Acer announces Chromebook Vero 514 with Alder Lake-U CPUs and eco-friendly chassis

In an effort to reduce the environmental impact brought on by PC device manufacturing, Acer recently announced its first laptop with chassis made of recycled materials. The company chose the Chromebook Vero 514 notebook to be the first eco-friendly model as it also features the low-power Intel Alder Lake-U processors, and Acer announced that it plans to shift all production facilities to 100% renewable energy by 2035 in order to help mitigate the impact caused by climate change.

The eco-friendly laptop case of the new Chromebook Vero 514 is made of 30% post-consumer recycled plastic. Furthermore, the keycaps also include 50% recycled plastic, the touchpad surface is entirely made of plastic collected from oceans and the device package is made of 90% recycled paper. The display itself is 99% recyclable in the eventuality of malfunction. Even with this many recycled materials and a profile of 0.8 inches, the case itself is rugged enough to meet MIL-STD-810H standards.

On the hardware side, this Chrome OS device is powered by Intel’s Alder Lake-U processors such as the Core i3-1215U, i5-1235U, i7-1255U with minimum 12 W TDP and it also includes a Pentium Gold 8505 option with 15 W TDP. These CPUs can be complemented with up to 16 Gb of LPDDR4X RAM and up to 256 GB PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD storage.

It also features a 14-inch display that comes in touch (Corning Gorilla Glass) and non-touch variants with a 1080p 300 nit IPS panel able to reproduce 100% sRGB. Port selection includes 2x USB-C + 1x USB-A 3.2 connectors, HDMI video output and audio jack. Internet connectivity is enabled through a Wi-Fi 6E card, while the webcam only offers 720p quality, and a fingerprint reader is offered for extra security. Together with the 56 Wh battery, the device weighs 3.1 lbs.

This model will initially be available in the U.S. starting this October. At first, only the base configuration with Intel Core i3-1215U, 8 GB RAM and 128 GB storage will be available at retailers like Best Buy for US$500. Europe, Middle East and Africa are getting the model in November with starting prices set at 599 EUR.

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