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With so much mass involved, at least those designing it kept a reasonable balance between the display and base so that it's stable even if the screen is angled extremely. Comparing it to a 12th Gen part, like the i5-1235U we saw in the P2, this processor is about 80% of that performance in single thread and 60% in multi-thread tasks. To summarise, the processing power of this model is probably overkill for general office use, but the GPU isn’t anything special.
Considering that this laptop is designated a ‘Travelmate’, the mass of this machine is on the high side at 1.9 kg or over 4 lbs. That’s plenty to be carrying around, and this isn’t the machine you can practically hold with one hand and operate with the other. All these desktop replacements, except the ThinkBook 16p, show exemplary battery life. Four of them also present perfectly fine screen quality for business apps, if not enough for prepress or photo editing jobs, but the TravelMate's display just doesn't cut it—unacceptably dim even at peak brightness, with wretched color coverage. As we said, this is one laptop that cries out for connecting to an external monitor.
Verdict: A Decent Laptop, Through a Glass Darkly
However, there is one aspect of the P2 we didn’t care for, and that was the liberal plastering of bloatware on the Windows 11 installation. Other than the MacBook Air, the four comparison systems all have the latest Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics. The Air is also the only one of the bunch without an Intel CPU; that's because Apple developed its own ARM-based processor, the M1, which also includes integrated graphics as part of the chip. The M1 doesn't run all of the performance benchmarks PCMag uses (we'll get to the rest below), but it excels on those it does run. Our review machine using a 12th Gen Core-i5 processor looks like a sweet spot where you get the best deal without spending excessively.
Battery life at 9 hours and 42 minutes was more than acceptable, even if Acer claims more than 14 hours for this platform. What was also good is that when we used all the battery capacity in that test, we managed to reclaim 43% of that capacity within 30 minutes of connecting to the charger. We also liked the keyboard, which is big enough to have a numeric pad, even if it’s a little narrow, and the touchpad is also well-sized, but because of the numeric pad offset, it’s not very central.To make it workable, we were forced to use full brightness, and even then, the colours it produced were subdued. Like the SSD, this looks like another cost-saving choice on Acer’s part. What doesn’t need any help is the battery score as tested by PCMark10. At over ten hours, with the screen brightness turned down to 120 nits, that’s more than a working day of use.
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