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Acer’s Chromebook 15 is now made of aluminum and a lot more expensive

Acer’s Chromebook 15 is now made of aluminum and a lot more expensive

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Acer Chromebook 15
Image: Acer

Acer’s biggest Chromebook is getting a big refresh. Its palm rest and lid are now made out of aluminum, instead of plastic, and the laptop is now supposed to get 12 hours of battery life, up from 9 last year. But for those improvements, you’re going to be paying a lot more: the starting price is $399, whereas the last generation started at $299 and can now be found for well below that.

It looks like Acer is going to be opening up a lot more configuration options this time around, too. The Chromebook 15 will have options for dual-core Celeron or quad-core Pentium processors, 32GB or 64GB of storage, and 4GB or 8GB of RAM.

Acer Chromebook 15
Image: Acer

As before, the laptop has a 15.6-inch 1080p display. But this year’s model is slimmer and lighter: it’s now down to 0.74 inches thick and 3.79 pound in weight, instead of 0.95 inches and 4.85 pounds, so there’s a big improvement on that front.

On specs alone though, I don’t know that Acer is doing enough here to justify the big price bump. Chromebooks are supposed to be great values — and right now, you can buy much nicer Chromebooks for around $400 and equivalent Chromebooks for much cheaper. Though not necessarily with such a big screen.