The Acer Aspire S7-393 Review: Broadwell Comes To Acer's Ultrabook
by Brett Howse on October 5, 2015 8:00 AM ESTFinal Words
Summing up the Acer Aspire S7 shows a mix of things done well and things that need work. The design of the Acer S7 is strong, with it being one of the thinnest and lightest Ultrabooks around that are powered by a Broadwell-U processor. The glass cover on the top of the display is a premium touch, and the aluminum keyboard deck feels excellent like only a metal can reproduce. Acer also has a great thing going with their dual-torque hinges, even though the one on the S7 is not quite as easy to use as the R 13 model, but I think this is only the case because of how light the S7 is. It is kind of amazing that this notebook is really already three years old. The design has held up well.
There is not much more to say about Broadwell-U at this point. Skylake is literally already announced. Acer sent me this notebook a couple of months ago, but it was still going to be tight with the release of Skylake. We are still waiting on devices to arrive with the 15 Watt Skylake parts, but the battery life gains and performance jump of Broadwell over Haswell is still impressive. The Core i7-5500U that Acer sent in this laptop is no slouch. On the rest of the specifications, it is also right out of the Ultrabook play book, with 8 GB of DDR3L and a 256 GB SSD. I’ve already harped on it a few times, but Acer needs to ditch the RAID 0 and go with a single faster SSD, preferably PCIe, in the next refresh.
Performance is good, and styling is good. That is a great start for the S7, and I can see why this is a notebook I have heard others recommend over the years. For me, there has yet to be a perfect laptop, and the S7 is certainly not there either.
What needs some work is, for starters, the keyboard. Silver keys with a light colored font is already a challenge to read, but once you turn on the light green backlighting it is pretty much impossible to read the keys unless you are in a completely dark room. Maybe I am in a minority here, but I feel that backlighting should improve the visibility, and not hinder it. The Acer S7 is certainly not the only device to fall into this trap, but that doesn’t change the fact that it did. The keys themselves could also use some work, but it is difficult when notebooks are this thin. The lack of a fifth row of function keys also makes it awkward to do standard tasks which would normally be done with those keys.
The display is also sub-par for 2015. When the Aspire S7 first launched in 2013, even having an IPS offering instantly made the display a lot better than many being sold at that time. In the last two years though, we have seen a big swing in display performance and accuracy, and the S7 simply falls short of the bar for this year.
The software situation is also a bad one, and one that I wish all companies would abandon especially on the higher priced devices like this one. I understand margins are thin when you are selling a notebook for a couple of hundred dollars, but once you get into the mid-thousands I find that hard to accept. Acer gets paid to put links to eBay and Dropbox onto this machine. Do I really need a shortcut on my taskbar to Amazon? Likely not. I can usually find my way there myself.
Getting back to the positives, Acer has done a decent job on battery life. If you exclude the Dell XPS 13, it lands right near the top of devices sold this year, despite having a smaller than average battery inside. That is a net win, since it can keep its svelte form factor and still deliver in mobility, which is kind of the idea of an Ultrabook. It is not class leading here, but it handles itself well. Even more interesting is how much of a jump the Acer S7 has seen in the last two generations with the move from Ivy Bridge in 2013 to Haswell in 2014, and now Broadwell. We have to thank Acer for letting us review the same basic model over the last three years.
All in all, the Acer Aspire S7 is a stylish, thin, and light Ultrabook, which packs in good performance without having to ramp up the cooling fans. It has some issues that need to be addressed in future generations, but if an outright accurate display is not at the top of your list of requirements, it may not matter, just like the keyboard which is certainly serviceable and really only at a disadvantage because of the thin profile of this notebook. Yes, Broadwell is near the end of its reign, but it was a good reign.
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Sietse Vliegen - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
OK. I've been using one for about a year now. I have the i7 with the 2560x1440 display. Simply a brilliant piece of equipment.Unlike some of you, I have no preference for a particular brand. But I needed a sturdy reliable machine as I am on the road most of the time for business. Hence, the price was also not a decisive factor. In the past I have used laptops from Samsung, Toshiba, IBM, Lenovo, Apple. All of them had issues sooner or later. Therefore, I do not believe that any particular brand will guarantee a trouble free laptop future. I'm sure I'll have some issues with Acer too, eventually. But so far so good and boy, I do like this machine, a lot.
At the time I looked at the HP Spectre . Promising, but sold out pretty much everywhere. Didn't like the rubber surface on the Dell XPS, gets stained after a while. Didn't like the hinges on the Lenovo Yoga 3, looks like a weak point. Not enthusiastic about the Macbook Pro 13 inch either, especially the rough edges. And I need a Windows machine, for business purposes, not a Macbook running Parallels desktop or similar. Looked at the Acer, couldn't figure out why they chose a SSD raid config either. But I did like the look and feel of the machine, and most specs were on par with the other machines.
