Acer Spin 3: A solid $650 budget laptop with nice bonuses

You don’t see Thunderbolt, Wi-Fi 6, or an integrated stylus on many laptops in this price range.

- MARK HACHMAN

Budget laptops continue to improve, and the Acer Spin 3 is a good example. For an affordable price it offers adequate components and battery life, with enough flexibility to accommodate a range of peripherals. Though the 14-inch, 360-degree convertible laptop delivers middling performance, a modern Thunderbolt port and a nifty integrated stylus stand out. In all, it’s a solid laptop, but in a market whose competition is growing stronger, quickly.

BASIC FEATURES

The Acer Spin 3 (SP314-54N-58Q7) we tested is sold at Costco for $650 (go.pcworld.com/cc65), although the company lists a few alternatives on its Acer online store (go.pcworld.com/onst). Of the four listed, only one, the SP314-54N-50W3, contains an up-to-date Core i5-1035G4 processor as well as a larger 512GB SSD, for about $150 more. (Intel’s 10th-gen “Ice Lake” processors (go. pcworld.com/icep) use the number attached to its “G” suffix to indicate the relative graphics performance, with a higher number being better.) We still consider our review unit’s loadout—8GB RAM, 256GB SSD— adequate for most needs.

Here are the basic features of our review unit, which is backed by a one-year “International Travelers’ Warranty.” Acer says that warranty runs concurrently with its standard one-year U.S. warranty, allowing the laptop to be serviced in up to 30 other countries where Acer has authorized facilities.

Display: 14-inch IPS (1920x1080)

Processor: 1GHz Core i5-1035G1

Graphics: UHD Graphics

Memory: 8GB LPDDR4

Storage: 256GB NVMe SSD