Acer Chromebook Plus 515 (2023) Laptop Review

The Acer Chromebook Plus 515's design looks clean and professional but somewhat cheap due to its plastic chassis and thick, protruding bezels. It has an island-style keyboard with speakers on each side and a centered, plastic touchpad. There are air vents on the bottom and at the back of the keyboard deck. This laptop is only available in the Steel Gray color.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 515's build quality is decent. It feels relatively sturdy despite its all-plastic chassis, and there are no obvious gaps in the construction. However, there's a fair amount of flex on the keyboard deck. The lid and display also flex, albeit not as much as the keyboard. The finish is fairly scratch-resistant and doesn't pick up many fingerprints and smudges. The whole device feels pretty heavy and clunky for a low-power Chromebook with a plastic chassis, as the weight isn't evenly distributed.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 515's hinges have a wide range, allowing you to place the screen flat on a surface, which can be handy when you need to show the content to someone opposite you. The hinges feel smooth when opening and closing the lid, and they're fairly stable, exhibiting very little wobble when moving the laptop or typing aggressively. However, they have too much resistance to allow for a one-hand lift.

The Acer Chromebook 515 Plus and its power adapter are compact and lightweight.

Accessing the internals is fairly straightforward; you only need to remove some Philips screws and undo the bottom panel's clips with a prying tool. Unfortunately, the memory isn't user-replaceable. The storage depends on the configuration; the 128GB model uses a soldered UFS drive, but the 256GB and 512GB models have an M.2 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD.

See the user manual here.

• 65W USB-C power adapter and cord
• Documentation
• Laptop sleeve

The Acer Chromebook Plus 515 is available with the following displays:

• 15.6" IPS 1920 x 1080 60Hz
• 15.6" IPS 1920 x 1080 60Hz Touchscreen

A 1080p resolution looks decently sharp on a 15.6-inch panel. You can see individual pixels up close, but this isn't a problem at typical viewing distances. The 16:9 aspect ratio is great for media consumption since most videos are in that format; however, a taller 16:10 ratio would have been better for productivity, as the increased vertical space lets you see more information at once, reducing the need to scroll. The touch-sensitive panel looks identical.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 515 is only available with 60Hz displays. The response time is very slow, causing noticeable ghosting behind fast-moving objects. The touch-sensitive display is identical.

The contrast ratio is decent for an IPS panel but is still relatively low compared to other display technologies like VA and OLED. This contrast level makes blacks look gray in dim settings. The touch-sensitive display will perform similarly.

The display's maximum brightness is sub-par. It's fine for most indoor settings but isn't ideal for well-lit rooms or outdoors in broad daylight. It gets very dim at the lowest brightness setting, which is great for dark room viewing as it causes less eye strain. The touch-sensitive screen has the same brightness.

The display's reflection handling is passable. Mirror-like reflections aren't a problem due to the matte coating. However, bright light sources, like a lamp or open window in broad daylight, can be distracting. These bright reflections are visible, even when viewing bright-color content with the screen at maximum brightness.

The display's black uniformity is okay. There's some clouding throughout the screen, and a small amount of backlight bleed along the bottom edge. These uniformity issues are only visible when viewing dark-color content in a dim setting.

The display's horizontal viewing angle is okay. The image dims and washes out quickly as you move to the side. You can still share the screen with someone else for text documents and other casual content; however, it's best to be directly in front of the screen if you need perfect accuracy for color-critical work. There's more color shift on the right side of the display than on the left, though this could be only on our unit, so your experience may vary.

The display's vertical viewing angle is passable. Like the horizontal viewing angle, the image dims and washes when viewing from above and below, so you need to look at the screen more or less straight on to see an accurate image, which can be challenging in tight places where you don't have much room to tilt the screen, like on a bus or airplane.

The display's accuracy is okay out of the box. The white balance is great, but many colors are visibly off due to the display's narrow color gamut, especially the primary colors. The gamma doesn't follow the curve at all; dark scenes are too dark, and bright scenes are too bright.

The display's color gamut is bad. It doesn't have full coverage of the commonly used sRGB color space, meaning most content will look slightly washed out. This panel isn't ideal for color-critical work like photo and video editing. The touch-sensitive display has the same color gamut.

The display is entirely flicker-free, which helps reduce eye strain.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 515's keyboard is passable. The layout feels spacious and is easy to get used to. Key stability is okay, though the keycaps feel cheap. The overall typing experience is good; the keys have a good amount of travel and don't require much force to actuate, but they're a tad mushy, partly due to the amount of flex on the keyboard deck. Unfortunately, there's no backlighting, which isn't ideal if you like working in the dark.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 515 has a good touchpad. It's relatively large and feels smooth. It tracks all movements and gestures well, though the edges don't feel quite as responsive as the center. There's no issue with palm rejection. The buttons feel tactile, but you can only click in the bottom half of the touchpad. Acer advertises this touchpad material as 'OceanGlass', which is just recycled plastic.

The speakers get reasonably loud and don't distort at high volume levels. They sound clear but slightly unnatural, with almost no bass whatsoever.

