Acer Aspire S3 Ultrabook VS. Apple MacBook Air, Ultrathin Laptop Review

Oct. 10, 2011 - PRLog -- Acer Aspire S3 Ultrabook VS. Apple MacBook Air, Ultra-thin Laptop Review

Acer is picking a fight with Apple’s with its own take on the MacBook.

Acer’s just-unveiled Aspire S3 is remarkably similar to the Air, even with the distinctive sculpted keyboard indentation in the top case.

But as Acer Australia’s Nigel Gore told APC, when you make everything in a notebook smaller and smaller, the designs are inevitably going to bear some similarity. (Then he gave a long-winded justification about how it’s hard to tell the difference between various models of car, but we’ll spare you that one.)

APC had hands-on time with this gorgeous piece of engineering yesterday at the Australian launch event, and of course we smuggled in a MacBook Air to put next to it to compare.

So, how do they stack up against each other?

See Also: Ultrabooks harness the best of tablets to fight Apple Macbook Air by batteryfast.co.uk - http://www.batteryfast.co.uk/battery-technology/ultrabooks-harness-the-best-of-tablets-to-fight-apple-macbook-air-by-batteryfast-co-uk/

This notebook is so slim it’s barely there.

Thickness | Officially, the Aspire S3 is claimed to be 13mm thick. Put next to a MacBook Air that’s 17 mm thick at its thickest point, it was obvious that the Air is still thinner.

Mac ate nothing but Subway for six months and came away two millimetres thinner…

It turns out the Aspire S3 is actually 17mm at its thickest point, not taking into account the rubber stoppers on the bottom, which add a couple more millimetres.

Putting aside a few thousandths of a metre between friends, it is an impressive form factor, and a surprisingly clean design for a PC notebook.

Das blinkenlights have been whittled down to a mere two tiny pin-prick LEDs beneath the screen — one to indicate the notebook is on, and another to indicate low battery. (That’s still two too many in our opinion, but hey, two are better than seven… we’re looking at you, Toshiba Portege Z830.)

Weight | The S3 tips the scale at “less than 1.35kg”. Presumably, the weight varies a bit depending on whether you go for a hard drive or an SSD model.

That’s competitive with the 13″ MacBook Air, which weighs 1.3kg. Of course, the 11″ MacBook Air is lighter at 1.08kg, but as the Aspire S3 is only coming in 13″ models, it’s not really a valid comparison.

Aesthetics | … are in the eye of the beholder, of course, but there are some visual features worth pointing out.

The S3′s casing is made of magnesium-aluminium alloy and finished with a lightly brushed texture. The MacBook Air is finished in a smooth, matte aluminium.

We didn’t see any of those godawful affixed-with-superglue Microsoft and Intel stickers on the S3, but since we were looking at pre-production engineering samples, it may be that they just hadn’t been stuck on yet.

Clean and unsullied by supplier logos

The bottom of the notebook, while cleaner than most PC notebooks, has one very strange aspect: the bare face of the hard drive poking out. It turns out that to shave millimetres off the notebook, Acer decided to cut a hole in the bottom case and allow the hard drive to sit flush with the bottom of the case.

Read More: http://www.batteryfast.co.uk/battery-technology/acer-aspi...

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