Acer Aspire Vero 16 review: Could be better, but doesn’t need to be

Acer’s eco-conscious project with the Aspire Vero family continues into 2024 with the Aspire Vero 16 (AV16-51P-5641). This new model carries on the recycled-plastic design and funky detailing — colorful feet and mirrored R and E keys. At $749 for a model with a decent set of specs offers a compelling budget package. It’s not the most exciting system, but as a piece of utilitarian hardware, it gets the job done. Too bad there are others doing it better.

Looking for more options? Check out PCWorld’s roundup of the best laptops available right now.

Acer Aspire Vero 16 (2024): Specs and features

The Acer Aspire Vero 16 starts out with mid-range specs, avoiding the minimal memory and storage pitfall of cheap laptops. For $749, you get a 12-core Intel Core Ultra 5 125U (2 performance cores, 8 efficient cores, 2 low power efficient cores), 16GB of soldered memory, 512GB of storage, and a 1920×1200 display. Configuration options are limited with a storage bump to 1TB, touchscreen functionality, and a processor upgrade to Core Ultra 7 155U bumping the total to $900. Acer has mentioned a configuration with a 2560x1600p display, but at the time of testing, we couldn’t see one available. 

• CPU: Intel Core Ultra 5 125U
• Memory: 16GB LPDDR5X
• Graphics/GPU: Intel Graphics
• Display: 16-inch 1920×1200 IPS
• Storage: 512GB PCIe Gen4 SSD
• Webcam: 1440p
• Connectivity: 2x Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C with Power Delivery and DisplayPort Alternate Mode, 2x USB-A 3.2 Gen 1, 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x 3.5mm combo audio, 1x Kensington lock slot
• Networking: WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3
• Biometrics: Windows Hello fingerprint
• Battery capacity: 53 watt-hours
• Dimensions: 14.16 x 10.1 x 0.78 inches
• Weight: 4.0 pounds
• MSRP: $749 as-tested ($749 base)

Acer Aspire Vero 16 (2024): Design and build quality

Somehow, the Acer Aspire Vero 16 avoids feeling like Acer’s many cheap Aspire models. Despite having much the same shape as Acer’s other laptops, the Aspire Vero 16 pulls something off with its visible and tangible use of recycled materials. The mix of different colors plastics makes for a unique chassis that has loads more character than the bland, shiny plastic on other models. This design may differ from the other Aspire models, but it’s largely consistent with earlier Vero models, which Acer has been doing for several years now. 

Something about the texture also just feels more comfortable, as well. It feels more like I’m resting my hands on a park bench than on a slab of plastic slowly heating up from the system humming away inside. The chassis flexes a bit under pressure, but not to a worrying degree. And Acer has the system built to a few Mil-Spec specifications, including drop and cold resistances. 

Since the display has a 16:10 aspect ratio, the Acer Aspire Vero 16 also steers clear of dated-looking bezels. It’s still flanked by strips of plastic, but they’re not terribly chunky.

The laptop is fairly sizable, though not overly so for a 16-inch laptop, and it still just narrowly manages to squeeze into a laptop sleeve meant for 15-inch laptops. It’s also not overweight for a 16-inch laptop, weighing in at just a hair over four pounds. 

The base of the laptop sits on a set of four rubber feet colored in a pastel blue that continues to make this a more fun-to-look-at system than most Aspire models. The hinge design has a flaw, though. If you open it while the laptop is on your laptop, it has a propensity to pinch hard. That’s an ouch. The front edge of the laptop would also have been better with a little more rounding. Venting on the bottom lets you see right through to the heatpipes and fans, but this proximity to the surface can make the base feel more than a little hot, especially if the laptop is charging. 

All told, the Acer Aspire Vero 16 is an attractive laptop for what it’s offering. It could improve in a couple small ways, and it would be nice if the Acer Jumpstarts app didn’t plug ads into the notification panel, but its faults are minor for a $750 laptop. 

Acer Aspire Vero 16 (2024): Keyboard, trackpad

On the one hand, the Acer Aspire Vero 16’s keyboard is a step up from others in the Aspire line, but on the other, it’s still held back by one of the same issues. The tactility is on point, with poppy keycaps that snap back quickly and have decent resistance and stability for quick typing. But they have the same convex keycaps that make typing on Acer systems such a pain for me, as my fingers always struggle to naturally find and maintain center on the keys.