The webcam is great. The image looks sharp and reasonably detailed, but it's slightly overexposed. Also, some colors don't look quite true to life. Voices sound loud and clear, albeit a bit nasal. The privacy cover is only a physical barrier; it doesn't disable the camera at the software level.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 515's port selection is okay. The USB-A port supports USB 3.2 Gen 1 data transfer speed of up to 5Gbps. The USB-Cs also support USB 3.2 Gen 1 data transfer speed, as well as charging and DisplayPort.

The wireless adapter is an Intel AX211NGW. Wi-Fi 6E has faster speeds, lower latency, and less signal interference than previous Wi-Fi standards. However, you need a router that supports Wi-Fi 6E to benefit from these features.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 515 is available with the following CPUs:

• Intel Core i3-1215U (6 cores/8 threads, up to 4.4 GHz, 10MB cache)
• Intel Core i5-1235U (10 cores/12 threads, up to 4.4 GHz, 12MB cache)
• Intel Core i3-1315U (6 cores/8 threads, up to 4.5 GHz, 10MB cache)
• Intel Core i5-1335U (10 cores/12 threads, up to 4.6 GHz, 12MB cache)
• Intel Core i7-1355U (10 cores/12 threads, up to 5.0 GHz, 12MB cache)

All five are low-power processors designed for general productivity tasks like text processing, web browsing, and video playback, not demanding workloads like video editing or gaming. Intel's 12th and 13th Gen CPUs have a similar hybrid design with a mix of performance and efficiency cores. The core count remains the same between 12th and 13th Gen; the Core i3s have two performance and four efficiency cores, while the Core i5s and i7 have two and eight, respectively. The Core i3s are more than adequate for people with a light workload, as Chrome OS runs well on low-end hardware. The i5 and i7 will provide a snappier experience and give you more headroom for heavier multitasking and intensive applications. The difference between Intel's 12th and 13th Gen processors is very small; the 13th Gen CPUs are faster, though the difference is hard to notice in regular use.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 515 is only available with integrated graphics. The Core i3 has Intel UHD graphics, while the Core i5 and i7 have Intel Iris Xe. These GPUs can only handle light productivity tasks. You can play some games from the Google Play Store, but you may need to play with low settings for smooth gameplay.

You can configure this laptop with 8GB or 16GB of RAM. The memory isn't user-replaceable.

You can configure this laptop with 128GB, 256GB, or 512GB of storage. The 128GB model uses a soldered UFS (Universal Flash Storage) drive, while the 256GB and 512GB models have a user-replaceable M.2 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 515's overall score in Geekbench 5 is decent. The Core i3-1215U has good single-thread performance, but its multi-thread performance is on the lower side as it only has six cores. That said, this level of performance is more than enough to handle almost anything you'd need to do on a Chromebook. If you're a heavy multitasker or run more intensive, multi-threaded applications, getting a Core i5 or i7 model is best, as they have more cores to provide a smoother experience. As for GPU computing tasks, the integrated graphics processor performs poorly and isn't suitable for demanding workloads.

Cinebench R23 doesn't run on Chrome OS.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 515 performs poorly in Blender. The CPU is slow to render 3D images, and GPU rendering isn't supported. If you need to render images, it's best to get a Windows laptop with a discrete GPU or a MacBook Pro with Apple silicon, like the Apple MacBook Pro 14 (M3, 2023).

The Intel Core i3-1215U's integrated GPU performs poorly in the Basemark GPU benchmark, as it's a low-power graphics processor designed for light productivity tasks. You can play some mobile games from the Google Play Store, but you may have to play with low settings to get smooth gameplay. Even then, performance can vary depending on the game because most games from the Google Play Store are designed for Android smartphones and tablets with an ARM processor, so some may not run properly or lack keyboard, mouse, and controller support. The Core i5 and i7's Iris Xe iGPU is faster than the Core i3's and will provide a better gaming experience with higher frame rates. There's no difference in performance graphics-wise between the 12th and 13th Gen CPUs.

The 256GB UFS drive performs poorly. Its sequential read speed is passable, so the system still boots up and launches apps relatively quickly; however, its slow write speeds mean it'll take a long time to write anything to the drive. The 256GB and 512GB PCIe Gen 4 SSDs are likely much faster.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 515's battery life is okay. You can get through a typical 8-hour day on a full charge, but just barely, so you might have to plug it in for a short time, depending on your usage. That said, an 8-hour battery life is low for a Chromebook, as Chrome OS devices typically last much longer.

Borderlands 3 doesn't run on Chrome OS. This laptop's integrated graphics can't handle such a demanding game, anyway.

Civilization VI doesn't run on Chrome OS.

Counter-Strike 2 doesn't run on Chrome OS.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider doesn't run on Chrome OS.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 515's keyboard is relatively cool when idle and only gets mildly warm under load. The fan is audible at full speed, but it's barely a whisper and isn't distracting.

We can't test the performance over time because UNIGINE Heaven and Cinebench R23 aren't compatible with Chrome OS. There's likely some thermal throttling on the CPU and GPU, as this is a relatively compact laptop with a single fan.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 515 runs on the 64-bit version of Chrome OS. Every Chromebook has an 'expiration date' at which it stops receiving software updates, and according to Google's official document, the 515's end-of-life is June 2032. Google may extend this date as they have for other Chromebooks; it's best to check their official document for any changes.