You can see by its acetic product page on the official Acer website that the Aspire Lite 14 is an uncomplicated machine. Affordability is the name of the game with this laptop, and all other factors and features you will read about in this review come with that fact hanging overhead.

Don’t expect unlimited cosmic power or gimmicky price inflators like 360-degree foldability or ultra-thinness, the Aspire Lite 14, like its namesake is light on all these things. Instead, you get the bare bones, but at least they’re bare bones with intricate carvings so they’re nice to look at.

Aesthetics

When it comes to entry-level laptops, we have seen some ugly machines in the past. More concrete slab than PC, colourless, drab laptops that fly under the radar most of the time. Thankfully Acer has decided that just because your machine is cheap, it doesn’t have to look it.

The silver finish is nice, and the thin screen and curved bottom of the Aspire Lite 14 tell of a higher price point. Nothing too loud or obnoxious, with a small Acer branding at the top of the screen and a shiny black keyboard.

Unfortunately for the lightweight laptop, you can tangibly feel the cost-cutting as it is plasticky to the touch and fragile-feeling under handling, especially the trackpad which is strangely and ungodly hard to click and use. This is the cheapest feeling part of the whole picture, somehow it feels like it was attached to the base of the laptop as an afterthought, or like a black market addition rather than the factory trackpad.

Acer Aspire Lite 14 Specification and Performance

The Intel N100 CPU is nothing special and struggled to perform under benchmarking. We saw a 40-point score in multi-core tests and a 39-point score in single-core tests. It took significantly long to complete the Cinebench 2024 benchmarks denoting just how lacklustre the 800Mhz processor is.

Graphics-wise, the integrated Intel UHD card is again not made for modern gaming, with a score of 371 on TimeSpy in our review which is very strange given that you get a full month’s subscription of Xbox Game Pass free with the Acer Aspire Lite 14. It absolutely boggles the mind because the machine will struggle to run even the most basic, indie of videogames with the hardware loadout present.

For comparison of just how tiny the N100 chip is, the Acer Aspire 5 Spin 14 got a Geekbench score of 7 593, and TimeSpy score of 1 691, and even this machine struggled with heavy graphics or processor loads.

Outside of benchmarks, the Aspire Lite runs relatively well under normal usage. Surfing the web and everyday office work should be fine, as well as schoolwork. You can watch videos on YouTube just fine, but installing apps takes some time longer than most laptops we’ve used in the past and at the end of the day, the weak hardware will mean that you can only do so much with this machine.

Forget about any notable gaming, forget about running performance-hogging apps for video or image editing, and even Google Chrome may harangue your usage. Of note, the benchmarks absolutely mangled the battery.

Battery

According to Acer, the Aspire Lite 14’s cell can manage 10.5 hours after charging to 100 percent. There’s no fast-charging present and I think we may have seen some smartphones with a bigger mAh capacity.

This takes me back to the bygone days of the early 2000s when a laptop just managing to keep on after unplugging the cable was a significant achievement, but it is now 2024 and we have come far, my friend. Instead, the charging and battery life of the Lite 14 continues the trend seen in this revenue, “nothing special.” Just our early benchmarking took the battery life down to single digits in about an hour.

We suspect Acer’s 10.5 hour lifespan has the caveat “without touching the laptop at all” because just 45 minutes of work cut 40 percent battery down to saver mode and we were just typing and researching online.

Notwithstanding the fact that the 45.6Wh charging is slow and you will have to leave it charging overnight if you want to get any unplugged usage out of the machine the next day.

Acer Aspire Lite 14 – Final verdict

All of the above information would have garnered an even lower final score if the Aspire Lite 14 was any bit more pricy, but at R6 000, it will likely be the first laptop for many people and honestly, it runs better and looks better than other entry-level contraptions we have used in the past.

For that, the Acer Aspire Lite 14 gets the score that it gets in this review, but if you need to do anything else other than look at the internet we recommend you buy a better laptop and just pay a monthly instalment if you can’t afford it in full. There are many machines we have reviewed in the past and most are better than the Aspire Lite 14, so take your pick.

A bare bones laptop that looks better than its cost-saving price, but it can’t hide its middling hardware with its silver finery.

FINAL SCORE: 6 OUT OF 10.