Some lines of notebook are growing more eco-friendly as manufacturers strive to incorporate greener manufacturing practices and recycled materials into their builds and packaging. Acer's Aspire Vero line is a leading example, going above and beyond to make a greener laptop without sacrificing performance. The company has a track record, impressing with both the 2021 and 2022 Vero models. The latest Aspire Vero ($849) doesn't change much, sticking to the revisions we've come to expect from an annual refresh: new silicon, an updated webcam, and marginal modifications to boost the percentage of recycled material in the machine. But while this year's Vero is decent, its performance is only middling, and going green still carries a price premium that might make the Vero a tough sell considering what's inside.
The Big Green Machine
Last year, we reviewed the 14-inch Aspire Vero, but this time around we're taking a look at the 15.6-inch model, though other than screen size they're very much alike. The speckled design returns in three colors: Mariana Blue, Cobblestone Gray, and the new Cypress Green, each meant to invoke sustainable imagery, as if your laptop washed up from the depths of the ocean to the shore.
Like previous models, it's easy on the eyes, but the 2023 Vero is the greenest yet. The laptop's paint-free chassis is made of 40% post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastic—up 10% from last year—and the housing of the AC adapter has increased to 50% PCR.
Those worried about durability can rest easy: Though as eco-friendly as laptops get, the Aspire Vero is no paper straw. It's sturdy, even hefty, at 3.8 pounds—though that's lighter than similar-sized laptops like the Dell XPS 15 and the Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 Gen 8. Size-wise, it's a match for earlier 15.6-inch models at 0.7 by 14.6 by 9.3 inches, far from ultraportable but still compact enough to fit into most book bags.
Acer's Ocean Glass touchpad (with fingerprint reader) returns, and offers a smooth and responsive glide for those inclined to use their fingers for navigation. The island-style keyboard—its keycaps again about half recycled material—is a comfortable if generic backlit board with a 1.3mm travel distance and a numeric keypad squeezed in at right. The R and E keys are still reversed or mirror-imaged, which is supposed to make you think Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.
Peeking at the laptop's bottom, you'll find cooling vents and colorful rubber feet that add a bit of an accent. But the part you may care most about is the Aspire's use of standard screws, which allows you to easily upgrade, repair, and (hopefully!) recycle your machine.
The Sum of Its Greener Parts
As for the display, Acer again makes a conservative choice with a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) IPS panel with a 16:9 aspect ratio. The bezels aren't especially thin but don't get in the way, and remote workers will enjoy a bump in webcam resolution from 1080p to 1440p. Acer includes its ComfyView anti-glare matte finish that reduces light reflections, as well as Temporal Noise Reduction technology to produce high-quality images even in low-light conditions. Both were included in last year's model and are welcome again here.
One underrated feature packed away inside the chassis is the sound system. Thanks to the TrueHarmony feature found in the speakers, which uses high-quality magnets to produce high flux for more realistic sound reproduction, audio comes in loud and clear, albeit a little hollow thanks to the lack of bass. The absence of booming bass is typical for most laptops, and the chassis doesn't vibrate at max volume, which is an unwanted effect often noticed in low-cost Chromebooks and other budget laptops.
The annual refresh brings a move to Intel's 13th Generation Core processors, known by their "Raptor Lake" codename in geek circles. Our review unit's is a Core i7-1355U, a low-wattage chip designed for affordable mainstream systems and thin ultraportables. It's not really meant for gaming or digital content creation, but it brings more efficient battery life.
This Aspire Vero carries Intel Evo certification, guaranteeing at least nine hours of battery life, one second of wake-up time from sleep, a Wi-Fi 6 radio, access to Thunderbolt connectivity, and the ability to recharge to at least four hours of juice in half an hour. Ultimately, this means less time spent tethered to a wall outlet and more time browsing the web across a stable internet connection. The CPU's Iris Xe integrated graphics cement the Vero's place as a productivity rather than gaming laptop, though our system came with an appreciated 16GB of DDR5 memory and a 512GB solid-state drive. Up to 2TB of storage is available.
