Acer Spin 5 (2022) Review

Here's something you don't see every day: The 13.3-inch Acer Spin 5 convertible we reviewed in March 2018 is not only still listed on Acer.com but its price has apparently gone up $50. The newest Spin 5 is more costly yet at $1,379.99 but considerably more sophisticated, with a 12th Generation Intel Core i7 instead of 8th Gen Core i5 chip and a 14-inch display with 16:10 aspect ratio. It's a capable 2-in-1 but awkwardly positioned—about $400 above nice affordable models like the Lenovo Yoga 7i 14 Gen 7 and $400 below elegant premium convertibles like the HP Spectre x360 13.5. If your budget beats economy but won't quite stretch to first class, it might be a smart solution.

A Slim Silver-Gray Slab 

Our $1,379.99 review unit, model SP514-51N-70LZ, is the only Spin 5 with one of Intel's latest processors, the Core i7-1260P (four Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 16 threads). It has 16GB of RAM and a 1TB NVMe solid-state drive, along with a 2,560-by-1,600-pixel IPS touch screen. (No OLED model is offered.) The Windows 11 Home system offers Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The aluminum chassis measures 0.67 by 12.3 by 8.6 inches and limbos under the ultraportable weight line at 2.87 pounds, making it slightly trimmer than the Lenovo Yoga 7i (0.68 by 12.5 by 8.7 inches, 3.2 pounds). There's almost no flex if you grasp the screen corners and just a little if you press the keyboard deck, though it's hard to open the lid one-handed. 

The display bezels are thin (Acer claims an 88% screen-to-body ratio), with a speaker grille above the keyboard and a row of vents along the rear edge. The webcam has neither a privacy shutter nor face recognition for Windows Hello logins, though there's a tiny fingerprint reader built into the power button at top right of the keyboard. The Spin 5 carries Intel Evo certification, and its screen is designed for low emissions of blue light.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Two USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports join HDMI and USB 3.2 Type-A ports and an audio jack on the laptop's left side. (The power adapter makes use of a USB-C connector.) The right flank holds a second USB-A port, a microSD card slot, and a niche to store the provided Acer Active Stylus. Also on this edge is a notch for security locking cables.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Not 4K or OLED, But a Spiffy Screen Nonetheless 

We're in favor of the trend toward laptop displays with slightly taller 16:10 rather than 16:9 widescreen aspect ratios; they let you see a bit more of a document or webpage without scrolling. (Screens with squarer 3:2 ratios, like the Spectre x360 13.5's, show even more, and some Acers have made good use of them in the past, but the Spin 5 apparently isn't premium enough.) The IPS panel is surprisingly bright and vivid, with broad viewing angles. One quibble is that the touch glass shows reflections at extreme angles.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Colors are rich and well saturated, and white backgrounds are pure without being dingy or grayish. Contrast is high, and fine details are sharp, with no pixelation visible around the edges of letters. Acer includes a 5-inch, one-button Wacom AES 2.0 stylus. It has tilt detection and 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity; it kept up with my rapid scribbles and swoops and exhibited good palm rejection when my hand brushed the screen. 

The webcam is above average, with 1080p instead of 720p resolution for sharper selfies. It captures well-lit and colorful images with minimal static. The sound isn't very loud even at max volume, but it's clean and crisp instead of tinny or hollow, though bass is absent and it's hard to distinguish overlapping tracks. DTS Audio software offers music, movie, and game presets and an equalizer.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The backlit keyboard offers two levels of brightness. The keys themselves have a snappy, responsive typing feel, but the layout commits a couple of common sins: The top-row keys (including Escape and Delete) are puny, and the cursor arrow keys aren't in the correct inverted T but a clumsy, HP-style row with half-size up and down arrows stacked between full-size left and right. The petite up and down keys are hard to hit, which is especially unfortunate on laptops like the Spin 5 where the cursor arrows double with the Fn key for Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down. The buttonless touchpad isn't the biggest, but it is comfortable to use. 

The installed Acer Care Center software is handy for centralizing updates, tuneup, and recovery. On the flip side, some borderline bloatware includes Aura Privacy, Dropbox, ExpressVPN, Photo Director, and Power Director trials, plus annoying ads for Forge of Empires, though the full year of Norton Security is nice.

Testing the Spin 5: A Five-Way Clash of Convertibles

In terms of price, the closest 14-inch convertible to the Spin 5 we've seen lately is the small-business-focused Lenovo ThinkBook 14s Yoga Gen 2. The Lenovo Yoga 7i 14 Gen 7 and the Dell Inspiron 14 7415 2-in-1 cost less than the Acer, while the ritzy HP Spectre x360 13.5 costs more. You can see their basic specs in the table below.

Productivity Tests 

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. 

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Acer's 28-watt P-series processor outran the 15-watt U-series chips in the Lenovos and HP, winning our CPU tests and easily hurdling the 4,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicate excellent productivity for everyday apps like Word and Excel. Its performance and display make it a fine Photoshop platform for editing work in moderation, too. 

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics), and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

Even as the leader of this pack, the Spin 5's Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics are miles behind the dedicated GPUs of gaming laptops, but the 2-in-1's perfectly suitable for streaming media and casual gaming. 

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The Acer's battery life was near the back of the pack, but it still gives you plenty of stamina for a full day of work or school, plus an evening of Netflix. Don't sweat it if you forget to slip the AC adapter into your briefcase. As for the display tests, the numbers bear out the conclusions our eyes drew: its screen can't quite match the sky-high contrast and color of the OLED Spectre, but it is about as good as an IPS display gets, with impressive color range and outstanding brightness.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

A Midpriced Convertible That's Really a Bargain 

The in-between price we mentioned up top keeps the new Acer Spin 5 from replacing the Lenovo Yoga 7i Gen 7 or HP Spectre x360 13.5 as our Editors' Choice pick among either affordable mainstream or premium consumer convertibles, respectively. But as Goldilocks can tell you, sometimes in between is a fine place to be. The Acer threads the needle to deliver a trim, winning 2-in-1.