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Well, I put my money where my mouth is and picked up the 2022 Acer Chromebook Spin 714 earlier this week. Acer’s first 12th gen Intel Chromebook is typically priced at $729 but a current Best Buy sale drops that by $100. So I figured I’d take the plunge, knowing I could return the laptop within 14 days. How is it so far? Read on for my first impressions of the 2022 Acer Chromebook Spin 714.

Since I just reviewed another 12th gen Intel Chromebook, the HP Elite Dragonfly, I have some comparison thoughts sprinkled throughout my first impressions. While these two devices aren’t close in price, they are close in terms of what you get. You can see the specs of all the 12th gen Intel Chromebooks here, for reference.

For starters, the HP hardware is certainly nicer. So too is the overall build quality and materials used. That’s not to say the Acer Chromebook Spin 714 isn’t designed well or is poorly built. It’s just not as premium. Put another way, the overall look and feel of this ChromeOS laptop are what you’d expect at this price. The same holds true for the HP Elite Dragonfly, which costs $400 more at full retail price.

In fact, there’s little new here in terms of design and materials. Acer made slight modifications from its Spin 713 such as moving the speakers between the keyboard and display. The aspect ratio of the display is different from the 3:2 on the 713 as well; the Spin 714 uses a 16:10 panel. Other than that and a few changes to the device edges, there’s not much to say.

This doesn’t really bother me, to be honest. I consider Acer’s high-end Chromebooks to be more utilitarian than fashion-forward. And compared to my 2018 Acer Chromebook Spin 13 that the Spin 714 is replacing, it’s a step up. This laptop is thinner and nicer looking than my old workhorse. (Sorry, Spin 13, but it’s true.)

Since I mentioned the display, I’ll share thoughts on that next. While my preferred screen aspect ratio is 3:2, I am liking the 16:10 display here. It’s working well for multiple windows when I browse, use Twitter, code, etc… And it’s better for content consumption than a 3:2 screen as wider content fits better.

Color reproduction is quite good as are the viewing angles. Right now the only nitpick I have is the 340 nit brightness of the screen. It actually doesn’t even seem that bright to me. I’m not sure why and I’ll have to do some side-by-side comparison testing with dimmer and brighter screens. But even indoors, I need the screen brightness level at around 70% for comfortable use.

Obviously, you’re not getting the haptic trackpad of the HP on the Acer. It’s a standard multitouch trackpad that’s a bit small but certainly fine. I haven’t had any issues with random mouse taps or mouse movement. It works. I’ll admit I do like the haptic trackpad on the HP, having used those for years on Macs. Can I live without it? Of course.

I’d consider the keyboard on the Acer Chromebook Spin 714 to be above average so far. There’s a fair amount of light-bleed under the keys, but I can say the same about the HP. The typing experience has been solid as the keys are well spaced and sized, and have a good amount of travel. It’s not too loud of a keyboard either.

Although I don’t use a digital stylus that often, it’s nice to see Acer include it with the Spin 714 at this price. It’s a dockable USI pen so there’s a place to keep it at all times. It charges while inside the chassis. I haven’t yet tested it on the display but I will in my full review.

I had high hopes for the Spin 714’s speakers since they’re not downward firing. But this is probably the biggest letdown so far. They’re just not loud nor rich sounding. Now that may be due to a software fix and if so, it means this could improve. I heard from several early owners of this device and they said the speakers cracked and popped. Mine do not, which suggests a software change to address that problem. It may have fixed that issue but it appears that speaker output went too far the other way.

The star of the show here is the 12th gen Intel chipset inside this Chromebook. Unlike the Core i3 used in the HP Elite Dragonfly, Acer popped a Core i5 inside. Paired with 8 GB of memory, this ChromeOS laptop is every bit as fast as the HP, as you’d expect. What I didn’t expect is that the Core i5 doesn’t “test” much faster than the Core i3.

I’ve only performed a few Octane benchmark tests on the Spin 714 at this point. The first one cracked 80,000 points, which is the highest I’ve ever seen on a Chromebook. Subsequent tests were slightly lower but within a few hundred points. As good as that sounds, the Core i3 in the HP returns Octane numbers in the 76 to 77-thousand range. So synthetic benchmarks, so far, are very comparable. And I can’t tell any difference in speed when using the HP and Acer side-by-side on the same tasks.

For those that eventually look for a 12th gen Intel Chromebook of their own, a Core i3 might be all that’s needed. And this is definitely overkill for someone who just needs to browse the web a few hours a day, run an Android app or two, and doesn’t use Linux on Chromebooks. You can easily be happy by spending $200 less for an everyday Chromebook.

That’s about it for now as I’ve only had a few days with the device.

If there are specific questions you have, drop them in the comments and I’ll either answer them here or in the full review.