As a result, I have to settle into a slower typing speed to avoid accuracy issues. Trying to type at a fast pace, I end up with tons of errors. Relaxing into a rhythm of around 100 words per minute, I find it easier to maintain accuracy, and this bore out in Monkeytype, where I hit 108 words per minute with 99 percent accuracy after a series of much worse results that came from trying to go faster.

The keyboard includes white backlighting that’s generally helpful in dark conditions and offers two different brightness levels. Oddly, especially for a laptop presenting itself as environmentally conscious, the laptop defaults to turning the keyboard backlights on every time it wakes up even if they were manually turned off. 

Acer isn’t setting a high bar with its trackpad on the Aspire Vero 16, but it gets the job done. It’s reasonably large, though definitely could have been larger. It’s pleasingly smooth, and it has a satisfying click to it. Acer has squeezed a fingerprint scanner into the trackpad, taking up just a small slider of space in one corner. Impressively, it doesn’t really impair the functionality of the trackpad in the least. A swipe over it will track just the same as a swipe anywhere else on the trackpad, though it has a distinct feel that makes it less pleasant to swipe over.

While the hardware isn’t much of an issue, sometimes the system introduces some latency to the trackpad that can impede fluid navigation. It also has a knack for rejecting hardware clicks if two fingers are on it. As someone who often guides the cursor around with a middle finger and clicks with an index finger, this can be more than a little frustrating, but it may be a niche case for others.

Acer Aspire Vero 16 (2024): Display, audio

The display on the Acer Aspire Vero 16 is a surprising strong point. It’s very easy for laptop makers to skimp on the display, especially when it’s fitted into a more affordable machine like this. But Acer has stepped up. At 1920×1200 it’s not incredibly sharp for a 16-inch display, but it’s plenty for most uses. With a peak brightness of 374.2 nits from its anti-glare IPS panel, it proves easily visible in most conditions. Its somewhat thick bezels are even that much easier to ignore when considering the 1250:1 contrast ratio the screen achieves — a step up from the typical 1000:1 of IPS panels. Where Acer goes above and beyond is in the color.

The display reaches 86 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, which isn’t rivaling recent OLED displays, but is very respectable for just about any sub-$1,000 laptop. The color is accurate as well, measured at an average dE of 1.62 with no color exceeding a dE of 2.73. So whether you’re working on spreadsheets or web design, the display is up to the task. 

The Acer Aspire Vero 16 doesn’t rock when it comes to the little down-firing speakers it has built in. They’re not very loud at all. But they do have a nice balance. Even when they’re cranked up, they don’t distort significantly, and they have a respectable amount of low-end, enough to give music and movies a little punch to the sound. Just about any pair of headphones or half-decent Bluetooth speaker will be better, but they’re certainly viable for solo listening in a quiet space.

Acer Aspire Vero 16 (2024): Webcam, microphone, biometrics

Acer opted for a slim fingerprint scanner that lives on the trackpad, and that wasn’t for the best. In addition to it impacting the feel of the trackpad, it’s just not the best scanner. I find it struggles to register my print more often than others I’ve tested (though most bumble the task to some degree). And one time the laptop seemed to get confused and not even register my fingerprint, just registering my finger as touching the trackpad.

The webcam is a sharp one, offering a 1440p resolution that provides clear detail in photos and video. That said, resolution is only one half of the battle. While the camera does manage to pull in a decent amount of light, it doesn’t always manage light intelligently, often vacillating between underexposure and overexposure, both of which look fairly bad. The field of view is also quite wide, which may be useful if you want to get multiple people in, but may require sitting extra close if you want to fill the screen in your video calls and recordings. For privacy, the camera has hardware shutter 

The microphone system built around the camera is another story. It doesn’t capture my voice at a very high volume when sitting at arm’s length, but my voice is clear. Better still, the system eliminates background noise incredibly well. A box fan blowing on me from less than two feet away wasn’t picked up by the mic in the slightest, and background café noise coming through computer speakers was also eliminated. You’ll just want to be sure you sit close and speak up so you get a good volume out of the mic array.

Acer Aspire Vero 16 (2024): Connectivity

The Acer Aspire Vero 16 has a respectable array of ports for a budget-friendly laptop. It certainly could have done more with its size, like including an SD (or even microSD) card reader, but its inclusion of two USB-A 5Gbps ports, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and a full-size HDMI port leaves little else to be desired for on-the-go connectivity and at-home docking options. A 3.5mm headset combo jack and Kensington lock slot round out the ports. 

