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Body review
The Acer Chromebook 317 (available on Amazon) is the first-ever 17-inch Chromebook you can buy, but its size is its only real selling point. If you absolutely need a gigantic Chromebook and can’t stand something smaller, you can either pick it up or wait for something better, but we recommend patience over purchase. There simply isn’t much about the Chromebook 317 to get excited about beyond its large screen.
As a large laptop, the Acer Chromebook 317 doesn’t have much going for it except its powerful presence. It’s all in size and little style.
About the Acer Chromebook 317
Here are the specifications of the model we tested:
Processor: Intel Celeron N4500
Memory: 4 GB LPDDR4X
Storage: 64 GB eMMC flash memory
Display: 17.3 inch FHD (1920 x 1080), 16:9, 60Hz IPS (non-touch)
Ports: 2x USB-C (USB 3.2 Gen 1), 2x USB-A 3.2 Gen 1, 3.5mm mic/headset combo, MicroSD
Graphics: Integrated
Wireless: Wi-Fi 6 802.11AX, Bluetooth 5.0
Battery: 56Wh battery with 45W charger included
Weight: 5.29 lbs
Dimensions: 10.5 x 15.8 x 0.89 inches
Warranty: 1-year limited warranty
Acer also offers a 2-in-1 version of this Chromebook, the Chromebook Spin 713, which is powered by a 10th-generation Intel Core i3 or Core i5 processor and costs over $100 more, but the screen is only 13.5 inches.
What we like
Big screen, cool temperatures,
Acer’s $399 Chromebook 317 costs almost nothing for a huge laptop. The equation doesn’t get much simpler than that. At the time of this writing, Acer’s Chromebook was the only 17-inch Chromebook in existence. For anyone who cares about size more than any other specification, Acer’s laptop asks very little for a decent big screen.
With a resolution of only 1080p, the laptop’s screen doesn’t overwhelm us with its quality for its enormous size, but it’s important to put that in context: this is a cheap Chromebook powered by integrated graphics from an Intel Celeron chip. If you’re looking for something big, beautiful and 4K, this is not the laptop for you. The laptop’s IPS display does the job, but it will not blow you away. At maximum settings, it’s as bright as most other Chromebooks we’ve tested at 237 nits. We wish it had been better at displaying deeper black gradations, but then again, it’s a Chromebook.
Of course, with a big screen comes a big footprint. The Chromebook 317 weighs just over 5 pounds, which is being considered “not fun to carry around,” provided you can fit this big laptop into a bag. That’s the inherent problem with a 17-inch laptop; the screen size means you’re more likely to park your laptop on your desk or limit its travel to brief trips between your home office and your couch. A laptop of this size isn’t designed for portability, and in Acer’s case, its large laptop doesn’t have much going for it other than its imposing presence. It’s all in size and little style.
The Chromebook 317’s temperatures were also fairly normal. We didn’t feel any discomfort, whether we were using the computer for simple web browsing or subjecting it to a battery of benchmarks. Its bottom end didn’t get above 36°C in our most demanding test, which puts it on a par with all the other Chromebooks we tested. The computer’s noise did not bother us, but that makes sense, given that there’s not much to cool down compared to, say, a performance-oriented gaming laptop.
Reasonable battery life for its size
The Chromebook 317 performed well in our battery test, reaching six hours and 41 minutes during an extended Web browsing session. (For our battery test, we use a Chrome extension that automatically scrolls through a bunch of Web pages until the battery runs out.) That’s not as good as other Chromebooks we’ve tested, such as the Lenovo Ideapad Flex 3, which lasted nearly 10 hours.
However, most of the recent Chromebooks we looked at hovered around seven hours or more, so it’s impressive that the Chromebook 317 - with a larger screen than any of the others - had no problems holding up.
Perfectly placed ports
We were pleased to see a good amount of connectivity on the Chromebook 317: a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A and Type-C port on each side of the laptop, as well as a microSD slot and a headphone/mic jack combo (to compensate for those mediocre speakers). While you won’t find anything like a dedicated HDMI interface on this laptop, you can connect an external display via Display port over USB-C, so there’s that.
That microSD slot is especially important given that the Chromebook 317 only comes with 64GB of total storage. That’s low, given that most Chromebooks we’ve recently reviewed start at 128GB (like Lenovo’s ThinkPad C13 Yoga). And Acer doesn’t give you the option to upgrade that storage when you buy the laptop. You probably won’t need a ton of storage since they primarily built this laptop for web browsing and online services, but we’d still prefer more built in.
