Acer made a rugged Chromebook to withstand student life
Keep dropping your laptop? Acer has just the fix: A rugged Chromebook designed to resist drops, spills, and other punishment — possibly making it the ideal laptop for the life of a student.
The new model, the 11.6-inch Chromebook 11 C771, is a relative beast physically, measuring 0.82 of an inch thick and weighing about 3 pounds. By contrast, Apple's MacBook — which has a bigger, 12-inch display — is 0.52 inch thick and weighs just 2 pounds.
But that extra heft bestows durability: The laptop is rated to resist drops up to 4 feet and 132 pounds of downward force. In other words, a teenager (a key demographic for Chromebooks) could stand on top of this thing and not break it. The keyboard is spill-resistant, too. The ruggedness probably addresses a key pain point in Chromebooks: When the device is cheap and issued by a school (as opposed to something you buy yourself), users may not to care for it as much.
Powering the Chromebook is an Intel Celeron processor (3855U), though that likely won't get you very far if you like to have multiple browser tabs open. Luckily Acer will also offer the C771 with a 6th-generation (Skylake) Core i3 and even an i5, although those models won't ship until September. All models have 32GB of local storage and 4GB RAM.
The Chromebook's 1,366 x 768 display can be either a touchscreen or a regular (non-touch) one. If you go with the touch model, battery life is rated at 12 hours, but for non-touch you'll be able to squeeze out an extra hour at 13. In either case, it's a pretty impressive spec, though real-world use is often short of manufacturer ratings.
As a bonus, the monitor can fold out completely flat at 180 degrees.
One downside: There's a proprietary AC charging port, despite there being a USB-C port as well. That's not to surprising given the chips powering this thing, and Acer says you can also charge via USB-C as a bonus, which is nice. There are two USB 3.0 ports and an HDMI port, too.
The Celeron version is available now for $329.99 (touch) or $279.99 (non-touch), with the Core versions coming in the fall.
Correction 8/9/17 11:10 a.m. ET: Acer clarified that users will be able to charge via both USB-C and the proprietary charging port, not solely via the latter.
Pete Pachal was Mashable’s Tech Editor and had been at the company from 2011 to 2019. He covered the technology industry, from self-driving cars to self-destructing smartphones.Pete has covered consumer technology in print and online for more than a decade. Originally from Edmonton, Canada, Pete first uploaded himself into technology journalism at Sound & Vision magazine in 1999. Pete also served as Technology Editor at Syfy, creating the channel's technology site, DVICE (now Blastr), out of some rusty HTML code and a decompiled coat hanger. He then moved on to PCMag, where he served as the site's News Director.Pete has been featured on Fox News, the Today Show, Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC and CBC.Pete holds degrees in journalism from the University of King's College in Halifax and engineering from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. His favorite Doctor Who monsters are the Cybermen.
