Acer Chromebook Spin 713 Review: The Affordable Flagship By Chrome Unboxed

For, the past few years, things like a high-res scream, 3x2 aspect, ratio, backlit keys, glass, trackpad, the latest Intel processors, eight gigs of ram and VME storage. All that kind of stuff. When I would say those types of things you would assume. I was talking about a high-end, very price Chromebook, but the Acer Chromebook spin, 713 kinds of changes this up, and it's starting to follow. What we're seeing is a trend in 2020 of giving all the best specs for a much lower price. Let's check it out.

Today's video is brought to you by Word VP, and they're the VP and a choice for millions of users, including Chromebook users, because they're awesome at what they do and that is keeping your browsing safe and secure, whether you're at home or out, and about if you'd like to learn more about them and their services head over to chrome, unbox, comm forward, slash Word VPN and you can learn more and get started today. So, let's start off with Bill quality here- and this is this weird mixed bag and I had the same hang-up with its predecessor in the spin 13 about a year and a half ago that device felt like it was almost just thrown together with like leftover parts, which was weird for a device that was at least nine hundred to a thousand dollars. This device is more refined. The 7:13 feels like it was more thoughtfully put together, but still not quite on the level of something like a pixel would go or a pixel book. It doesn't feel that carefully crafted, but the pieces it's made of are good, so you have an aluminum lid on top, you have an aluminum bottom, and then you have good plastic that surrounds the keyboard, so it doesn't feel flimsy.

It doesn't feel cheap at all. Furthermore, it just doesn't feel as thoughtfully put together as something like those other devices that I mentioned. So it's not to say it's a knock here. It's its, not a poorly built, Chromebook I! Don't want to come across that way, but you're going to notice. When you pick it up, there's some rough edges here and there some parts where things just don't quite come together and that takes away from the overall premium experience with this type of Chromebook.

That being said, though, this device may not come together perfectly. It does come with military-grade durability, and so it can survive downward force of a hundred and thirty pounds on it and drops of up to four feet. So while it may not be the most pristine put together Chromebook, this thing is going to be able to survive, beating a couple more specifics on the build quality here, you're looking at a laptop, that's, not the thinnest thing in the world. Sixteen to seventeen millimeters at its thickest point 3.2 pounds which honestly doesn't feel that heavy for a laptop this big, it's a 13.5 inch three by two screen. So it's a bigger Chromebook and the hinges work really.

Well, too, you get a whole 360-degree. You know rotation thing going on here. It's a convertible laptop, but you also get a one finger: lift and I always love. That makers are starting to figure out how to get this working, so you can get a one finger, lift and still have a hinge that does all the fun stuff that we want our convertible devices to do. Let's move on to the screen, and this is easily one of the biggest highlights of this device, as I mentioned before, it's a 13.5 inch 3 by 2 aspect ratio screen. So if you've used a pixel slate or the original pixel book or the HP Chromebook X 2, you understand kind of what that 3 by 2 ratio gives you it's a lot more vertical space and the way that this one slots itself with this diagonal measure.

If you set it next to a 15.6 inch 16 by 9 screen, it's actually just as tall as one of those, so you almost feel like you're working on a 15.6-inch laptop, but in more of a 14 or 13 inch form factor, it's a really cool trick. It's been a great screen experience, and it's high-res. It's super bright we've measuring it around 450, nits or so of brightness. Furthermore, it may actually get a little brighter than that measuring screen. Brightness is kind of difficult and the resolution on it, I'm looking at my screen, because it's so bizarre 22:56 by 1504, I literally I, can't remember that long enough to take my eyes away from it and tell you, but what I can't tell you are that that is a very high resolution.

It's not quite quad HD fully across the board. It's not 4k, but it's much higher than standard 1080p, and you notice it. Everything is pin sharp on the screen. It's super bright. It's gorgeous to look at the bezels are nice and small.

Furthermore, it is by far my favorite feature of this device, and it was my favorite feature of the spin 13 before it. Furthermore, it is a great thing to have this much screen real estate in this kind of package, and again it is something that has brought me back to this Chromebook and made me as I've tested other devices while I've had this around want to come back to this curl look over and over again, it's a great productivity tool. Furthermore, it's gorgeous to look at Acer is absolutely knocked it out of the park with this screen on this Chromebook. Moving down from that screen, we get to the keyboard and trackpad and there's no real surprises here. Well, I will say this I, don't like Acer's keyboards a lot of times and I harp on them for either being too mushy or not click enough I've really enjoyed this keyboard.

The click mechanism on it is perfect. The key travel is very nice. There's backlighting to the keys I have nothing whatsoever to complain about with this keyboard. Is it my absolute favorite keyboard? No I won't say that, but it's very good and very usable I don't make a lot of mistakes with it and I don't think most of you are going to have any issue with it whatsoever beneath. That is a massive all gorilla glass trackpad that has been wonderful to use I mean the ability of it to reject oils and all the swiping gestures and the click mechanism has been great.

I mean it's just a fantastic trackpad, so you combine that trackpad with this keyboard and that screen you have all the makings of what is a fantastic, a Chrome OS experience. Usually we get to this point in the review and I just kind of regurgitate some stuff about the ports on the device because it feels like most Chromebooks have the same ports, but this one is surprisingly different, and it brings back one port that we haven't seen in quite some time. So, first up you get USB type-c on both sides of charge and display data all that stuff. It does what you expect it to do. You have a micro SD card slot.

