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A few days before we headed to New York for Acer’s Global Press Event, I was trudging around Sam’s Club and happened across a 15.6″ Windows convertible. As I wielded the behemoth, I struggled to imagine how anyone would want to use a device this size in tablet form. But, to each his own and clearly OEMs are selling these slabs to someone.
With the limited amount of 15.6″ devices in the Chromebook realm, I was relatively surprised when Acer unveiled a convertible variant of their very popular Chromebook 15. Still, for an unusual form-factor in such a large laptop, Acer executed the 4-in-1 very well.
The Acer Chromebook Spin 15 has officially appeared in Acer’s online store and you can pick it up for $449 but before you do, let’s clear up some details about the new device. Here’s the listing from the Acer Store if you’d like to check it out and follow along.
For the most part, the listing is exactly what we covered at the unveiling in New York. There is, however, one glaring misprint and one questionable feature listed for the Acer Chromebook Spin 15.
The Acer Store listing shows Windows 10 Home as the operating system for the Chromebook Spin 15. Yes, that is a mistake. No, this isn’t one of the fabled “AltOS” Chromebooks we’ve been hearing rumors about. The Spin 15 runs good ‘ole Chrome OS just like its predecessors.
The other hinky bit of information is a random Thunderbolt™ 3 USB-C port listed among the four ports on the Chromebook. We have seen a small handful of references to Thunderbolt in the Chromium Repositories and I have no doubt that we will eventually see support for the hardware interface. I don’t believe this listing is correct though. We saw no evidence of the Chromebook Spin 15 supporting Thunderbolt during our hands-on time. I have reached out to our contacts at Acer for clarification but for now, if you are looking to grab this Chromebook, don’t count on it supporting Thunderbolt.
Apart from that, everything is as expected here:
- Chrome OS
- Intel Pentium N4200
- 4GB RAM
- 64GB storage
- 2 x USB 3.0
- 2 x USB-C
- MicroSD
- 1920 x 1080 FullHD touch display
- upward-firing speakers
- 4-in-1 convertible form-factor
- Android apps out of the box
If this is the one you’ve been waiting for, now’s your chance. Check out all the detail directly from Acer at the link below.
Update: I have verified with Acer that the Acer Chromebook Spin 15 does not support Thunderbolt. This and the Windows operating system were errors that were corrected the day of the listing.
