The humble Chromebook may be a tough sell to creatives and other users who have become used to the constant march of technology. Why would you want a low-powered laptop that’s limited to web and Android apps (plus Linux if you don’t mind fiddling about a bit) with a relatively low-res screen in 2024?
The fact is that, compared to many of the best laptops for graphic design and the gaming laptops that come out with increasing speed, a Chromebook is a bargain, and one that can deal with much of the office work that comes with running a studio as well as being a capable browsing machine that can handle a little photo editing too. When you’re only paying £350 for a second machine to complement your MacBook, you’re not looking for excellent performance, you’re looking for versatility, and that’s what Acer provides here.
Design & build
There's a lot of plastic in the casing of the Acer Chromebook Plus 514. That’s not a criticism, particularly, as it means it’s always warm to the touch and keeps the weight down, but plonk it down next to something metal like the HP ZBook Firefly and you can see the difference. Plastic cases feel less premium, which is fitting because this is not a premium laptop. Again, not a criticism.
The design is functional. Everything is where you expect it to be (once you get your head around the design quirks common to Chromebooks). The 14-inch form factor means no attempt has been made to squeeze a numpad in at the side of the keyboard, so the keys haven’t been made too small. For a budget machine, the keyboard is extremely successful, as the keys have enough travel and bounce to give a bit of feedback. The Enter key has been shaved back a bit, but still stands tall, the Ctrl key is huge, so you’re not going to miss it when going for keyboard shortcuts, and the handy line of hardware control keys that replaces the F row are fairly large and easy to use. There are even a pair of stereo speakers at the edges and an ambitious little DTS logo too - though few are going to be using these speakers for anything beyond Zoom calls.
Elsewhere, the bezel is thin, the ports are accessible, the trackpad is small but usable, and there's nothing to stop you flipping it open and getting straight to work.
Features
Chromebooks aren’t noted for their cutting-edge features, and so you get a standard mix of Type-A and Type-C USB ports (the 5Gbps type, so fast but not that fast), an audio socket, a microSD slot and... that’s about it. Of course, there's Wi-Fi and Bluetooth too, and connecting up some of the best Bluetooth headphones will turn it into a nice little streaming machine.
The screen is a 1080p IPS panel, without touch sensitivity. It’s not bad, but a few years of working with laptops sporting higher-resolution OLED screens has left something that once would have been hailed as a great experience feeling flat. There is nothing wrong with any of the features offered by this Chromebook, and it’s actually pretty hard to criticise, it just lacks the excitement we feel when we check a laptop’s specs and see Thunderbolt 4.
But what are you going to do with Thunderbolt 4 on a Chromebook anyway? Its 128GB of storage can be used to copy files off a camera, which you can edit in either the Android versions of Lightroom, Capture One or other editing apps, or the Photoshop web app. The likes of LumaFusion and Premiere Rush give it video editing potential too.
The ability to run Android apps is a big plus for the Chromebook Plus, giving it access to a huge ready-made library of apps, though as they’re often designed around touchscreens the interface is sometimes imperfect. Some web apps can also be installed on the Chromebook to get their own icon on the taskbar, simplifying the process of using them, and you can use web apps, Android apps and the browser side-by-side with no problems other than the occasional reluctance of one to use the whole of the screen.
Performance
The Intel Core i3 i3-N305 is an eight-core chip from Intel’s 12th-gen Alder Lake stable, but one that leaves out the P (performance) cores that give chips like the i9-12900K their juice in favour of the E (efficiency) cores that the big desktop chip relegates to background tasks. This is a pretty good choice for a Chromebook, as there are enough cores to spread tasks out across the chip (and there's a turbo boost of up to 3.80 GHz on offer) without unnecessarily stressing the battery. Add the 8GB of RAM that seems to be standard for a Chromebook Plus, and you’ve got a nippy little machine that’s capable of swapping between apps without lag.
Of course, you’re not going to get something that can stand up to an M4 or i9 from a Chromebook, and that’s OK. Just for fun, we ran the web app tests we use to benchmark Chromebooks on a 13th-gen Intel i9, and got results that were about twice as good as the i3 in the Chromebook Plus 514. The same was true of Geekbench 6, with the i9’s single-core score twice as good as the i3’s, and the multi-core score three times better.
But what exactly were we expecting? The Chromebook runs a lighter-weight OS, and web or Android apps aren’t exactly heavy on processor resources. If you really want to slow it down, you can install the Linux version of GIMP and fire up something with lots of layers, but that’s not really what a Chromebook is for, and the performance of the Chromebook Plus 514 is extremely good if you keep within its expected limits. Battery life seems decent as well - it’s hard to gauge without a standardised benchmark like we have on Windows, but you’ll see nine hours out of a charge, and maybe more.
Price
It’s hard to argue with a laptop for £350. If you’re looking for something for browsing, streaming, office work and maybe a bit of light photo manipulation, then you’re not going to find anything cheaper. Add to this the solid plastic build quality from Acer, and the high level of usability you get from the keyboard and trackpad, and you may start to wonder why you’d spend any more.
Who is it for?
While this isn’t the sort of laptop that’s going to appeal to designers and video fiends who need the fastest possible chips pumping away under their laptop’s casing, the market for Chromebooks is found among the huge number of people who rarely move from the browser when they use a laptop. Its creative software may be limited to web and Android apps unless you want to tinker with the Linux command line, but there's still plenty on offer here for presentations, accounts, databases and web development.
Should I buy it?
Buy it if...
You spend a lot of time in the browser
Being portable is important
You like a bargain
Don't buy it if...
Mac or Windows apps are your thing
You can’t live within a web browser
You like a metal laptop casing
