At both the packaging and product levels, sustainability and environmental awareness are more prominent than ever in the tech world: ocean plastics, recyclable boxes, metals on their second life. Acer is the latest company to embrace eco-friendly design in its laptops with the Aspire Vero (starts at $699, $899 as tested), a 15-inch laptop partly made up of post-consumer recycled (PCR) materials. While the laptop incorporates a bit of trash, the result is anything but: solid performance, upgradable components, Windows 11 out the box, and an undeniably handsome design. It’s not a scorching bargain, but it proves itself as a reliable desktop replacement laptop.
A Greener Machine
What sets the Aspire Vero apart from other 15-inch laptops is its eco-friendly dressing. The laptop’s chassis is made up of 30% PCR materials, while the keycaps are made up of 50% PCR. The rest of the computer is a light speckled gray (called Volcano Gray), a favored color scheme of eco-friendly tech devices. The chassis is totally paint-free, another environmentally-friendly measure meant to lower the amount of potentially harmful volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, released into the air. All in all, the Aspire Vero looks nice, it’s environmentally sound, and feels pleasing and solid to the touch.
Acer’s environmentally friendly approach extends even to the packaging, 85% of which is made up of recycled paper. The laptop bag and protective sheet for the keyboard are made of 100% recycled plastic. All of this plays into the company’s environmental goals for 2021 and beyond.
Aside from its outer appearance, the Aspire Vero model we reviewed comes with decent components for its asking price: An Intel Core i7-1195G7 processor and Iris Xe Graphics, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. While the storage space is a little on the low end, the processor and RAM more than make up for it. It’s rare to find this proficient a loadout on a sub-$1,000 desktop replacement.
The entry-level configuration is nothing to scoff at either, as it makes use of a Core i5 processor. (See our guide to choosing the best laptop CPU.) You do cut your RAM amount and SSD capacity in half going for the $699 base model, though.
Whatever configuration you settle on, you’ll get Windows 11, Microsoft’s latest operating system. Thankfully, it’s not the S version of Windows that limits you to the Microsoft Store for downloads. It does come stuffed with some preinstalled apps, though, including Amazon, Dropbox, Disney+, the Microsoft Office Suite, and Norton Security Ultra. Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth round out the machine’s connectivity features.
The Aspire Vero feels solid enough that while I didn’t drop it onto the ground during my review, I got the impression that it could take the rigors of daily use in stride. It measures 0.7 by 14.3 by 9.4 inches (HWD), a fairly standard measurement for 15-inch laptops, and weighs 3.9 pounds. While 15-inch laptops aren’t always the lightest options, one under 4 pounds is worth noting. Of course, lighter and thinner profiles do exist—take the Editors’ Choice-award winning 15-inch Microsoft Surface Laptop 4, for example.
Turning the machine around, you may notice that the Aspire Vero uses standardized screws to hold its undercarriage in place. Acer has ensured that removal is easy, hopefully persuading you to upgrade, repair, and eventually recycle your machine without hassle.
The Aspire Vero’s backlit keyboard is fairly standard, with a function key row lining the top. The keycaps are comfortable enough, though the number pad and arrow keys do feel a bit cramped. To really drive home the eco message, Acer marks the R and E buttons in yellow and mirrors them to reinforce the Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle mantra. The trackpad is roomy and even includes a fingerprint scanner to let you log in without typing your password via Windows Hello. That is far from a given in a laptop of this price.
Green, But Not So Bright
Just like the keyboard, the Aspire Vero’s 15.6-inch IPS full HD (1,920 by 1,080 pixels) display is standard fare. It uses Acer ComfyView, an anti-glare matte display that reduces light reflection for a more comfortable viewing experience. In practice, it works, and we didn’t find an angle that ruined our viewing experience. There’s no touch capability to the screen, but that’s not much of a deal breaker on a desktop-replacement machine.
What might be more of a problem is the screen’s lackluster maximum brightness. In our testing, we found that the panel never got impressively bright, registering at just 242 nits when at the maximum setting. That means that despite the full HD resolution, images can appear dull and washed out.
Speakers, located under the laptop, are full and clear, even at maximum volume. Acer’s TrueHarmony technology employs high-quality magnets in its speakers to produce a high magnetic flux, which is then divided between speakers and results in more realistic sound reproduction. This means your audio will be louder and clearer at higher volumes.
The Acer Aspire Vero comes equipped with a surprising number of ports. On the right flank, you’ll find a Kensington lock notch, a USB 2.0 port, and a headphone jack.
The left flank is positively packed. You’ll find two USB 3.2 Type-A ports, HDMI and Ethernet ports, and a USB 3.2 Type-C port.
Benchmarking the Aspire Vero: Average Performance
The environmentally friendly Acer gets a lot of things right, but how does it hold up versus other laptops that have similar specs? To put the Aspire Vero to the test, we’ve run a variety of productivity, graphics, and display benchmark tests to see if you’re getting your money’s worth from this green machine.
Joining the Aspire Vero is the HP Pavilion Aero, the 15-inch Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 mentioned earlier, the pricey VAIO SX14 (2021), and the XPG Xenia 14. All of these laptops employ similar GPU and CPU setups, but most of them cost more in the configurations we tested, which you can see in the chart below.
