Acer Aspire 1 A114-32-C1YA: Fine for Basics, but Hardware Failed

The Acer Aspire 1 is the Microsoft answer to the continuing onslaught of affordable Google Chromebooks, featuring decent specs, at a downright affordable price. While I would not want to use it as my only machine, as a secondary device, it has much to offer. An immediate downside is that it ships with Windows 10S, which is a limited version of Windows, that can only install apps from the Windows Store. However, this is easily remedied, and it is a free upgrade to Windows 10 Home, which then allows any Windows program to be used, and is recommended to intermediate and advanced users. At this price, we can’t expect amazing, but the Acer Aspire 1 is a decent laptop. While the exterior is a lightly textured plastic, it is quite thin with a fanless design, and the keyboard is good although the keys have shallow travel. The touchscreen is also serviceable. The display is also ok, and with a 1080p resolution, although it could be brighter, and have richer colors. Still, it does not look bargain to my eye. The 3 USB ports, and HDMI port along with an Ethernet port match up well against many mainstream laptops these days. The CPU is the Celeron N4000, and while it is a dual core part, is the newer Gemini Lake architecture, and has enough horsepower for routine tasks, such as email, word processing and basic web surfing. The Acer Aspire 1 is gimped in a few departments. The first is the “hard drive” which is 64 GB of eMMC memory, which is a cousin to that flash card in your old digital camera, with speeds more akin to a mechanical hard drive than an SSD. The space is limited, but it should have enough for a Windows upgrade, unlike the 32 GB machines. There is also only 4 GB of RAM, which you can feel when you open up more than a few tabs on your browser. Finally, while there are two speakers, they are fairly small, and the audio lacks punch and bass, which is typical for this type of machine. Overall, the Acer Aspire 1 is a more than decent bargain machine. While not suited to advanced tasks such as video editing or gaming, for the basics such as email or web browsing it gets the job done. When I pushed it, it was even able to stream a 4K video quite smoothly. This makes it an ideal device for a student to take to class, a senior citizen, or to take on vacation. Update: Major problems with the device including broken Wifi on 5 GHz, a nonfunctioning HDMI port, and then completely fails to boot at all and just refuses to start, or stuck on the boot splash screen and fails to progress. Sent for service. Update August 2021: The wifi card died. It did accept the Intel AX200 part, and wireless works better than new.