Acer Aspire 14 AI review: a good price can’t mask some real disappointments

Laptops priced between $750 to $1,000 price range fall into a sort of gray area between true budget laptops and midrange machines. As such, there’s a great deal of inconsistency that you don’t find in laptops under $500 (typical compromises made to reach an affordable price) and over $1,000 (generally higher quality). The Acer Aspire 14 AI is one such laptop, and like some others, it’s a real mixed bag.

It’s reasonably priced laptop at $750 for a usable configuration, available from Costco only. But it cuts a corner in the display, something I’ve seen less often over the last couple of years, and it fails to leverage Intel’s Lunar Lake efficiency advantage. Those two flaws, more than anything, make that attractive price something of a tease.

Specs and configuration

There’s just one Aspire 14 AI configuration available today, with an Intel Core Ultra 5 226V chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 14.0-inch FHD+ IPS display. It’s $750 at Costco, and $890 direct from Acer.

The Costco price is an attractive price for the right laptop. However, it’s debatable if this is the right laptop. It’s $250 less than the Apple MacBook Air 13 (M4), which is a meaningful drop — except, the MacBook is the best small laptop made today and well worth the extra money if you can afford it. And if you shop around, you can find some better laptops for around the same price, even if they’re a generation or two behind. The Asus Zenbook 14 is one example — I’ve seen on sale for less than $600 with an OLED display, and it’s a great choice.

Design

The Aspire 14 AI is constructed of a mix of plastic in the keyboard deck and aluminum in the lid and bottom chassis. That shaves a little off the price and perhaps a little from the weight as well, although at 3.05 pounds, the Aspire 14 AI isn’t even close to the lightest 14-inch laptop I’ve reviewed. Unfortunately, the keyboard deck gives a bit with light pressure and the lid is a little bendable. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad build quality, but it feels less robust than laptops that cost $1,000 or like the Apple MacBook Air 13 (M4) and Acer’s own Swift 14 AI. I’ve reviewed other laptops for less than the Aspire 14 AI that are more robust, like the Asus Zenbook 14.

Thanks to some relatively thick plastic display bezels (which also contribute to the laptop’s lower price), the Aspire 14 AI isn’t the smallest laptop. It’s wider and deeper than quite a few other machines, and while it’s reasonably thin at 0.67 inches, it’s still a bit less portable. And overall, the impression of quality just isn’t quite there, with a hinge that’s way too firm and requires two hands to pry open the display. I keep referring back to the price, though, because if you need to shave off some of the cost, these aren’t the worst ways to do so.

The aesthetic is fine, with a gray color way that’s unblemished with fake chrome like lower-priced laptops often were several years ago. The lines and angles are streamlined enough that the Aspire 14 AI isn’t bland, and so it’s a good looking enough laptop. Again, those thick display bezels belie that sense of modernity that a lot of laptops display, but you won’t turn this laptop away based on its looks alone.

Keyboard and touchpad

The keyboard has slightly smaller keycaps and the layout is the tiniest bit cramped. Acer could have used up a little more space and made for more comfortable key spacing. But, the switched are reasonably light and snappy, with a bottoming action that isn’t harsh or fatiguing. I do like some other keyboards better, such as Apple’s Magic Keyboard and HP’s version it uses on its latest OmniBook laptops. But, I was able to type this review at nearly full speed without too many mistakes, so I’d rate the keyboard as pretty good.

The touchpad is large enough (although there’s space for a larger version), and for a mechanical touchpad, it’s fine. I don’t expect haptic touchpads on laptops in this price range, and in fact the Aspire 14 AI’s touchpad is quite responsive and its button clicks are quiet and confident. That makes it better than some other lower-priced laptops I’ve used.

Acer includes a touch display, which I think is great at the price. It won’t matter to every user, but there’s no downside.

Connectivity and webcam

There’s a good selection of connectivity, with a couple of modern Thunderbolt 4 connections and some legacy ports as well. That’s plenty for a 14-inch laptop, and better than some. The MacBook Air has just two Thunderbolt 4 ports, although it does benefit from its MagSafe 3 power connection that keeps both ports free while charging. You’ll give on up with the Aspire 14 AI, but you also won’t be required to use a dongle or hub to plug in more than a couple of devices. Many laptops with Intel’s Lunar Lake chipset has Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, but the Aspire 14 AI is stuck one generation back.

The webcam meets the new 1080p standard, which was a welcome change overall, and it provides a quality image with an infrared camera for Windows 11 Hello facial recognition. The Lunar Lake chipset has a fast Neural Processing Engine (NPU) that exceeds Microsoft’s 40 tera operations per second (TOPS) requirement for its Copilot+ PC AI initiative. That means that the various Copilot+ AI features like Windows Studio Effects and (eventually) the Recall functionality will run well on-device using an NPU that’s more power-efficient. Acer also offers a few AI-enabled utilities to enhance video and audio quality and edit pictures. That’s becoming the norm today, with most manufacturers offering a host of AI features, so the Aspire 14 AI is keeping up with the market here.

