Acer now shipping Spin 5 convertible with Kaby Lake-R and new aluminum design

The Acer Spin series is the manufacturer's answer to the popular Lenovo Yoga and HP x360 series of convertible notebooks. Our review on the original Skylake Spin 5 earlier this year revealed it to be a fairly inexpensive and long-lasting 2-in-1 that suffered from unappealing looks and a cramped keyboard when compared to the competition.

Now that Kaby Lake-R is widely available, the Taiwanese manufacturer will be updating its Spin 5 series with both Core i5-8250U and i7-8550U processor options and a sleeker aluminum design. The chassis will come in 13.3-inch and 15.6-inch sizes with new options like USB Type-C and full-size SD card readers that were sorely missing on the original Spin 5. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the new 13.3-inch SKU will be thinner and lighter than the outgoing model as well.

The biggest change in terms of performance will be the 4 GB GTX 1050 GPU option on the larger 15.6-inch SKU. This particular Pascal GPU has proven to be quite capable for playing modern 3D titles not unlike on the much pricier XPS 15.

The 13.3-inch and 15.6-inch Spin 5 SKUs will retail for $800 and $1000 USD, respectively. The convertibles are not yet in stock on Newegg and Amazon, but they will likely start shipping soon as the SKUs are already on Acer's official website. Here's hoping that Acer will incorporate Ryzen SoCs to make its notebooks even more affordable in the near future.

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