Again it does what you expect. Headphone microphone, Jack great, does what you expect in a USB type-a. We won't get into all that, but it's nice not to have to carry it, don't go around for all of those legacy peripherals, but we also get a full size HDMI slot on this one, and we haven't seen one of those in quite some time and USB-C can still handle all of your display stuff. So the dock that I normally use I still use with this I, don't go and use the HDMI slot. But if you need to, if you're in a meeting- and you have to present something- and you just have an HDMI cable- that the guy handed you to go on- that TV, you've now had a Chromebook that you don't have to go, dig out a dongle and find some sort of adapter.

You can just plug it right in, and it works the exact way you would expect it to, so technically you could sit down with this at your desk. You don't need any kind of docking solution, because this has all the I/o that you need to hook up any kind of peripheral that you could and that's kind of a breath of fresh air one. Not so great thing when we talk about the external ports. Here are the speakers, and I'm not talking about the speaker, ports themselves, I'm talking about the speakers. They're kind of quiet really tinny have no base response, and, even though my bar is super low for laptop speakers, this one somehow kind of comes in a little below that they're almost unusable in most circumstances, so I would definitely recommend having a set of headphones or a set of wireless earbuds, or something like that around with you.

If you're going to be consuming media on this one, now all the screen and keyboard and trackpad and I/o benefits you get with this device, wouldn't really be any good if the internals of it weren't also good. Thankfully, that is the case with the spin 7 13, as the only model that is currently available, that you can buy at Best. Buy right now comes equipped with the 10th gen Core i5 processor, from Intel 8, gigs of ram 128 gigs of SSD, NVMe storage and, if you're not familiar NVMe is just much faster, read/write capable storage. So you really get the best of all worlds. Here, you're getting an insanely, fast processor, you're, getting 8 gigs of ram, which is going to be plenty for just about any user across the board, and you're getting plenty of internal storage that, because it's NVMe SSD, if you want to you, can crack this thing open and go through some steps and actually pop in a larger SSD.

If you wanted to so internally, this thing is an absolute monster. I mean it has not had any issues whatsoever dealing with my monitor the internal monitor. At the same time, all sorts of apps, all sorts of tabs open all sorts of graphic work. It doesn't matter this thing chews through everything. It is insanely fast, and I've, absolutely loved working from it.

Additionally, along with that 10th gen Intel chip, better connectivity options too so Bluetooth 5, is on board here. Wi-Fi 6 is also there, so anything you're needing to connect to so the latest routers or your latest Bluetooth peripherals are going to connect up way better than Chromebooks of the past, and you're. Getting all of this with stellar battery life, I was easily getting 10 hours of battery and I would say if you keep the brightness down and don't go crazy with all the power. That's under the hood here, you're going to get 11 12, if you don't really try that hard. Finally, if you've noticed in some b-roll, there are fans here, there are fan ports, but for me there hasn't been a single time.

I've even heard them kick on now, when you power it up, you'll hear them were one usually time, but apart from that, I've not even heard them kick on they're there. If you need them, and you're not going to have to worry about overheating issues, but if fans bother you I, don't think these fans are really going to cause you that much problem. Finally, before we wrap up, it is worth noting that this device does come equipped with USI stylus compatibility, the predecessor of it had a garage DMR, stylist and I like garage stylist, because they're there, when you need them. So I was a little sad to see that this one does not have that. But given the number of people that use pins and don't use pins, it's probably better for them to have USI stylus support built in here for when those pins start to arrive, they're not arriving.

Yet we have one here in the office and HP is the only one that shipping one so as those start rolling out. Obviously we're going to do more testing on that and comment more on how USI stylus has work with these devices, but for right now, just know that it's there, and eventually it's going to be something you'll be able to take advantage of. So as we wrap up I need to talk about one other thing here and that's the price I didn't say anything about it as we move through this, because if you didn't know it already, you might be going well, you know if the price is right, this might be the Chromebook for me. Let me tell you: the price is kind of insane for this, because, if I took all of these specs and all of this stuff and said, hey bright screen, three by two aspect: ratio, high-res, backlit, keys, glass, trackpad, 360, foldable, hinge, USI stylus. All of that stuff and put it all together and said: how much do you think a Chromebook like this should cost I guarantee you would be higher than what the cost is, because you can buy this right now over at HP for six hundred and twenty-nine dollars and honestly compared to just the last couple of years of Chromebooks that have come out and the things that are included in those Chromebooks.

This thing at that kind of price is a little insane just like we've seen with the Lenovo flex, five bringing great features to a $400 device and the Lenovo duet, bringing crazy features to a $250 device. I think Acer's done kind of the same thing here, they've packed in all the specs. You could want, like just all sorts of things that drive you to want to come back to this Chromebook and drop the price way lower than what most of us would have expected. To be honest, we were so unsure when we first got this Chromebook in. We were emailing back and forth just to make sure that this is the configuration that was going to start at 629 dollars, and that is the case.

Core i5, eight gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of NVMe storage is the one that is six hundred and twenty-nine dollars and I can tell you. This thing feels looks and performs like a thousand dollar Chromebook. It runs circles around other things that are four and five hundred dollars and for the money at this point, if you're looking for that kind of flagship experience, that high-end Chromebook with all the stuff and all the specs and all the toys- and you want to not have to spend a thousand dollars, it is so easy to recommend the Acer Chromebook spin, 713 I love this device. It has become my daily driver device for right now. I think it is easily one of the best buys and one of the best things that you could spend your money on right now in the Chrome OS ecosystem, but guys that's been it for this one.

If you like this video, give it a thumbs up, go down there and hit that subscribe, button, make sure and hit the notification bell as well. If you like to be alerted when we make future videos just like this one and don't forget to hit the join button to see all the stuff that our members get like behind-the-scenes footage and custom emoji until next time, we'll see you.

Source : Chrome Unboxed