Most of the Acer's ports are on its left flank: two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, one USB 3.2 Type-A port, and an HDMI 2.1 monitor connector. The right side is more sparsely populated, with just a USB-A 3.2 port and an audio jack—plus a Kensington security lock slot.
Testing the Acer Aspire Vero (2023): Green Is Key, But So Is Power
No question, the Aspire Vero is an eco-conscious choice, but looks and carbon footprint aren't everything. For our performance comparisons, we pitted the Acer against some similarly priced competitors in our battery of benchmark tests.
In the comparison group, the Lenovo Yoga 7i Gen 8 and the Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED are slightly bigger and smaller than the Aspire, respectively, and share the same Intel processor. The Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 is a higher-end convertible built around a 13th Gen Intel P-series CPU, whose higher wattage (28W versus the U-series at 15W) should give it more performance. Finally, we reached across the processor aisle to include the HP Dragonfly Pro, which rocks an AMD Ryzen 7 7736U chip.
Our first and most important benchmark is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of Windows productivity tasks to give an overall score for everyday office workflows. A score above 4,000 points indicates excellent productivity for popular app suites like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. All five laptops here scored well, but the Aspire Vero finished at the back of the pack by a tiny margin, as it did in PCMark's Full System Drive storage subsystem test.
Moving onto CPU-focused benchmarks, we put a stopwatch on systems as they use the open-source transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution. Maxon's Cinebench is another test that exercises all of a processor's cores and threads while rendering a detailed image, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro is a stress test that simulates a variety of real-world applications.
The Vero posted middle-of-the-road results for this group. We were disappointed that the Acer refused to run our usual productivity finale, the benchmark PugetBench for Adobe Photoshop. All told, this year's Aspire Vero should still deliver suitable performance for its price, judging by its 5,000-plus PCMark 10 score.
Graphics Tests
The Aspire Vero doesn't pretend to be a gaming laptop, though we ran it and its competitors through two subtests in UL's DirectX 12-based gaming simulation 3DMark. (It balked at our other graphics test, the offscreen-rendered GFXBench 5.0.)
The Acer managed decent scores that are typical of Iris Xe Graphics. This indicates it should be okay for casual gaming (with older, less-demanding titles) at low resolutions and detail settings, and of course for video streaming. Fast-twitch titles and demanding AAA games are naturally beyond its remit; like all Xe-based laptops, it's a movie-watching machine more than a gaming one.
Display and Battery Tests
In our final series of tests, we turn our attention to a laptop's battery life and display quality. For the former, we make sure the system is fully charged, then disable Wi-Fi and any keyboard backlighting while looping a locally stored 720p video (the Blender Foundation mini-movie Tears of Steel) with screen brightness set to 50% and audio volume to 100%.
The Aspire Vero excelled here, with an unplugged runtime of over 15 hours. In fact, only the Asus ZenBook and Lenovo Yoga lasted longer. Naturally, we should expect an eco-minded laptop to last as long as possible on battery.
Finally, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite display calibrator and software to measure the screen's coverage of three popular color spaces or palettes—sRGB (internet), Adobe RGB (photos and design), and DCI-P3 (video and cinema)—along with its brightness in nits. The Vero's color coverage was fine, considerably better than the Yoga 7i's, but not as comprehensive as the others on the list—another middling finish from the jolly green laptop.
Verdict: Certifiably Greener, But Lacking in Key Areas
The Acer Aspire Vero is a competent system, but its merely adequate performance would be much easier to swallow if it qualified for budget laptop status instead of being on the cusp of too expensive at $849 MSRP. The 2023 model's move to Intel 13th Generation silicon brings a modest bump in performance but doesn't justify trading up from last year's edition. This is a perfectly competent laptop, but Acer barely hitting the desktop-replacement basics while fractionally reducing your carbon footprint doesn't do enough to replace the Dell XPS 15 or Apple MacBook Air 15-Inch as our Editors' Choice picks for desktop replacement laptops.
