Acer unveiled a new line of convertible notebooks under the Acer Spin name this summer, and now several of the first models are available in the United States.
Prices for the 13.3 inch Acer Spin 5Â start at $599, while the thinner, lighter Spin 7Â with a 14 inch display sells for about $1200.
The Spin 7 is a svelte laptop which measures 0.43 inches thick and weighs less than 2.7 pounds. It has a 14 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel IPS display and a 360-degree hinge that lets you fold back the screen and use the computer in tablet mode.
Thin and light comes at a cost though. Rather than a 15 watt Intel Kaby Lake-U processor, the Spin 7 features a 4.5 watt Core i7-7Y75 Kaby Lake processor, which should feel almost as fast as a higher-power chip under some circumstances, but which doesn’t offer the same raw horsepower for CPU-intensive tasks.
Acer says the Spin 7 should get up to 8 hours of battery life and the laptop features 8GB of RAM, 256GB of solid state storage, and two USB 3.1 Type-C ports.
Acer’s Spin 5 convertible laptop is a 13 inch model that isn’t as thin or light, but sells for about half the price of the Spin 7.
A model with a 1920 x 1080 pixel display, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and an Intel Core i5-6200U Skylake processor has a list price of about $650, but at least one retailer is currently selling that model for $600.
A $500 model with a Core i3 Skylake chip and 128GB of storage also seems to be coming soon, but I haven’t found any stores selling that model yet.
The Spin 5 measures 0.8 inches thick and weighs just over 3.5 pounds. The laptop has an HDMI port, one USB 3.0 port, two USB 2.0 ports, and an IPS display.