Acer Aspire S 13 review: A solid, no nonsense, affordable ultrabook

Hype can be dangerous. It often reduces great things to only good and brilliant concepts to only OK. Hype was my biggest problem coming into the launch of the Acer Aspire S 13. After seeing the magnificence of something like HP’s Spectre 13 and the 12-inch Retina MacBook, I had a lot of hope going into Acer’s launch, especially when I heard from sources that the S 13 was going to be something like that.

The bad news? It was that very same hype that led me to be disappointed when I first saw the S 13 in the flesh. But, after that died down, I’m glad to say that my disappointment was completely unfounded.

WOW! OMG! WOAH! Would be appropriate reactions when someone sees the world’s thinnest laptop. Sadly, those will not be the reactions that you’ll get with the Acer Aspire S 13. It isn’t eye-catching and probably won’t turn heads when you whip it out in a sea of MacBooks in Starbucks.

But that also means the S 13 doesn’t have the bling and show-off-y stuff you’d usually find on those high-end ultra-portable laptops. It’s more blue-collared. It’s more grounded. And, it doesn’t rub your nose in the fact that you can’t afford one. To everyone else, it’s just like their laptop, except that it’s maybe slightly thinner and lighter.

It also does what it’s supposed to do rather well. Now, I don’t want to spoil your impression of this laptop by building too much hype but I’ll say this — when it came time to give the laptop back, I was more than a little sad to part ways with it.

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We live in an age of technological marvel. Never before have we seen so many awesome ultra-thin and ultra-portable laptops. These laptops are amazing and I’m absolutely in love with them.

But, ultra-thin and ultra-light laptops have always been a luxury that’s just out of my reach. They’re incredibly expensive, to put it in simpler terms, and not everyone can pony up for one. So if you’re like me and you want a thin and light laptop but can’t afford any of the ultra-thin or ultra-light laptops, what should you buy? Should it be the Acer Aspire S 13?

Let’s not beat around the bush, the S 13 is no HP Spectre 13 killer. It doesn’t ooze premium because it’s not made from some space-age material nor is it milled from a single block of aluminium. This little laptop from Acer is made mostly out of plastic.

It’s got a plastic shell, a plastic hinge and a plastic underbody. Fortunately, the palm rest on the inside of the laptop is made of metal. Not only does it give the keyboard structural rigidity, minimising flex, it also adds a touch of premium to the overall experience. Yes, the laptop is mostly made out of plastic, but where your hands tend to spend most of their time, they’ll be greeted with a nice brushed metal finish.

Unfortunately, the bezel surrounding the S 13’s 13.3-inch display is rather thick and isn’t particularly good looking. The display itself isn’t touch-sensitive either, which took some getting used to from my end, and it flexes quite a lot. What’s nice, though, is that the Full HD panel is pretty good. It’s sharp and quite colour accurate from what I can tell. It also has a matte finish which reduces glare and makes viewing under sunlight not much of an issue.

Acer’s Aspire S 13 comes in two configurations. While both have 6th-generation Intel Core i5-6200U processors, the models are separated by their memory configurations. For the base model (which I have here on review), you get 4GB of DDR3L RAM and a 128GB SSD for RM2,799. The high-spec RM3,399 model, on the other hand, comes with 8GB of DDR3L RAM and a 256GB SSD.

Overall performance was smooth during my usage, with it being able to crunch productivity tasks — like photo editing, word processing and browsing — with no problems. My only concern is the limited storage. Out of the box, it does have some bloatware so you end up with about 100GB of usable space on the base model. The good news is that a lot of it can be uninstalled (I immediately got rid of that pesky McAfee because it was bugging out my Google Chrome).

It’ll even handle light gaming with minimal issues. League of Legends at high settings gave me about 100 fps without any issues and CS:GO was also relatively smooth at medium settings. But, when you run slightly more demanding games like Borderlands 2 (which isn’t even that demanding if I’m being honest) frame rates get pretty choppy.

