Acer Aspire 14 AI Review: Cheap Copilot Plus PC Offers Great Battery Life and Future-Proofing

CNET’s expert staff reviews and rates dozens of new products and services each month, building on more than a quarter century of expertise. 8.0 / 10 SCORE Acer Aspire 14 AI $700 at Costco Pros Exceedingly long battery life Competitive performance for the price Useful port selection Cons Dull display Dull design With the Aspire 14 AI, Acer delivers a modern AI processor to its budget laptop line in the form of an Intel Lunar Lake CPU. The Intel Core Ultra 5 226V features a neural processing unit (NPU) capable of 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS) for local AI processing, which happens to be the minimum requirement for Microsoft's Copilot Plus PC platform. The Aspire 14 AI costs just $700 at Costco, making it the cheapest Copilot Plus PC we've reviewed. So, the question becomes, In what areas does this budget model sacrifice to hit a lower price than other Copilot Plus PCs? The Asus Zenbook A14, the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 and the HP OmniBook X 14 each cost hundreds more ... Read full article.