The first benchmark we run is PCMark 10, a test that simulates a variety of Windows programs to give an overall performance score for office workflows. In this test, a score that sits between 4,000 and 5,000 points is indicative of good performance. The Aspire Vero pushes itself over the 5,000-point threshold, as do most of the other machines on the list.
PCMark 10’s Full System Drive storage subtest, on the other hand, seemed to give the Acer Aspire Vero the most trouble. This storage benchmark measures the program load time and the throughput of the laptop’s boot drive. The Acer Aspire Vero falls behind in a big way here, potentially because it uses the older PCI Express Gen 3 SSD interface. This could explain why, despite the identical storage capacity, the VAIO SX14 outperforms it thanks to its PCI Express Gen 4 SSD, which allows for higher transfer speeds.
The next test uses Handbrake 1.4, an open-source tool for converting multimedia files to different resolutions and formats. Converting video files is a CPU-heavy task, one that’s probably best relegated to better-equipped workstation laptops.
The Acer Aspire Vero is one of the slowest of the bunch, trailing the HP Pavilion Aero, the Microsoft Surface Laptop 4, and the VAIO SX14. That was also true during the Cinebench R23 benchmark, another multi-core test meant to exercise all of a processor’s cores and threads. The i7-1195G7’s four cores and eight threads produced average results.
The trend continued as we ran the next benchmark, Geekbench 5.4, another multi-core CPU stress test meant to simulate real-world activities. The AMD Ryzen-equipped Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 was the king of the ring in this test, flanked by the VAIO SX14 and the HP Pavilion Aero.
Our final productivity test is PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses version 22 of Adobe’s popular image editor to measure a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications using a 2018 version of the software. PugetBench executes a broad range of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, resizing, rotating, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
All in all, the Acer Aspire Vero doesn’t do too badly here, at least compared with its company, coming in just behind the VAIO SX14.
Graphics Tests
With the CPU tests behind us, we refocus our testing on the GPU. Every laptop in this comparison makes use of integrated graphics—either Intel’s newer Iris Xe silicon or AMD’s Radeon integrated GPU.
The first graphics benchmark we run is the 3DMark benchmark, a graphics test suite for Windows that contains several subtests for different GPU functions and software APIs. We queue up two DirectX 12 tests in particular: 3DMark Night Raid and 3DMark Time Spy. (Note: We were unable to run the 3DMark tests on the XPG Xenia 14, so those results are absent.)
None of the computers in this comparison is a gaming laptop, by any stretch, but under the right circumstances, you can get some mileage out of them. The Acer Aspire Vero chugs along well enough given its hardware. The next benchmark we run is the GFXBench 5.0, a graphics simulator that stress-tests both low-level and high-level routines. We run two subtests, Aztec Ruins and Car Chase, rendered off-screen to accommodate different display resolutions and make comparisons valid.
Using the GFXBench tests, we can quantify the results and see the average frames per second (FPS) of a theoretical game running at 1080p and 1440p. At higher resolutions, the Acer Aspire Vero struggles to keep above 20fps, but at 1080p, it fared a lot better. Does that mean the Acer Aspire Vero is a decent gaming laptop? It’s possible, as long as the game isn’t too graphically intensive. (See our deeper dive into the performance of laptop integrated graphics in recent games.)
Display and Battery Tests
The final stretch of our testing involves the laptop’s display and its battery life. To test the battery, we charge up the battery to 100% and then play a locally stored copy of the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel on a loop at 50% brightness and at 100% volume, along with a few other battery-testing tweaks to ensure consistent and fair settings across all tested devices.
In this test, the Aspire Vero performed the worst, tapping out at 8 hours and 24 minutes, 42 minutes before the next in line, the XPG Xenia 14. While it might be the greenest laptop, it’s not the most battery-efficient. You can manipulate battery-saving settings in the Verosense app, which could lead to some extra battery time. (The battery test was run on Balanced Mode.)
Last but not least, the final trial is the display brightness and color measurements. Using Datacolor’s SpyderX Elite calibrator and its software tools, we measure display performance, screen-brightness output levels, and gamut settings for the three most relevant color spaces for laptop users: the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 standards.
Unfortunately, the Acer Aspire Vero’s display just doesn’t deliver, and the results are disappointing across the board. Considering the machine is $900, I was hoping for at least 300 nits, which is what we’d expect from a laptop at this price.
Green Tech, Without Spending Much Green
Acer’s environmentally conscious laptop feels solid, sounds great, and offers decent if unremarkable performance. But is it worth your money? At the end of the day, the Aspire Vero is simply a good laptop wrapped in an eco-friendly bow. It performs well, has a decent port selection, and don’t forget that a Core i7 processor with 16GB of RAM for under $1,000 is a good deal.
The experience is tempered by its ho-hum display and lackluster battery life, though you might be willing to overlook those if you like the machine’s green credentials; those are what elevates this machine from a 3.5-star to a 4-star showing. If you’re able to stretch your budget, however, you can find a more impressive overall desktop-replacement laptop for a few hundred dollars more in our 15-inch Editors’ Choice winner, the Dell XPS 15.
