Acer Chromebook Plus 515 review: This $400 laptop has killer speakers for the price

The Acer Chromebook Plus 515 ($399) is a refreshed model with enough upgraded hardware onboard to take advantage of Google's Chromebook Plus AI features.

That means this ChromeOS workhorse can do things like generate text for you, automatically caption live video and audio or edit images with Google's AI-powered editing tools.

Whether you find these AI features useful or not, I'm pleased to report they work as advertised and do add some value to this affordable Chromebook. In fact, after using it myself for a few weeks I think the Acer Chromebook Plus 515 is one of the best Chromebooks you can buy if you just need a capable PC for writing, editing and browsing the web.

In this Acer Chromebook Plus 515 review, I'll walk you through the high points and low moments I encountered while using this machine for work and play; I'll also show you why I think the Chromebook Plus 515 is a great deal.

Acer Chromebook Plus 515 review: Cheat sheet

• What is it? A 15-inch Chromebook with enough horsepower under the hood to qualify for the extra AI features offered on Chromebook Plus hardware.
• Who is it for? Anyone that needs a cheap laptop for writing and browsing the web.
• What does it cost? The Acer Chromebook Plus 515 is available for purchase from Acer's website for $399.
• What's good about it? This cheap laptop doesn't feel like that cheap, with a sturdy chassis, a nice 1080p display and a comfy keyboard. Plus, you get plenty of ports and the speakers are surprisingly good.
• What's not so good? The display doesn't get terribly bright or colorful, and you "only" get about 8 hours of battery life on a full charge.

Acer Chromebook Plus 515 review: Specs

Acer Chromebook Plus 515 review: The ups

Our Acer Chromebook Plus 515 review unit is a capable Chromebook for not a lot of money, and that alone is a virtue. However, I wanted to call out a few more specific strengths this Chromebook offers that you should know about.

Speedy performance

The Intel Core i3-1215U CPU and 8GB of RAM powering our Acer Chromebook Plus 515 review unit aren't much, but they're plenty to get you through a work day as fast as you can type.

While our Plus 515 review unit isn't fast enough to compete with the best MacBooks or the best Windows laptop s, it's more than capable enough to handle whatever you need to do in ChromeOS. I've had no trouble using it to write this review and stay on top of my daily to-dos in Chrome, even with with 15-plus tabs open and music streaming in the background.

Our lab testing backs up my hands-on experience, and as you can see from the chart of results above our Plus 515 review unit is pretty capable.

While our review unit can't quite catch up to the Lenovo Flex 5i Chromebook Plus in raw single-core CPU performance, it does speed past the Lenovo in the Geekbench 6 multi-core CPU benchmark. It also wins out in our WebXPRT 4 benchmark, which tests how well the laptop performs when processing Web frameworks like HTML 5, JavaScript and more.

So while the Acer Chromebook Plus 515 obviously doesn't have the power to handle the kinds of demanding coding tasks or video editing apps you need a beefy laptop for, it's plenty fast enough for just about anything you can do on a Chromebook.

Surprisingly good speakers

When you imagine great speakers on a laptop, Chromebooks typically aren't the first thing you picture, but that might change after you spend some time with the Acer Chromebook Plus 515.

While it can't match the sound quality of the best computer speakers or even a 16-inch MacBook Pro 2023 with its six-speaker sound system, the Plus 515's pair of upward-facing speakers are surprisingly good.

Flanking the keyboard, these stereo soundmakers sport DTS Audio branding and get remarkably loud for their size. But even at maximum volume they don't get too distorted or tinny, and vocals in tracks like John Lee Hooker's "Serves Me Right To Suffer" and Albert King's "Born Under a Bad Sign" sound warm, rich and clear alongside the music.

These are the best speakers I've ever seen on a Chromebook, and they're a high point of using the Plus 515. Of course, it's also nice to have the headphone jack and a good pair of cans when you're streaming Spotify at the coffee shop.

Plenty of ports

Our Acer Chromebook Plus 515 review unit sports plenty of ports, which is great when you want to use a lot of peripherals at once or a wide variety of older and newer devices since you get both older USB-A and newer USB-C ports.

Specifically, you get a USB-C port on the right side alongside a 3.5mm audio jack and a lock slot for security. On the left-hand side you get another USB-C port, a USB-A port and an HDMI 1.4 out for external displays.

Since the laptop charges via USB-C you can plug it in from either side, a real boon when you're working in a cramped coffee shop or classroom without easy outlet access. In general, the broad port selection make this a versatile and useful laptop that can easily accommodate an external keyboard, mouse and more.

