Pricing for the Snapdragon-powered Acer Chromebook Spin 513 hits multiple retailers

Thanks to a bit of a heads-up from Kevin Tofel over at About Chromebooks, it looks like we’re nearing the finish line in our long wait for the arrival of the first consumer-facing Snapdragon-powered Chromebook. The Acer Chromebook Spin 513 is a beautiful looking device with an all-aluminum build, glass trackpad, backlit keyboard, IPS display, thin form factor, and super-light design. We had hands on it last fall when it was announced but due to the nature of the release, we couldn’t really test it or get a feel for its performance.

The jury is still out on how well the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c will perform in a Chromebook, but we have pretty high hopes at this point thanks to some benchmarks and general platform testing. With the numbers we’re seeing, I think it is fair to expect Pentium Gold performance out of this battery-sipping processor and if that is the case, the asking price we’re now seeing for the Spin 513 could be very, very attractive. If you remember, when pricing hit in the UK for this device, we assumed we’d see a $399 price point for the entry-level version and $499 for the upgraded RAM version. While we nailed the high end MSRP, we undershot on the low end.

Acer’s pricing – at least the MSRP, anyway – shows a rather odd disparity between the 4GB and 8GB RAM versions with the lower end configuration coming in at $479 and the upgraded 8GB version hitting $499. Twenty dollars for the upgrade seems a small difference, honestly. While those prices are decent, the good news is it will likely be lower in real life. After searching for the model names provided by Acer, we found multiple retailers selling the 4GB (R841T-S4ZG) version as low as $417 and the 8GB (R841T-S5VA)as low as $448. If I’m being frank, I feel like those prices are perfectly in line with what I’d expect. I’d love to see $399 and $449 as the standard asking prices for this Chromebook down the road a little bit.

Officially – at this point, at least – that’s all we know. With the Spin 513 hitting multiple retailers and Acer’s own store at this point, it feels like we’re getting very, very close to an official launch at this point. We’ve reached out to our Acer representative and hopefully we’ll have news to share soon on a bit more of a solid timeline. As always, as we know more, you will too. Hopefully we’ll have one of these production-ready devices in-hand very soon.