Performance

There’s just one 8-core/8-thread Intel Lunar Lake (Core Ultra Series 2) chipset offered with the Aspire 14 AI, specifically the Core Ultra 5 226V. Like all Lunar Lake chipsets, it runs at a base of 17 watts, and it has the slowest clockspeed in the lineup. Intel designed the new chipsets to focus on efficiency, with performance that’s faster than the older 15-watt U-series Meteor Lake chipsets but slower than those running at 28 watts.

Looking at our benchmarks, the Aspire is as fast as other comparable chipsets and slower than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chipsets that are also aimed at efficiency. The MacBook Air 13’s M4 chipset is also a lot faster. The Core Ultra 5 226V also equips the slower Intel Arc 130V integrated graphics, but the Aspire 14 AI did surprisingly well here compared to other Intel Arc 130V chipsets. However, these scores generally aren’t good enough for all but light gaming, and integrated graphics don’t help much with speeding up creative tasks.

The ThinkPad X9-14 will be fine for general productivity tasks. Gamers and creators won’t be too excited, though.

Battery life

The Aspire 14 AI has a 65 watt-hour battery and a low-resolution IPS display. Combined with the energy-efficient Core Ultra 226V chipset, I expected very good battery life.

What I saw in our battery tests wasn’t terribly impressive compared to other Lunar Lake and Qualcomm Snapdragon X laptops. Setting aside the Lenovo Thinkpad X9-14 that had usually bad battery life, the Aspire 14 AI just wan’t terribly impressive. Some of the machines on this list have power power-hungry OLED displays, like the Asus Zenbook S 14, and those did significantly better.

It’s not that this is terrible battery life, especially compared to the previous generation of Windows laptops that averaged a few hours less. It’s just that given the components, the Aspire 14 AI should have done better. You shouldn’t have to compromise in both display quality and battery life the way that you do here.

Display and audio

There was a time when laptops priced less than $1,000 generally had inferior displays with low brightness, narrow and inaccurate colors, and low contrast. Over the last several years, though only the least expensive laptops have had less-than-average IPS displays — and that average is much better than it used to be. When I powered on the Aspire 14 AI, I could instantly tell that the display would be one of this laptop’s biggest compromises to reach a price that isn’t really all that low.

The colors are muted and don’t look very natural, and that display doesn’t get all that bight by modern standards. It just didn’t look great to me, and that’s setting aside the spectacular OLED and mini-LED displays I’ve looked at lately. Even compared to the typical IPS display, this one just wasn’t great. And at 14.0 inches and FHD+ (1920 x 1200), the display wasn’t particularly sharp, either.

According to my Datacolor SpyderX Elite colorimeter, the display didn’t benefit from objective measurements either. While it was brighter at 331 nites than our standard of 300 nits, that just demonstrates that we need to establish a new standard. Most displays are closer to 400 nits today, making this one seem too dark by comparison. The colors were very narrow at 62% of sRGB, 46% of AdobeRGB, and 46% of DCI-P3. That’s well below the 100%, 75%, and 75% averages, respectively, of today’s typical IPS displays. OLED displays come in at 100%, 95%, and 100% and mini-LED are somewhere in between, making this display look even worse. And those narrow colors weren’t very accurate either, at a DeltaE of 2.59, above the 2.0 that’s preferred for productivity work and where most displays fall. Contrast was good at 1,200:1, above our still-relevant 1,000:1 baseline.

Ultimately, this just wasn’t a very good display. It’s okay if all you’re doing is browsing the web and working in productivity applications. But it’s not very good for streaming media, which will look muted, and certainly not for any kind of creative work. It’s a corner that I hate to see cut on a laptop like this one.

The audio was pretty average, though. Two downward-firing speakers provide good enough sound for YouTube videos and system sounds, with enough volume and reasonably clear mids and highs and the usual lack of bass.

Conclusion

If you buy the laptop from Costco, you’ll pay $750. That’s not a bad price for a 14-inch laptop with decent productivity performance. It’s not the best-built laptop with the most elegant design, but you don’t expect that for the price.

However, the display simply isn’t very good, with narrow and muted colors and low brightness. Given that I’ve seen laptops with OLED displays at this price, that’s not great. And the battery life is disappointing. Ultimately, I think you can get a much better laptop for the same price if you shop around. Spend a couple of hundred dollars more and you’ll be a lot happier.