CNET's key takeaways
Laptop prices are on the rise -- and the more they increase, the better Acer's Aspire 14 AI looks.
The Acer Aspire 14 AI is available for $500 at Costco $628 at Amazon
The Intel Lunar Lake CPU offers good performance for the price and long battery life.
The display and design won't wow you.
When I reviewed it in April, it cost $700 at Costco and was the cheapest Copilot Plus PC I had reviewed. Fast-forward two months, and a Labor Day deal has brought that price down to $500 at Costco, making it the cheapest Copilot Plus PC I've seen -- and a great value.
Budget laptop shoppers will find no shortage of cheap models around $500 that are priced so low for the simple fact that they are older laptops with aging components that get more outdated with each passing day. The Acer Aspire 14 AI doesn't fall into this category. It's the rare laptop with both a truly budget price and modern components. It’s based on a current Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processor (codenamed Lunar Lake) that delivers good performance for the price, along with great battery life and competitive AI performance. The Aspire 14 AI also wins points for supplying more RAM and storage than most budget laptops. In fact, it's one of my best budget laptops of 2025.
My experience with the Acer Aspire 14 AI
I'm still waiting for the killer AI app to make a laptop AI CPU a must, but it's nice to know that when it arrives, you'll have a machine that's built for it.
Thanks to its Intel Core Ultra 5 CPU that has a neural processing unit capable of 40 trillion operations per second, the Aspire 14 AI hits the minimum requirement for Microsoft's Copilot Plus PC platform. Its AI processor can offload AI workloads -- constantly taking Windows Recall snapshots, blurring backgrounds for video calls and producing live translations -- to its NPU, keeping the CPU and GPU freed up for whatever primary task you're working on.
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