Thanks to its massive display, you could easily mistake the Acer Chromebook 15 (I specifically tested the CB515) for a Windows laptop. Designed to dazzle the eyes and the fingertips, it’s a top choice for those who don’t mind a little extra heft, but still want a low price.
Design
The first and most unique thing you’ll notice about the Acer Chromebook 15 is its sheer size. With this notebook, you get a big, spacious screen and a full-size keyboard. The 15.6-inch (1,920 by 1,080 pixels) display is massive in size next to most other lower-end Chromebooks; the next largest Chromebook in this roundup offers a screen size of just 12.3 inches, a significant difference. The machine is so big it has room for two large (and loud) speaker grilles on either side of the keyboard. It’s built with a durable aluminum lid but has plastic innards and a base. The display features a 180-degree hinge that allows it to open to the point where it can lay flat against the tabletop, the screen aimed directly upward.
Features
Aside from the large screen, which is not touch-sensitive, and impressive speakers, the only other feature of note on the device is the backlit keyboard, a huge help if you’re using the machine in the dark. As for the keys themselves, the action is mushy, but not unusably so. The touchpad offers a vast region for your fingers to scroll and excellent responsiveness when depressing the pad to click. At 3.9 pounds, it’s (understandably) the heaviest notebook in this roundup, though at just 20 millimeters thick, it’s thinner than two others.
Specs
As expected in this category, the Acer Chromebook 15 is fairly stripped down. The CPU is a 1.1 GHz Pentium N4200, which came out way back in 2016. Paired with the standard 4 GB of RAM and 32 GB of flash storage, it’s about as entry-level as possible. Ports include two full-size USB 3.0s, two USB-Cs (either can charge the device), and a micro SD card slot, a respectable configuration for a machine of this price.
Performance
A CPU three years out of date does few favors for any computer, and while the Acer Chromebook 15 was the slowest machine on the industry standard Speedometer 2.0 benchmark (which measures the responsiveness of web applications) — a whopping 37 percent below the field’s average — it performed much better on the JetStream 1.1 and the Kraken 1.1, which measure somewhat higher-end operations, including graphics and audio processing as well as encryption. Here, the Acer Chromebook 15 scored only 10 and 7 percent below the average scores, respectively.
*lower scores are better
Battery
With 8 hours and 10 minutes of run time on my full-screen video playback test, the Acer Chromebook 15 offers true all-day battery life. You’ll find somewhat better scores in this category, but for a machine with a screen of this size, that mark is impressive.
Conclusion
No big mystery here: Size is the main selling point of the Acer Chromebook 15. It retails for $400, and despite a poor performance on one benchmark, it’s a good buy at that price. As always, the Chromebook 15 is available in numerous configurations (with processors ranging up to the Intel Core i5), and — more importantly — is often sold as a refurbished unit, so pay close attention to these factors before you break out your wallet.
