The Acer Aspire S5-391-9880 is aptly named. It aspires to be something special, to combine beautiful design with uncompromising performance, to be a premium ultrabook worth every penny of its $1,399.99 (direct) price. It achieves most of its goals, just not quite enough of them. The Aspire S5 offers strong performance and is equipped with a Thunderbolt port?a lightning-fast 10Gbps port previously seen only on Apple laptops?but it falls short of delivering the sort of user experience we expect from a machine in this price range. The end result is an ultrabook that is perfectly adequate, if slightly dissatisfying.
Design
The Acer Aspire S5 has a unique design, anchored with Acer's MagicFlip I/O Panel, a powered hatch on the back of the system. With the press of a button, this concealed panel opens up, revealing the laptop's ports. This motorized panel is a neat idea, but the execution leaves something to be desired. Port covers of plastic or rubber are already needless and irritating, but when pressing the button to open the hatch?which you'll need to do anytime you want to plug in anything other than headphones?it opens slowly with an electronic grinding sound. It's not a sound that inspires confidence, and I came away from testing worried that, with long-term use, the hatch might not always open and I'd thus have no access to even basic ports. Even if nothing ever goes wrong with the panel, it's still an inconvenience that introduces another potential point of failure into the design but adds nothing to the user experience.
While we're picking on the design flaws, let's talk about a couple more. The chiclet-style keyboard is adequate, but on a laptop at this price it should be backlit. And last but not least, though the clickpad is large and responsive, it doesn't have any marks or textures to distinguish the right and left buttons from the touch surface. Because the entire surface is clickable, users may find themselves frequently right-clicking unintentionally.
The display is a little underwhelming, with the same 1,366-by-768 resolution seen on much cheaper systems instead of something to match the 1,920-by-1,080 display found on the Asus Zenbook Prime UX32VD-DB71 ($1,299 list, 4 stars), or even the 1,600-by-900 screen of the Dell XPS 14 (Summer 2012) ($1,499 direct, 3.5 stars). The Aspire S5's built-in speakers are similarly average; they're adequate for understanding video dialogue, but audiophiles won't be satisfied by their puny bass and overall flat quality.
These little issues are easy to pick out because the rest of the design is so good. The keyboard is slightly recessed, not with a cookie-cutter inset, but with a subtle curved deck. Burnished black aluminum covers the lid and palm rest, and a magnesium-alloy frame keeps things durable and light, though the screen bezel and underside of the laptop are black plastic. It's a look very similar to that of the HP Envy 4-1043cl ($1,034.99 direct, 4 stars). The laptop is also very thin, measuring 0.59 by 12.6 by 8.9 inches (HWD), but it's worth mentioning that the Aspire S5 measures less than 0.6 inch thick when closed. Open the MagicFlip panel and the Aspire S5 fattens up to nearly a full inch. It's also light, weighing a scant 2.58 pounds, lighter than the 2.85-pound class-defining Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (Mid 2012) ($1,199 direct, 4 stars).
Features
Although the wisdom of the MagicFlip I/O panel design may be questionable, the ports that are on it offer some of the best options found on an ultrabook. Two USB 3.0 ports offer speedy connectivity for peripherals and drives, while a full-size HDMI output lets you connect to an HDTV without an adapter. But the real treat is the inclusion of Intel's Thunderbolt technology, which has thus far been somewhat exclusive to Apple products. The Thunderbolt port physically resembles a Mini DisplayPort jack?actually, it is one?and can be used to hook up an external display?but it also offers unparalleled speed. Thunderbolt-equipped peripherals are still rare, and mostly appeal to niche groups like video professionals, but as the technology goes mainstream other uses are sure to arise.
A 256GB solid-state drive (SSD) in the Acer Aspire S5 offers twice the storage capacity of the 128GB options found in the Sony VAIO T13 (SVT13112FXS) ($799.99 direct, 4 stars) and Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (Mid 2012), but can't match the capacity of traditional hard drives like the 500GB drive found in the HP Envy 4-1043cl or the Lenovo IdeaPad U310 ($799.99 direct, 4 stars). What the SSD does offer, however, is speedy performance, fast boot times, and near-instant waking from sleep. You'll also find plenty of software already on the drive when you first power it up. The desktop is cluttered with links to popular Web services like Netflix, Skype, and eBay, along with icons for Acer's own utilities like Clear.fi, a proprietary media-sharing solution that uses your home network, and Acer Cloud, which bolsters the 256GB drive with cloud storage. Acer covers the Aspire S5 with a one-year warranty.
Performance
In multimedia tests, the Acer Aspire offered decent performance and speed, cranking through Photoshop and Handbrake in decent times, but trailing behind the Asus Zenbook Prime, which added a discrete Nvidia graphics processor to the mix. Although the Aspire S5 makes the most of its integrated graphics processing (Intel HD Graphics 4000), it was unable to produce playable scores in either of our gaming tests.
The Acer Aspire seals its 34Wh battery out of owners' reach, but in MobileMark 2007 it lasted 6 hours 33 minutes. By comparison, competitors lasted longer, like the HP Envy 4-1043cl (7:45) and the Sony VAIO T13 (7:18). The Aspire did, however, outlast the Asus Zenbook Prime UX32VD (5:26).
The Acer Aspire S5 certainly offers strong performance and a beautiful design, but it's a mixed bag with strange design quirks and several features that fall flat. Frankly, the biggest issue with the Acer Aspire S5 isn't the MagicFlip panel, or any of its other design flaws?it's the price. At $1,400, this is one of the more expensive ultrabooks on the market, but aside from a marginally thinner profile and a Thunderbolt port it fails to deliver the features or experience you expect in that price range. Compared with the Editors' Choice Asus Zenbook Prime UX32VD-DB71, which offers better performance thanks in part to a discrete GPU, it's hard to give the Acer Aspire S5 anything more than a lukewarm recommendation.
BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS:
COMPARISON TABLE
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