Acer Chromebook Vero 514

A solid ethical choice, this is a well-built Chromebook that will keep speeding along until 2030

- TIM DANTON

PRICE £499 (£599 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk

Acer is the king of Chromebooks, with its Enterprise Spin 714 walking away with the Labs Winner award in our most recent Chromebooks Labs (see issue 337, p74). And as it happens we're also fans of its Vero range of laptops, which claim to cut emissions of CO2 by 21% compared to its normal laptops through the use of recycled plastic rather than "virgin" plastic.

This is the first Vero Chromebook, and it makes a lot of sense for Acer to extend the Vero idea to this OS. After all, when it comes to electronic waste our focus should be as much about the overall productive life as it is the initial effort to make it. This Chromebook will receive automatic Chrome OS updates until June 2030, and even after this point it will still be usable (but less secure).

What's more, I would expect it to stay snappy throughout its life. That's because Acer includes a 12th generation Core i5-1235U processor in this laptop, and it's insanely quick as a result. Around 20% faster than the Spin 714, which had an 11th gen 15-1135G7 chip inside - this proves that the power of the big.little architecture Intel implemented in its 12th gen Core processors works just as well in Chrome OS as it does Windows.

Rather than weigh this review down with benchmark numbers I have extended the benchmarks graphs below, but what I really want to emphasise is the speed of this laptop in real-world use: Chrome snaps to attention, apps spring into life, and it's simply a pleasure to pick up and use.