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While the early parts of this week saw most Chromebook deals wither up and fade away, there are still a couple deals worth your time. One in particular happens to be on my favorite Chromebook at the moment: the Acer Chromebook 516 GE. We saw a return of this massive, $200 discount last week, and much to my surprise, it has returned once again this week amidst the lack of other solid deals.
A new model is on the way, but don’t be deterred
We have to address the elephant in the room with the 516 GE, however, and I want to assure you that taking advantage of this deal won’t hurt even if the new one shows up soon. While there is clearly a new Chromebook Plus model on the way for the 516 GE, the only upgrades we know about for certain are an upgrade to the 13th-gen Intel silicon and brighter RGB keyboard backlighting.
While those are welcome upgrades, it can’t be overstated that anything Acer does to improve on the already-awesome 516 GE will be in the realm of a tweak or two, not a massive overhaul. The existing 516 GE is so good already that there’s little reason to change a bunch of stuff. Instead, I’m hoping for an iterative update, and that means catching the existing 516 GE for just $449 right now is still an amazing deal.
As a reminder, this device comes packed with superlatives, and they start with the display. Coming in at 16-inches, 16:10, QHD (2560×1600), 120Hz, and 350 nits, the screen on the 516 GE is 100% the star of the show and something I look forward to working from any day of the week. The rigid chassis is only 3.7 pounds (crazy-light for a 16-inch Chromebook) and the RGB keyboard and OceanGlass trackpad make for a comfortable input experience.
Flank those pieces with upward facing speakers and plenty of diverse I/O (there’s even an Ethernet port, here) and you start to see why I love this device so much. And the inside is equally impressive with a 12th-gen Core i5-1240P processor, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of NVMe storage. Other than a touch screen, this Chromebook has it all, and for $449 you simply cannot go wrong. With the new model on the way, I’d expect this deal to stick around for a bit, but there are simply no guarantees of that. Don’t miss out!
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