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Do you know if they will release a i5 16gb Ram version of this or the HP elitebook?

That’s the perfect sweet spot for me.

Great questions, Mike. I only know what the device makers “plan” to do based on their news releases. Unfortunately, those plans don’t always come to pass. I’ve lost track of how many times the “up to Core i7 ” model or “up to 16 GB of RAM” model was announced and I was waiting for simply never arrived. I will keep an ear to the ground though and post if/when new configs debut.

thanks for the update. As luck would have it I dropped my hp x360 yesterday and the screen cracked so finding a replacement just became that much more urgent 🙂

Hmm… was that an “accident” or a reason to upgrade? 🤣

~ I love that Acer split up the power and volume buttons. Power is on the left and volume is on the right. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve hit the wrong one on other Chromebooks because they’re next to each other. ~ The 1080p webcam is a nice upgrade from older models.

By now, these should be Chromebook standards.

TL;DR: Do you feel held back by the 8GB of RAM?

First, I wanted to express my appreciation for how quickly you covered this device. My previous top candidate was the CX5400, and other than a couple of Reddit AMAs, it was several months between when orders started shipping and anyone who got one actually talked about it. So especial thanks for spending your own hard earned cash to get one of these and let us know how it is.

Second, I’m in much the same spot as you: I’m a computer science student, and that makes me nervous about only 8GB of RAM. I start my university’s android app development course in two weeks, and given how quickly VS Code evaporates my available RAM I’m scared to see what Android studio does to it. You previously mentioned that the faster CPU might be enough of a benefit to justify a downsize in memory, did that hold up?

I don’t feel held back but I’m also not a full-time developer building massive apps. I’m using VS Code for JavaScript classes, where the exercises are small programs and the solutions are typically 100 lines of code or less. So far, the experience is super speedy for that scenario. This device meets the minimum requirements for Android Studio on a Chromebook so I’m sure it can handle that IDE. Would it be more efficient with 16 GB of RAM? Sure. But I don’t think it will be a painstaking slow dev system. I think it’s really going to depend on the complexity of Android apps you work on. Something with basic graphics and a UI, maybe up to 6 activities or pages should be fine.

I do think the speed of the processor can help compensate but obviously, more RAM is always better so the device doesn’t have to swap data in and out. Oh and thanks for the kind words!

Thanks for the fast response!

It seems when I visit the Acer website and store, they never have any variants of current production systems I might like to buy. Only lesser and older systems. Also, I want 16GB, i-5 12th gen, and 256GB SSD – yet to see this anywhere.

I went with this (i.e. Acer Spin 714) over the HP Elite Dragonfly Chromebook because the more affordable Elite Dragonfly CB didn’t have the Intel Iris Xe graphics. Overall I would have loved to have the Haptic Trackpad of the Elite because I love it on my Surface Laptop Studio. But I wanted to install Steam which I did successfully on the Spin 714 due to the i5 cpu and Iris Xe graphics which aren’t options on the cheaper Elite Dragonfly.

Nice. Did you install Steam in the Linux container or were you able to get Borealis (the custom Steam container Google is working on) installed? I’ll have to check my box to see if a wireless mouse is hiding in there. Thanks!

I installed in the Linux container. I followed this You Tube video (link below) which was helpful because I was missing some 32 bit libraries. So the video had 4 short commands I had to run to complete the installation. If you follow this video you can’t go wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-ok2zxm22I

Also my Acer Spin 714 from Best Buy came with a wireless Acer mouse enclosed in the box.

Mr Tofel you completely sold me on Chromebooks, i plan to get this one asap. However, Chromebooks run faster and they are touch which most latest Apple Macs cant do. Let alone that i can run games and android apps as well as the browser at a faster pace. I do read this site on a daily basis, Chromebooks are a thing. I do IT support for my tech start up, however, more and more people want to know about Chromebooks as they want something that is simple to use and super fast.

I too have been wrestling between the Acer Spin 714 and the HP Elite Dragonfly over the course of this year—and the needle constantly seems to go back and forth between the two for me, whether it’s price, whether I can even get a 16GB of RAM model, and now, quality. When I was recently browsing around for the Spin 714, I came across its BestBuy listing, and wow, there are some really disappointed buyers there: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/acer-chromebook-spin-714-laptop-14-0-2-in-1-touchscreen-intel-evo-core-i5-8gb-256gb-ssd-slate-blue-slate-blue/6507836.p?skuId=6507836

It would be great for you to weigh in on whether you’re also seeing the speaker and trackpad issues that others are voicing in the BestBuy reviews!

i saw the same and exited the cart waiting for Kevin’s review. amzn has the 713 i5, 8ram, 256ssd $519 …seems a better alternative if the best buy reviews are legit

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