765G in the Google Pixel 5, but you do get optional 4G which, in a low-cost laptop like this, is very impressive.

Elsewhere, the Chromebook 513 has a Full-HD, 13.3in touchscreen topped with scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass, up to 14 hours of battery life and a 360-degree hinge that lets you spin the display around and use the laptop in a number of different positions.

All this for £399 looks like a very good deal indeed; the catch is that the Acer Chromebook 513 won’t be available until February 2021 in the UK, so if you fancy one you’ll just have to sit on your hands.

Acer Swift 3x comes with Intel Xe MAX discrete graphics

This being an Acer global press conference, those two headliners weren’t the only products unveiled. Also on the launch list were additions to Acer’s Predator monitor and gaming PC range, and new models in the reasonably priced Swift, Spin and Aspire ranges of laptops, all of which feature the latest 11th Gen Intel CPUs.

Of these, the most interesting is the new Acer Swift 3x, which employs not only the latest 11th Gen Intel CPU silicon but also Intel’s all-new Xe MAX discrete graphics – among the first laptops to do so – and Thunderbolt 4 connectivity. As with previous Swift 3 laptops, the 3x has a 14in display, is slim and light and prices start at a tempting £899.

The other new models include the Acer Spin 5 (prices starting from £899), a thin and light 2-in-1 convertible with a 360-hinge, 3:2 aspect-ratio display and integrated active stylus, plus the Acer Spin 3 (from £799), a 13.3in 2-in-1 with a 16:10 display and a built-in stylus.

The Acer Swift 3x will be available in the UK from November and the Spin 5 and Spin 3 will be available in December.