Acer had a bunch of non-PC items that caught SemiAccurate’s interest at Computex. The most interesting bit however was a PC comparison about one specific metric.
Acer Connect M4 5G Hotspot
Lets start out with the most useful bit, 5G hotspots. These are nothing new but coming from a major player with a history of good value products is what caught our attention. There were two models, Connect M4 5G pictured above and the Connect D5 Pro. The M4 is likely the more useful of the pair because it supports up to 16 connected devices and runs Android 12. On the other hand the D5 is a dongle and probably much cheaper so pick your poison. There is also a Connect X6E Plus mini-tower form factor meant for home Wi-Fi type fixed access point uses if you care about that stuff but that is far less interesting than the mobile variants.
Acer’s site is pretty painful if you are looking for specs, made worse by the fact that it appears to have gone down entirely as this is being written. A day later it is up for a click or two then fails again so this article will wing it a bit, sorry. That said the displays at an Acer event before Computex and at the show only listed “Mediatek” as the SoC for both the M4 and D5. Acer staff were unable to shed any light either but a little digging pointed us to the MT8863 for the D5 and all the literature shows the M4 with identical specs so… decide for yourself. In any case the M4 could be a very useful addition to any road warrior’s travel bag. Acer would not provide an MSRP for either model.
Acer Predator eBike
Next up is the Predator eRanger. As you probably know, Predator is Acer’s enthusiast/gaming brand with all the usual bells, whistles, and LEDs that this class expects, or is it tolerates? Either way an e-bike with a gaming brand is interesting. As an avid biker, I had to take a closer look at it, even if it looks to be an off-road type device. Yes I am a road bike snob and I regret nothing, no way I am doing the 2700+ miles a year I typically do on a fat tire bike, sorry.
A 750W, basically 1BHP, rear motor allows for a claimed 35km range with the 47v 10Ah battery, nothing special here. Top speed is listed as 25km/h under electric power or up to 45km/h with pedal assist. I want to meet the average e-biker who can add 20km/h to that top speed for any meaningful distance but the 7-speed rear hub technically allows it even if drag and friction from wide tiers indicate otherwise.
The bike itself looked quite solidly built but we didn’t ride it even if tearing around a crowded showroom was tempting. The basic tools were there but some extras we would like to see were lacking. Those are mainly USB charge ports, a phone mount, and connectivity. Normally we would write things off that lacked these options but talking to the Acer people who were part of the program, they indicated this was a first attempt and it will be improved.
Assuming that this is true, and we think it is, some minor tweaks and additions could make Acer an interesting choice for e-bikes. They have manufacturing, distribution, and from the look of the Predator eRanger, the engineering to get the basics right. A little more will go a long way here. As of Computex, no price was set but they suggested it would be in the range of $1500 when it is released. Nothing game changing here, just an interesting player with a solid looking first attempt and a roadmap for improvement.
That brings us to the most intriguing part of the Acer lineup, the Inspire mainstream laptop line. Acer and Qualcomm were heavily cross promoting each other at Computex so the Acer showcase had a lot of Qualcomm Snapdragon PCs on display. As usual I asked the Acer staffer why anyone would want an ARM based PC with the compatibility problems. He replied battery life, Qualcomm PCs had better battery life than x86 PCs. This is something ‘everyone knows’ and Qualcomm heavily promotes so it is true right?
This is one thing I would have loved to test but to date the Qualcomm PC supplied to SemiAccurate just got past boot looping last week but is nowhere close to functional at the moment so that option is right out. If only we could get a PC with the same chassis, same battery, but different CPUs to test those claims. Luckily for you dear reader, Acer did the work for us as you can see from the box on the left side of the Aspire 16 AI screen below.
Acer Aspire 16 AI Laptop with Qualcomm CPU
The Acer Aspire 16 AI is a Snapdragon based ‘PC’ with a 16″ 1080p display, 32GB of LPDDR5X, and a 1TB PCIe4 SSD. This stunningly mainstream device is model A16-11M or -11MT for the touch panel model. Change that 11 to a 61 and you have a Ryzen AI 7 350 model with the same specs, 11 to 51 gets you an Intel Lunar Lake Core Ultra 7 258V version. Same chassis, same everything. The battery capacity was not specifically listed, nor was it in the literature, on Acer’s web site, or anywhere else we could find. Booth staff did say that the batteries were almost assuredly the same between the devices but could not be any more specific. Given it is literally the same chassis between the three, and how expensive it is to make different batteries for something so trivial, we will go out on a limb and assume it is the same battery between the three variants.
The Qualcomm based -11M had a listed battery life of “up to 27 hr” as you can see above. The literature expanded that to 27 hours for a non-specified video playback test and 18 hours for a similarly nebulous web browsing test, all “up to” and for the 16 inch model. For the Lunar Lake model on display at the Acer showcase, the same screen had “up to 26 hr” or a bit less than 4% lower battery life. Clutch the pearls Annabelle, that changes the game! The literature listed 26 hours and 17.5 hours for the unlisted video and browsing tests respectively, again “up to”. Confirming what we all knew, the Ryzen variant had the same numbers listed as 18.5 and 16.5 hours, same caveats.
Acer Aspire 16 AI Laptop with AMD CPU
Both Intel and AMD models had MobileMark test results listed with Intel coming in at 18.5 hours and AMD at 16.5 hours. Qualcomm doesn’t have a MobileMark result listed which we assume is due to ARM compatibility problems or the result that once seen was deemed sub-optimal. Emulation has a price but we will never know which it was. One last interesting point is the AMD Aspire, and only the AMD Aspire, had the term “Multi-Day Battery Life” listed in the literature and on the screen above. The Intel chassis had the number listed like Qualcomm. Why? Can you say marketing messages paid for with MDF? I knew you could, slush money is insidious at times and in this case can prevent the number 17 from appearing on a spec screen.
So what is the take home message here? The much vaunted Qualcomm battery ‘advantage’ is about 4% versus Intel’s Lunar Lake when out in an apples to apples comparison. Which in this case it isn’t because the demo Intel chassis had a 1080p OLED screen and the Qualcomm sported a 1080p LED screen. All that said the tests weren’t run on these devices and OLED vs LED depends on a lot of things like colors used so we will once again assume the tests were run on similar screen configs. Factor this in as you wish but it sure looks like Lunar and Elite X are basically a wash for battery life with AMD being way way way behind.
So much for the marketing message, eh? It sure looks like Intel is right there on battery life where it counts but Qualcomm compatibility is another story entirely. SemiAccurate has had a Qualcomm based Laptop since a day after release and has yet to get it working. Several Lunar Lake based laptops have had minor quirks, mainly due to the staggeringly bad state of Lenovo’s BIOS, but they work. AMD has yet to supply us with a Ryzen laptop so we can’t compare but the Acer numbers match the anecdotal wisdom of the unwashed masses. Whatever you think of the messaging, this is about as close to a direct comparison as you are going to get, and from a fairly unbiased source too.
Moving on to more anecdotal observations, I came away from Computex with a much more positive view on Acer laptops than I expected. At recent shows my fairly negative view of their products which was formed a long time ago was eroded by contact with what appeared to be very solid products. The normal tests I do, hinge tests, screen bending, and other physical checks, all were much better than I expected. At Computex I went little deeper and the impression I formed over the past year or so was confirmed, these laptops look solid, at least the high end ones do. Acer is now back on my list of things to pay attention to.S|A
Charlie Demerjian
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