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Acer’s Evo Certified Chromebook Spin 713 is about as near perfect of an iteration as you could want in a premium laptop line. Acer has taken what was a great device in the first generation Spin and two life cycles later made a flagship Chromebook that is perfect for just about any use case. The 2021 version of the Spin 713 did little in the way of aesthetic or feature updates but let’s be honest, it didn’t need to. The 13.5″ 3:2 display is still one of the best out there and Acer tightened up the tolerances to make the Chromebook feel “more” premium than previous iterations. Anyway, I’ll save you from any more of my babbling and get down to the nitty-gritty. If you want to hear more about why we love the Acer Chromebook Spin 713 (2021 Edition), here is Robby’s full review.
The biggest update to the Spin 713 comes in the form of Intel’s 11th Gen Tiger Lake CPU. The Core i5 is a monster and we’re seeing benchmarks on these new-generation Chromebooks that absolutely destroy anything we’ve ever seen in the 10-year history of Chrome OS. I’m not talking marginal gains. These CPUs, combined with Chrome OS, are insane and we love it. The Spin 713’s finer updates to the build and the doubled NVMe storage are nice touches and it makes this Chromebook worth every penny of its $699 price tag.
As luck would have it, we’re in the Chromebook discount season and that means you can grab late-gen devices and save some of your hard-earned cash. While I can recommend this device all day at seven hundred dollars, Best Buy has once again dropped the price of the Spin 713 and you can pick up what is arguably the best Chromebook of 2021 for only $619. That makes it ten dollars cheaper than last year’s 10th Gen model. You can still grab the HP Chromebook x360 14c for $499 at the moment but I’d argue that this is giving you more bang for the buck.
Yes, the HP is nice and it brings a lot to the party like a fingerprint sensor and those B&O branded speakers. (That’s not as impressive as HP would like you to think, by the way.) If you like the HP, I’m fairly certain that you will be very happy getting one for only five hundred bucks. However, it has that mediocre 250 nit display. Acer’s Spin 713 comes rocking a 400+ nit panel and that’s a big selling point if you’ve ever worked in direct sunlight. It’s also has a 3:2 screen ratio which provides more workable screen real estate. The Spin 713 also has a Core i5 compared to the HP’s Core i3 so you get the better Iris Xe G7 graphics and that’s very important if you plan on taking advantage of things like Steam gaming when it finally arrives on Chrome OS. All that said, this is a lot of Chromebook for only $619 and I’d say that this is the device to buy if you are looking for something in the $500-$600 price range. Check it out over at Best Buy before it’s gone.
