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
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 it's now $500 at Costco, making it the cheapest Copilot Plus PC I've seen -- and a great value.
Acer cuts the right corners to hit such a low price for the Aspire 14 AI, delivering a well-rounded laptop with modern components. This is no budget laptop with outdated parts. It features the latest Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processor (codenamed Lunar Lake) that serves up competitive application and AI performance along with great battery life and a design that doesn't look all that different from Acer's pricier Swift laptops. The Aspire 14 AI's no-frills but future-proofed package makes it one of the 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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