Buy: Acer Chromebook 317 CB317-1H (2021)
What we don’t like
Slowness, even for a Chromebook
We didn’t expect the Acer Chromebook 317 to break speed records among all the laptops we tested, because that’s not really the point of a Chromebook. However, we didn’t expect Acer’s 17-inch giant to underperform for a Chromebook. It feels like Acer really sunk the budget into the laptop’s gigantic screen, leaving you with a relatively slower experience on a simpler Intel Celeron N4500 accompanied by only 4GB of memory.
The Chromebook 317 wasn’t the slowest Chromebook we tested, but it was up to 20 percent slower on single-core benchmarks and up to 50 percent slower on multi-core benchmarks than the two most recent Chromebooks we tested, the Acer Chromebook Spin 514 and the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2. However, each of these Chromebooks costs hundreds of dollars more than Acer’s 317. This presents an interesting decision: if you’re just doing light work, do you really need that much more power? Is the screen more important than speed?
If the Acer Chromebook 317 were more expensive, we’d say forget it altogether. However, for its price (and size), it’s good enough for basic tasks. As we wrote in our recent review of the Lenovo ThinkPad C13 Yoga, it’s possible to pack too much hardware into a Chromebook. People don’t pick up these laptops to do heavy-duty processing; they open their browser, open a few tabs, browse the Web, and call it a day. We wish the Acer Chromebook 317 was faster, but it’s good enough. And that may be all you need if you’re just impressed with the screen size.
For most people, though, we think it makes more sense to wait for more competition - or even go back to the perfectly reasonable 15-inch form factor, where you can save even more money for similar speeds or splurge for a better design and faster experience.
This keyboard, however.
Keyboards and 17-inch laptops seem to be eternally drawn to each other, but we don’t like that combination on the Acer Chromebook 17. We’d much rather see those extra keys go away and Acer center the laptop’s track pad and work a little on its small speakers - something most people are more likely to use than a narrow number pad.
Acer places a narrower number pad to the right of its conventional keyboard. It’s a delightful addition if you’re a numbers person, but the smaller key size makes this configuration slightly more cumbersome to use than what you’d find on a full-size desktop keyboard.
Acer then places two tiny speakers on the left and right sides of the keyboard. They’re angled upwards, which makes them sound a little better than most configurations found at this price point, but they’re still anemic. So much so that we’d rather settle for headphones than use them. They met our attempts at rocking them with a flat, bass-less sound that sounded excessively bad to us.
Also, the keys themselves have very little depth of travel. You don’t need to push very far to register a hit, which doesn’t create the most comfortable experience. Most annoying, however, is the lack of backlighting on the keyboard. None of the keys glow, which makes working on the Chromebook 17 in low-light situations not very fun.
Should you buy it?
No, not much
The Acer Chromebook 317 is a big, cheap laptop. If that’s all you care about, you really can’t go wrong with this 17-inch beast, the first Chromebook we’ve reviewed in this bag-breaking form factor. While this big Chromebook isn’t as fast as the competing Chromebooks we reviewed, we don’t expect most people to put this type of laptop through its paces, since it’s essentially a portable web browser.
This mediocre performance isn’t a hindrance, but it’s just one of many annoying additions to a comprehensive list of omissions - even at this price point - that makes us want to wait for a similarly sized competitor to arrive. The Chromebook 317 lacks anything fancy. It has a large screen, but it’s not detachable, it doesn’t have a touchscreen or stylus, the USB-A and USB-C ports are USB 3.0 instead of faster, only external Display port connections are supported (via USB-C), the number pad is weird, the speakers aren’t very good, and the keyboard doesn’t even turn on. The webcam is also absolutely horrible.
With the Chromebook 317, you’re essentially getting a good, big, portable display that’s a better (and cheaper) computing experience than the typical tablet/keyboard combination. It feels like that was Acer’s primary goal for this laptop, and that’s fine, but we don’t think it makes the most sense for everyone. You’re better off waiting to see what other manufacturers can offer at this size and price point - or, better yet, convincing yourself that a 15-inch screen is big enough and focusing your eyes on one of the many excellent, slightly smaller Chromebooks you can get right now.
Prices were accurate at the time this article was published but may change.
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