Ended up buying the Acer, and I must say I am impressed. Build quality is excellent, sturdy aluminium top, gorilla glass cover. Heck, you can even use it as a whiteboard. In business meetings, everyone wants to know what type of laptop it is, and checks how thin/light it is.
I use it almost every day and it is 100% silent most of the time, only at full load the fan spins up, but never gets really noisy. The 2560x1440 display is simply gorgeous. Everyone loves it. No problems with scaling of fonts or apps using Windows 8.1 or 10 (never tried Windows 8).
I have no problem with the flimsy powerplug. In fact, I think it's an advantage that it easily unplug from the laptop when someone trips over the power cord. But obviously, Apple's solution is even better.
The keyboard is fine. Spacing is ok and I can type really fast without any problems. I would prefer separate function keys, though. The silver color of the keys does not bother me one bit. The only minor niggle I have is that the keyboard backlight makes a slight whining noise at maximum brightness. Throttle down a bit and it's gone.
I don't understand the issue the reviewer has with *only* two USB ports. I use a Logitech Ultrathin T630 bluetooth mouse, which doesn't need a USB port anyway. Occasionally I use a USB stick. That leaves at least one spare USB port.
The reviewer states also that the displayport and the mini HDMI port could have been combined. Whereas that may be true, the simple fact remains that in business environments, most projectors/beamers either have an HDMI or VGA connector. DisplayPort is still pretty scarce although I do use it at home. HDMI works 100% of the time. VGA uses a dongle which is not always compatible with old plasma screens, so I found out: the laptop freezes until you unplug it from the screen.
Finally, the battery lasts about 6-7 hours, depending on what it is I'm doing (mostly office apps and webbrowsing). For business use that is excellent. In fact, I can usually use it for several days without charging. My previous $1500 Samsung notebook lasted only 3 hours or so.
All in all, I am extremely happy with this machine and I would definitely buy it again.
maccomb - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
Hi,I also bought the Acer S7-392. The looks are amazing but that is subjective.
What is not subjective is how good the 2560x1440 screen is; the battery time; how thin and light it is. It's now August 2016 and I bought this pc (where I'm typing) long time ago... don't really know 2 years or 3 ago? The gorilla glass cover is great, no scratches, no stains, nothing. It still as nice as when bought. Same for the screen itself. The keyboard: I also feel the lack of the dedicated Function key row, but other than that, it's great and the best compared to other ultrthin I know (asus and lenovo). I also don't understand the complaints on the SSD raid 0. Either I'm ignorant or you are... this provides me with aprox 1GB/s transfer rate. Specially when moving movies around from SSD to 1gbps network or to a fast USB3.0 external disk. As far as a I know, only Sony Vaio had something similar (4xraid0 or someting). It's as ran windows 7.. which I loved, then upgraded to 8.1 which was so-so, and now finally Windows 10 which is a great OS (and I'm a strong linux supporter mind you, for servers).
I reached to this article just because what I really wanted is to know if there was a newer version to buy, with more memory or more disk. I'm an intensive business pro user with virtualization running Linux, and lots of Office and all day long email and stuff... So you see. It's a light, slim, hardcore machine. I actually think that Acer has a bad trackrecord and must have created this S7 at this price to try to change it's image. It's unfair people look this laptop down without even testing it. My previous machine was a ibm thinkpad and toshibas before that. Oh well I just hope they keep making money from this line so they keep developing it.
maccomb - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
Hi,I also bought the Acer S7-392. The looks are amazing but that is subjective.
What is not subjective is how good the 2560x1440 screen is; the battery time; how thin and light it is. It's now August 2016 and I bought this pc (where I'm typing) long time ago... don't really know 2 years or 3 ago? The gorilla glass cover is great, no scratches, no stains, nothing. It still as nice as when bought. Same for the screen itself. The keyboard: I also feel the lack of the dedicated Function key row, but other than that, it's great and the best compared to other ultrthin I know (asus and lenovo). I also don't understand the complaints on the SSD raid 0. Either I'm ignorant or you are... this provides me with aprox 1GB/s transfer rate. Specially when moving movies around from SSD to 1gbps network or to a fast USB3.0 external disk. As far as a I know, only Sony Vaio had something similar (4xraid0 or someting). It's as ran windows 7.. which I loved, then upgraded to 8.1 which was so-so, and now finally Windows 10 which is a great OS (and I'm a strong linux supporter mind you, for servers).
I reached to this article just because what I really wanted is to know if there was a newer version to buy, with more memory or more disk. I'm an intensive business pro user with virtualization running Linux, and lots of Office and all day long email and stuff... So you see. It's a light, slim, hardcore machine. I actually think that Acer has a bad trackrecord and must have created this S7 at this price to try to change it's image. It's unfair people look this laptop down without even testing it. My previous machine was a ibm thinkpad and toshibas before that. Oh well I just hope they keep making money from this line so they keep developing it.