The Acer Chromebook 910 (aka Chromebook 15) we just reviewed is an excellent value at $350, and the company is wasting no time at all producing a faster model. Today, Acer unveiled an upgraded Chromebook 15, this one with an Intel Core i5 processor. The version in our review featured a Core i3 chip, and we already found performance to be one of its strong points. That could make the jump up to a more powerful i5 processor a bit pointless; this is a Chromebook we're talking about after all.

Still, Acer is claiming this Chromebook can outperform any other commercial Chrome OS laptop on the market today aside from Google's own Chromebook Pixel — which is slightly more expensive. Aside from the beefier chip, nothing else about the Chromebook 15 changes here, and that's not a bad thing. You still get the big 15.6-inch screen, durable design, surprisingly good trackpad, and long battery life. (The 4GB of RAM and 32GB of flash storage also remain.) But you'll pay more for this new, speedier hardware: it'll be priced at $499.99 when it ships next month. If we had to choose, most people would probably be fine with the base model.