Chromebooks in 2023 – Acer Chromebook Plus 515 Review

While you are most likely to run into one of these in school, Chromebooks have changed a fair bit since their introduction in 2011, and even more recently there has been a number of significant changes to make these rather interesting machines! I think it’s about time we revisit Chromebooks and see what they are like in 2023 – and what better to do that than Acer’s new Chromebook Plus 515. I’ll start off with what’s new with Chromebooks, then we’ll get into why you might want, or not want, one of these Acer machines.

When ChromeOS first launched, it was really pretty basic. It was essentially just the Chrome web browser, and a barebones OS to let you run the browser. Nowadays it’s getting dangerously close to being basically Google’s linux distro. The biggest change came in 2016 with the slow rollout of Android app support for ChromeOS devices. It took a couple of years for that to become a stable, usable experience, but now it’s pretty solid. A whole bunch of apps I use on Android now work pretty easily on ChromeOS. Most still open in a phone-sized window, with the option to change them to a tablet size window, or “Resizeable”, making it act like a regular desktop window. It does still warn you that the app might not support resizability and may break, but of the admittedly limited selection of apps I tried, I didn’t have any problems. The only point of confusion I have is with the Play Store. Due to some apps not supporting ChromeOS natively, sometimes when you install an app, say NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience, you get a full desktop version – but it’s clear it’s the same app as it prompts you to install it on other Android devices – but other times, you’ll get what is clearly an Android app. I can’t see any obvious way to know before you install what you’re going to get. Perhaps people more familiar with ChromeOS can enlighten me in the comments…

The next major update came in 2018 with the introduction of Crostini, Google’s Linux VM solution. It didn’t leave beta until 2021, but in short it lets you have a mostly fully featured Linux experience complete with terminal and GUI apps – I installed VSCode which works fine for the most part. I’ve even got an example React app running after realising you can’t create symlinks on the shared storage and moving it purely inside the VM storage. This level of Linux support means that, while it still is a VM and therefore is a bit clunky, you can install and run pretty much anything you’d need from a Linux machine, but you don’t have to deal with the whole reinstall the OS at the slightest sign of a problem type of issue I always seem to run into. So, between the Android support, and the Linux VM, ChromeOS is dangerously close to being a Chrome-flavoured Linux distro, and an actually useful bit of kit. 

Ok, that jab wasn’t in good faith, but I must admit that I’m surprised at just how versatile these have become. They went from being a pretty minimal experience – really just a web browser as your operating system – to being pretty fully featured with a number of locally run tools. It still is a terminally online type of machine, but with some local storage and a not insignificant amount of horsepower, it’s a fairly capable machine.

Which I think brings us nicely onto this, the Acer Chromebook Plus 515. The model I have here is the higher end Core i5 model, that being an i5 1235U, complete with 2 P cores and 8 E cores. It’s paired with 8GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 240GB of SSD space. That’s a surprising amount of power in a Chromebook. I mean, just looking at the PassMark scores for this i5 versus the Windows price equivalent from Acer, that being an Acer Aspire 3 with a Ryzen 7520U, this Chromebook is 30% faster in all core work, and about the same in single threaded workloads too. I guess that’s what you get when you don’t need to pay for a Windows license!

The display is clearly the centrepiece. It’s a frankly massive, slim bezeled, 1080p 60Hz IPS IPS display with reasonable, if flat colours to the eye. The display is noticeably dim, even with the brightness setting cranked to the max. My SypderX, via Moonlight, reckoned the display was peaking at less than 300 nits, although with a better than expected 1200:1 contrast ratio. I’d have definitely liked more brightness here, and I wouldn’t say this was an overly accurate, nor colour rich display. This is for consuming media, not creating it – although the OS would suggest that idea too. Naturally I did run my open source response time tool on this via Moonlight to see just how bad this panel is and.. Yeah… It’s not great. Some of the results were into the 30 millisecond range, making this a 47 Hz equivalent panel. Seeing as it’s only running at 60 Hz, I’ll let it off with a warning. 

The keyboard is average, or even a little on the naff edge. It’s worryingly mushy and soft, and I found myself mis-typing a fair amount. It’s certainly serviceable and you do get used to it, although something that unnecessarily annoys me is the lower case font on the non-shine-through keys. I don’t know why but it bugs me. The backlight does exist, but as I said they caps aren’t shine-through, so you’ll still struggle to see the keys in the dark. Something you will need to get used to is the altered layout. There’s no system key – at least not on the bottom row. That has replaced caps lock, and been filled by extra long control and ALT keys. They’ve also replaced all the function keys with what would normally be FN plus F key functions like audio, screen brightness, or just back and refresh buttons. They’ve also opted to put an ALT Graph button on the right of the space bar instead of a context menu key, and the keyboard is missing delete, home, end, page up and page down keys – or a secondary function layer to allow you to still use them. That’s honestly what annoyed me most about the keyboard’s layout, as I use those keys incredibly regularly especially when programming or using CLIs. You do have some keyboard shortcuts that mitigate some of those missing functions, like holding the system key and then pressing backspace you get delete back, and holding control and using the arrow keys get closer to home/end/page up/page down, but they aren’t quite the same, and you’ll have to memorise those binds.

The trackpad is just outright poor. By default mouse acceleration was on which drove me crazy, but even once I’d disabled that I found it would regularly miss my movements, not track near the edges of the trackpad, or sometimes would skip in and out of movement. It drove me mad. I had a USB mouse connected for almost all of my testing because of that. I was also somewhat sad to find this wasn’t a touchscreen, which I think would suit a machine like this well. 

I suppose that brings me nicely onto the I/O. Considering this is mostly a cloud-computing machine, it has a surprising amount of ports. You get one USB A port, two USB C ports – both of which support power in – HDMI 1.4 and a combo audio jack. That would rival most MacBooks! You’ve also got built in speakers that flank the keyboard, and while they do actually project upwards as you’d hope, they offer a pretty flat sound profile. They lack bass – as most laptop speakers do – although I’d still call them serviceable and the fact that they are user-facing is a clear benefit.

Battery life on the admittedly limited full brightness should net you around 5 hours of usage, or at a more conservative brightness level you’ll get up to 10 hours. I do have to admit that, so long as it’s charged, the instant-wake is so refreshing to experience. With Windows laptops it often feels clunky and slow, but with this you open the shell and no matter if it’s been a minute or a month, you are back where you left off. 

So, should you buy one? Well if you are looking to run anything locally, if it isn’t an Android app or something you can fight with the Linux VM to install, you’ll probably want to look elsewhere. This isn’t a gaming machine either – despite what Google’s TV ads would have you think – it’s a way to get a good user experience out of unequivocally low end hardware. This model is £500, but Acer will sell you an almost identical machine but with an i3-1215U – a 2 P 4 E core chip – which is still faster than that Ryzen chip and more than enough for regular ChromeOS usage, for £400 instead and I think that’s a much better deal. I can’t say I’d buy one, but I’m not the target market. For the right person, I can see why this exists, and why you’d put your cash here instead of a Windows machine. The privacy concerns are still a pretty big problem for me too, but it seems I’m in the minority there.