So this will be a comparison of two different worlds of Chromebooks – one has some of the best hardware that can be offered on a Chromebook which means it won’t come cheap, while the other has the best hardware that comes on a budget. We’re talking about the upcoming Samsung Chromebook Pro against the just launched Acer Chromebook 15. They each have their pros. So let’s find out how they fare.
Display
More often than not, the display is always the make or break feature for when a laptop is bought. And here, it’s quite a challenge. We could either opt for the bigger 15” Acer with lower resolution at 1366×768, or the smaller, touch-sensitive 12.3” rotatable screen with a resolution of 2400×1600.
Now that’s a world of difference for two differently-marketed notebooks. But it’ll make a lot more sense towards the end of this article, so bear with us. Of course, who wouldn’t want a hi-res, touchscreen, swivel display, right? But what if we also could use a little more screen real estate? It’s not very often that a laptop with a 15-inch screen comes this cheap, right? Well that depends how fast things are shown on it.
Hardware
The Acer Chromebook 15, apart from the 15-inch screen being the only redeeming quality about it, offers a modest, but pretty tight set up internally – 2GB RAM, 16GB storage, backlit keyboard (quite a plus for a budget laptop), two USB 3.0 ports, Bluetooth 4.2 and it also comes with 100GB of Google storage. The battery is very generous, being able maintain a 12-hour standby time. The brains of the unit is an Intel Celeron N3060 dual-core processor. It’s quite the performer too, with a clock-speed ranging from 1.6GHz to 2.48GHz when the load gets heavy. It’s also quite current and efficient so there won’t be any troubles we’ll face when we get down to business. And that pretty much sums up the most notable features of the Acer Chromebook 15! And it seems like a solid piece of hardware.
As for Samsung’s, the processor could be an Exynos-powered chipset or something else. It’ll pack 4GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. It’s about half-an-inch thick, if that’s something that’s important, and has a battery life that will span up to 10 hours. For a premium Chromebook, not too bad. But here’s the cherry on the cake – to complement the touchscreen and the hybrid model of the device, it’s got a stylus dubbed the ‘PEN’ neatly tucked into the side of the laptop. It’ll also come with an app called the ArtCanvas pre-installed. For an OS that’s developing and evolving by the minute, this feature will definitely be a stand-out.
Pricing
This is probably the most important facet – the deal-breaker or deal-maker. The Acer, with its modest but capable specs boasts a price-tag that’s practically a steal. For a 15-inch monitor, that’s more than people can ask for at the price at $199. So this probably could be the most value-for-money Chromebook for someone who wants to give it a shot. And it’s pretty much worth it.
The Samsung Chromebook Pro, with all its specs, comes at a whopping $499 price tag. For the extra $300, we get the stylus, a hexa-core CPU, a better resolution, touch-screen display, and a litte extra RAM and storage. We could say that the price increase justifies the cost of all these extra features, not to forget that this Chromebook is perhaps the lightest out there, but some might disagree. For that much dough, a decent mid-range Windows 10 laptop could find itself a pretty good offering with way more storage and memory on-board compared to the Chromebook Pro.
So there it is, if we’re looking for people very serious about their Chrome OS game, they better resort to the Chromebook Pro by Samsung. For those interested in perhaps, just using the Chromebook for light-weight usage and functionality, the Acer Chromebook 15 seems like very reasonable entry-point with really good features.