Google AI features are nice to have

I'm not the biggest fan of all the "AI" features that have been cropping up in modern PCs over the last year or so, and I tend to be pretty critical of them.

That's why I hope you believe me when I say the AI features that were available in our Acer Chromebook Plus 515 review unit during the review period not only worked as advertised but worked well.

During my time with the Chromebook I took advantage of these new AI features to caption a video in real time, edit a few photos, generate a few new wallpapers and test out the text generation tools.

I found these tools work reliably enough and are, in select cases, pretty useful. It's nice to be able to use Google's Magic Eraser feature to quickly remove someone from a photograph, for example, and in my testing, it rarely delivered a bad photo. Live Captions also worked well, without many errors, and I can see a real use for them since the captions on services on YouTube and Vimeo are rarely great.

I found text generation less interesting because while the grammar and copy it generated was reliably decent, the details were often wrong, forcing me to fact-check everything anyhow. Frankly, I found it easier and faster to write text myself rather than trust Google's AI.

In general, I don't think I'd use these features very often, but that has a lot to do with my dislike of AI tools in general. If you find them useful, I think you'll be pleased with how reliably well they work on this Chromebook without being intrusive or annoying.

Acer Chromebook Plus 515 review: The downs

While I hope this Acer Chromebook Plus 515 review shows what a useful and versatile laptop you get for the money, there's also a few weaknesses you should know about before you buy.

Not-great battery life

Acer claims the Chromebook Plus 515 can last up to 10 hours on a full charge, and that might be possible if you really dim the screen as far as it will go, turn off all extraneous features and try to be as conservative as possible when using it.

But in my hands-on experience, you should expect to get significantly less than 10 hours of battery life out of a full charge. In my time with the laptop, I could reliably count on it lasting 6-plus hours of dedicated usage or several days of occasional usage, so the battery does hold a charge pretty well.

But as you can see from the chart of results above, in our lab-based battery tests our Acer Chromebook Plus 515 review unit lasted an average of 8 hours and 16 minutes on a full charge.

Our in-house battery tests set the laptop's screen to a pretty dim brightness (~150 nits) and set it to endlessly surf the web until it dies, so it's not far removed from what you'll be doing with this laptop on a daily basis. And while 8-plus hours of tested battery life is good enough that you probably don't need to lug the charger to school or the coffee shop with you, it's not as good as premium MacBooks or Windows laptops these days.

Middling display

The 15.6-inch 1080p display on our Acer Chromebook Plus 515 review unit looks perfectly fine to my eyes, and it's plenty usable indoors. While I wouldn't recommend you try to use it outdoors on a sunny day, in general I had no issues making out details on the screen or watching my favorite movies and TV shows.

That said, when we got it into our testing lab our crack team of display experts found that it's not quite as bright or as colorful as some of the other Chromebooks we've recently tested.

As you can see from the test results charted below, the Plus 515's display hits an average brightness of 263.2 nits that peaked around 275 nits in the upper-left corner.

That's good enough, but it's not as bright as the Lenovo Flex 5i Chromebook (which costs just $100 more than the Plus 515) or the slightly cheaper Acer Chromebook Spin 314.

And if you look at the percentage of color gamuts the Plus 515 can accurately display (closer to 100% the better, DCI-P3 is wider and more demanding than sRGB), you'll see that it falls slightly behind the Flex 5i in terms of color reproduction as well.

Personally, I don't mind the screen on the Plus 515 at all, but I also don't think it's anything exciting to look at. If display quality is very important to you in a Chromebook, you might consider going with Lenovo's Flex 5i instead, which is a bit more expensive but has a brighter 14-inch 1200p touchscreen.

Acer Chromebook Plus 515 review: Verdict

The Acer Chromebook Plus 515 is a sturdy, reliable Chromebook that's a great deal for students, writers and anyone who needs a cheap laptop around the house.

While it doesn't excel in any area, this is an excellent all-rounder that offers a big 1080p display and a nice comfy keyboard to type on, flanked by a pair of surprisingly good speakers. I found it great for writing and browsing the web, and while it's not the lightest laptop on the market it's not a pain to carry to the coffee shop.

Of course, all the limitations of a Chromebook apply here. This machine isn't great for gaming unless you stream games over the Internet via a service like Nvidia's GeForce Now, and even then the lack of a dedicated Ethernet jack handicaps you somewhat. It also can't run any apps besides those on Android, so you'll have a hard time doing serious photo/video editing work.

But the Acer Chromebook Plus 515 excels at writing, surfing the web and streaming your favorite shows. It's a great value at $399, and if you can get it on sale for less, it almost feels like you're getting away with something.