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Best Acer laptop deals: From Chromebooks to gaming laptops

There are a lot of great laptop brands to pick from, but Acer makes a lot of solid and budget-friendly options.

While Acer might not be the biggest brand out there when it comes to the number of laptops and configurations, it has been around for quite a while and can compete as one of the best laptop brands out there. A lot of that is due to the fact that it has been around the market for quite a while, and it makes some excellent budget-oriented laptops and Chromebooks. That makes it a great option if you’re looking for an alternative that won’t cost you an arm and a leg. That’s why we’ve gone out and collected some of our favorite Acer laptop deals and put them for you below.

That said, if you can’t find what you’re looking for, we also have some great roundups of laptop deals, Chromebook deals, 2-in-1 laptop deals, and gaming laptop deals

If you need something very basic just to get online and do some general productivity and day-to-day stuff, then the Acer Aspire 1 is a good budget option. It has a 15.6-inch screen with an FHD resolution, which is nice to see at this price point, and the screen bevels are actually relatively thin for a budget-oriented product. Of course, it does come with a lower-end Intel Celeron N4500 and only 4GB of RAM, which means Windows 11 is in the reduced S mode, but the lower spec does mean the price can stay really low, too.

If you want to game, then the Acer Nitro V is a great budget gaming laptop out there if you want something to start out with. It has an RTX 3050, an entry-level 1080p gaming GPU, which is great because the screen is a 15.6-inch FHD panel with a 144Hz refresh rate, which will certainly push it to its limits unless you’re willing to compromise on the graphical fidelity somewhat. Even so, that’s not a dealbreaker, and for the price tag, you’re getting a pretty sweet budget gaming laptop.

It’s not often that you see great 2-in-1 laptops at this price point, especially Chromebooks, and while that does mean you give up a bit on the specs, it’s worth it if you need a convertible laptop. It has an easier-to-handle 14-inch screen running an FHD resolution, with a mid-range Intel Core Ultra 5 115U, which is more than enough given that ChromeOS is not as resource-heavy as Windows. The same goes for the 8GB of RAM, which would usually be a little too low, but it’s absolutely fine for ChromeOS.

Another great Chromebook option is the Chromebook 514 Plus, which has an Intel Core 5 120U, which is an entry-range desktop CPU and is great for a Chromebook since ChromeOS is a lot lighter than Windows. Similarly you get 8GB of RAM, which is more than enough for a Chromebook, and not only that, but it’s the latest DDR5 RAM, so it’s even faster. That said, you do get a much smaller 256GB internal storage, which you’ll probably need to supplement with an external hard drive as well.

The Predator Helios Neo 16 is the way to go if you want a larger screen to work with since it comes with a 16-inch monitor running a 2560 x 1600 resolution and can hit a whopping 240Hz refresh rate. That said, you do get the lower-grade RTX 4060, which is a high-end GPU that should handle most modern games just fine at 2K. You also get an Intel Core i9-14900HX under the hood, which is a great high-end CPU, as well as a solid 16GB of DDR5 RAM to work with, although it only has a 1TB SSD, which may seem like a lot, but many modern games are quite big, so you might also have to supplement this with an external hard drive.

Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.

What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?

Speech-to-text apps have flooded the App Store, making it easier than ever to type on our Macs with just our voice. I have previously covered one such app called TypeWhisper. However, there has been a dearth of good text-to-speech models, and most of the good ones are locked behind a subscription.

Ollama, an open-source app that lets you run local AI models on your computer, wants to change that. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and your prompts are never stored or used for training. 

Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.

How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?