It can get quite hot under load but the upside is that the heat is concentrated at the top of the laptop’s keyboard close to the hinge. This means that you won’t really feel the heat when your fingers are on the keyboard. But if you do put it on your lap, your knees might get a little warm as the vents are also located at the hinge of the S 13.

This definitely isn’t a gaming rig. Then again, I doubt many will be buying this to play video games. Its main purpose is to be your portable workstation and the S 13 does that rather well unless you do a lot of video editing. Coming in at 1.3kg, the laptop isn’t as light as a 12″ Retina MacBook or the Spectre 13, but it’s plenty light enough to carry around. The weight is also distributed rather evenly, making it really easy for me to pick it up with one hand by a corner and carry it around with me like it was a tablet.

Although you won’t be able to open it with one finger like a MacBook, due to the stiff hinge, the S 13 is quite thin at 14.58mm so it slides into my bag without any issues. Sometimes I’d even forget it’s there, but that’s partly because my daily driver is a 1.75kg Dell Inspiron 13 7000, so the S 13 is definitely a welcomed reduction in carry-on weight. If I had one complaint it would be that the screen doesn’t open completely flat (no 180-degree hinge) but it does manage about 160-degrees which I think should be good enough for most.

Battery life and charging aren’t too bad for a Core i5 processor either. I got about six hours and fifteen minutes on a single charge (so not a full day of use, unfortunately) with it taking about 3 hours to top up from empty.

It’s also got a nice set of speakers. They’re loud (which is likely what you’d want on a laptop) but don’t particularly crunch or crack when you crank the volume up, at least not to my ears anyway. But, their location towards the side of the laptop means that the audio can get muffled when you put it on a soft surface like a bed or sofa.

 

I do a lot of typing daily. For work, for leisure and even when I get bored, so a laptop’s keyboard is very important for me. When I first saw it, I wasn’t impressed with the keyboard at all. The keys were rather mushy and not terribly satisfying.

After using it as my daily driver for about a week, I still think the keys are mushy, but I’ve grown to be OK with it. Yeah, it could use more tactile feedback, but the keyboard does have other strengths too. The keys are really nicely spaced and have quite decent travel distances which goes a long way towards a satisfying typing experience. One thing that did annoy me was the weird placement of the page up and page down keys and the lack of media keys.

The trackpad is OK. It skips occasionally, but it tracks quite smoothly and can recognise two and three finger gestures most of the time.

Acer got quite a lot of things right with their new Aspire S 13. Sure, I expected a whole lot more, in the beginning, coming off the high of the then newly launched Spectre 13. But now, after I got to spend some time with it, I realised that setting those expectations made absolutely no sense.

The Aspire S 13 is in a different class. It’s a budget option and you’d be hard pressed to find something thinner, lighter and more powerful for less. Comparing across its own range of laptops, it’s really quite good value. But, you will sacrifice a little in the display and build department compared to something like the base model HP Envy 13 (RM3,299), and the touch plus convertibility of a Dell Inspiron 13 5000 series (RM2,998), both of which have the same internals as the S 13 I have here.

It may not be an ultra-thin or ultra-light laptop, but it’s thin and light and that’s definitely good enough for something that’s half the price of something like the Spectre 13. It’s for the person who wants function with a little bit of form but can’t afford to break their bank account at the same time. It’s for your average Joe, someone like you and I.

Acer Aspire S 13 — RM2,799

Operating System: Windows 10 Home 64-bit
Display: 13.3″ Full HD 1920×1080 IPS
Processor: 2.30GHz dual-core 6th Generation Intel Core i5-6200U
Memory: 4GB DDR3L
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 520
Storage: 128GB SSD Serial ATA/600
Dimensions: 327x288x14.58mm
Ports: 2 USB 3.0, 1 USB Type-C, HDMI, Headphone/Mic combo, SD Card reader
Weight: 1.3kg
Battery Life: About 6 hours