Wireless connectivity is also decent. The laptop features Wi-Fi 6E, so it’s ready for high-bandwidth applications and stable connectivity. Though I noted that it can take a few seconds to get connected to networks after the laptop wakes from sleep. The Bluetooth 5.3 connection proved stable during my testing as well. 

Acer Aspire Vero 16 (2024): Performance

The Acer Aspire Vero 16 is kitted out for everyday performance. The Intel Core Ultra 5 125U isn’t a top-tier chip, nor is the onboard graphics anything to get too excited about. But for the typical computing demands of a student or office worker and for casual web browsing, it’s up to the task. That said, so are plenty of other systems.

The Acer Aspire Vero 16 shows respectable performance in PCMark 10, which runs it through a variety of different workloads. And while it keeps up pretty well in most tested tasks, like video conferencing and web browsing, it falls behind dramatically when it comes to digital content creation. This comes down to its weaker peak performance and lack in graphical might. This is the first hint at why Intel isn’t giving the graphics on deck here the “Arc” branding.

Single core performance of the Acer Aspire Vero 16 actually wasn’t terribly far behind the others here, only 10-15 percent behind its Core Ultra 7 155H brethren, but the sustained multi-core performance is where it was held back. It just can’t keep up with the more powerful chips here. And with Acer lagging behind in the bursty load of Cinebench R20, it’s little surprise to see it fall even further behind in the sustained load of Handbrake. 

While Handbrake, in part, helps us see multi-core performance, it also helps us see a laptop’s ability to sustain performance. Cinebench R20 is a fast test, seeing the cores spin up, rip through a task, and then wind down. By contrast, Handbrake spins them up and slams them hard for the duration of the test. That sees heat build, and enough heat will force the processor to dial back its speeds, resulting in a longer time to complete the encoding.

When I tested the Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 Gen 9, I saw that it was fairly successful at managing its thermals, and that explains how it manages to come out so far ahead of the Acer Aspire Vero 16 in the sustained load of our Handbrake test despite being nearly equals in Cinebench R20. This is more than a little disappointing for the Acer Aspire Vero 16, especially as it has two fans onboard to try keeping it cool.

3DMark’s graphics benchmarks highlight the weakness of the generic Intel Graphics onboard here. Just like we saw on the Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 running the same chip, the performance is just not exceptional. Not only is the score lower overall, but we see the GPU-specific results sitting at about half of what’s on deck for the Intel Arc graphics. Different breeds of Intel’s graphics aren’t created equal. This graphical shortcoming manifests itself from time to time in everyday operation, too. Every now and then, it seems to have just had too much, and the whole screen will go black while it reboots itself.

Acer Aspire Vero 16 (2024): Battery life

Battery life is a strong point for the Acer Aspire Vero 16. It proved capable of running for over 12 hours in our video playback test, which is respectable for any laptop and quite impressive from one with just a 53Wh battery. With an anti-glare coating on the display, the Acer Aspire Vero 16 is also perfectly usable at the 250-nit brightness we use for our test, so it can reflect real-world battery life for video playback well.

Sadly, the Acer Aspire Vero 16’s merits are overshadowed by its competition, which simply knocked it out of the park when it came to their battery life. All four of these other laptops beat the Acer Aspire Vero 16 by an hour or more, with the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED and Dell Inspiron 14 Plus almost delivering an extra 5 hours, though they did have smaller screens and bigger batteries. That’s little excuse for the Acer Aspire Vero 16, though, which certainly should have had the space to fit more battery if its smaller rivals could. 

Acer Aspire Vero 16 (2024): Conclusion

The Acer Aspire Vero 16 is a cute, eco-conscious laptop (if you ignore its soldered on memory). It offers a decent all-around package that leaves very little to complain about. It’s performance is up to snuff in everyday use, with only a few snags here and there when it’s overloaded with browser tabs. While nothing about it is remarkable, its average marks in just about every category are worthy of some praise for a machine coming in at $750.

There’s more performance and more exceptional designs available from quite a few other laptops coming in below $1,000, but the Acer Aspire Vero 16 is still the cheapest by a wide enough margin that anyone who can’t stretch their budget or stomach the smaller screens can rest assured the Acer Aspire Vero 16 isn’t a bad alternative. And it might just be a better option for the environment.