The Acer 14 was able to fairly good performance in our tests. It shared the top score of 9 in this metric, putting it well ahead of the bottom score of 3. It stood up phenomenally to our everyday use test. Google Sheets windows were usually the first place we would notice any sort of lagginess in our testing, with switching between sheets and copying formulas across cells taking on noticable delays. The Acer 14 allowed us to quickly and easily navigate through Google Sheets, even with multiple other tabs open and high definition Youtube videos streaming in the background. During our testing it was so difficult to induce any kind of lagginess or glitches in the Acer 14 that in nearly felt like using a full fledged laptop. This meant that when our testers used the Acer 14 for a full length workday they noticed no limitations. Tabs could be opened and put aside for later without affecting speed, and background music could be streamed from whatever service they preferred without hogging all the RAM. The battery also made it through our full workday of use test with no problem whatsoever, and its advertised 12 hour battery life is one of the longest amongst the models that we tested. In fact, one of our testers used the Acer for a full day of work, then took it home and did some Netflix streaming, all on a single charge. On top of all this, the Acer 14 offers 32GB of onboard storage, which is double that of most other Chromebooks. This means you can be less selective in which Google documents to save to your hard drive for offline editing before a flight, and lends the freedom to download some movies to get you through the eight hour leg from New York to Geneva. In our opinion, you'd be hard pressed to find better performance out of a Chromebook.
This is where the Acer 14 really separated itself from the other high performing models we tested. It again scored a 9 in this metric, which saw scores as low as 5. The large keyboard lends an almost desktop level typing experience and definitely won't fatigue your typing muscles, even during the most furious of email sessions. The key themselves were responsive and smooth, even for the speed demon typers amongst our testers. It also has the largest and one of the most responsive trackpads of any of the models we tested, with a smooth and pleasant clicking action. This meant it was by far our favorite model for scrolling, clicking around in spreadsheets, and copy and paste jobs. Bottom line, laptops in general and small Chromebooks especially can feel limiting because they don't provide the desktop style interface of a full sized keyboard and mouse. The Acer 14 goes farther in erasing these limitations than any of the other models we tested, and thus feels like the machine for people who plan on getting work done on their Chromebook.
The Acer 14's screen is full 1080P high definition. The colors it produces are quite accurate and it has fairly nice contrast. It's not quite as good as the screen of the Acer 15, but it's still great for movie watching.
The Acer 14 is much larger than most Chromebooks, and at 3.4 pounds it is quite heavy. If you're willing to lug around a machine this large and heavy you'd probably be better off with the Acer 15.
The Acer 14 is slightly above the average price of the Chromebooks we tested. Considering its increased performance and usability, this is a great value if you're looking for a streamlined secondary machine that lets you be productive when you're traveling, or want one that won't put a damper on your movie watching experience. If you're looking for a primary machine, its price is enough to get you a low end traditional laptop with a bit more versatility, which might be a better value in that situation.
