Author: CataclysmZA

Acer Aspire 5 A514-54 Hands-On

In past reviews I’ve done on Acer devices, something has always stuck out to me. It is the company’s design language. While they aren’t afraid of working on their own style, their industrial design has veered between extremes in the past. Some designs are too safe, plastic, and boring, while others are adventurous and thin, and sometimes noticeably less likely to endure regular work pressures. The Acer Aspire 5 straddles a line that I finally think showcases what they can do given enough time to care about attention to detail.

Previous exposure to Acer’s Swift family has shown up some interesting limitations of Acer’s design team. They can make a device that is incredibly thin and light, and with gorgeous colours, but some things just failed in their execution. The Swift 7 from years back could bend under its own weight if held improperly. The Swift 5 family had some issues with ergonomics and port placement. Displays have been colourful and bright enough, but the matte finish could have been a visibility issue in some environments.

This machine, though? Spot on. For around R14,000, I don’t think you’ll very easily find something better put together. HP’s Pavilion 14 is closest in terms of features and build quality.

The only hint of colour is seen on the display lid, in this case a steel-blue aluminium shell. As with every laptop with an aluminium shell, scratches deep enough to get past the paint layer will appear silver in colour. This colour choice, while unintentional, turned out to be something I rather like.

The hinge cover meanwhile is sandblasted to a smooth finish, and will be ripe for gouges by sharp objects because the hinge extends outwards to lay a pair of colour-matching rubber feet on your chosen work surface. Two protrusions can be seen on the top corners of the lid for the MIMO-capable WiFi 5 antennae.

Given the choice, Blue or Silver lids for the current Aspire 5 family will be the best picks. Black and Pink will show up marks and scratches much more noticeably. The Gold finish might also fare well, given the low contrast.

Port-wise, there are acceptable compromises here. On the right is a Kensington lock, a USB-A 2.0 port, combination audio jack, and status lights. Note the lack of a SD or Mini-SD reader.

On the left is the barrel charger, Gigabit Ethernet, one HDMI 2.0 port, two USB 3.0 SuperSpeed ports, and one USB 3.1 Type-C port. This is straight USB, with no charging capabilty.

These are rather old standards to see on a modern Ultrabook-class device with an Intel 11th Gen processor. However, consider this: Most people do not own fast USB 3.1 or 3.2 devices, and far fewer are able to take advantage of a Type-C port that supports 10GBps or faster transfers. Acer’s port selection reflects the budget-ish nature of this laptop. It also helps somewhat that USB 2.0 is still here. There are lots of legacy devices that don’t communicate very well over the faster standards.

The hinge design raises the laptop about 3mm off your work surface. The angle creates a gentle incline of the keyboard deck, resulting in a comfortable typing position. Extending the display fully backward to its furthest point will cause the lid to come into contact with the work surface.

If you decide to extend the display fully and then drag it across a surface that is somewhat rough, you may find scuff marks on the lid later. Put this thing on wood or glass, or on a mat.

The way the hinge swings out has some implications for how accident-prone this design may be. Most laptop designs have hinges that do not support the notebook’s weight. This one does.

Consequently, these hinges also take all the strain of heavy hands on the keyboard, or an accidental hand held out to steady yourself when you realise you’re not wearing pants during your Zoom call. Abrupt downwards force placed on the keyboard will cause the hinge to lever the display closed with what can only be described as extreme gusto. Ouchies.

Opening up the Aspire 5, you can see that Acer has taken hints from improvements made by other brands such as ASUS with their X515 family. The keyboard deck is recessed, the large trackpad is slightly off-centre, and the chiclet keycaps have very dark grey lettering on a silver background.

Laptop vendors who are guilty of putting light grey letters on their white keycaps must please take note, and stop the craze of putting low-contrast things together. Yes, HP, that’s you. Stop it.

The typing experience is good with short key travel of about 1mm. There isn’t much flex to the chassis when typing and the incline helps to keep your wrists at the correct angles. The chiclet keys are closer to 95% sized, so they’re a bit smaller than you expect. There’s noticeably less feedback from the keys around the JKL area, and the navigation key layout has Page Up and Down buttons crammed in, but this is still a very good typing experience.

I’m not a fan of the integrated power button, and in general including it on the keyboard is not the best location. But space is at a premium, so it’s a compromise that you’ll have to live with.

Opening the notebook also reveals that exhaust air from the cooler has to vent up onto the display. While this leaves surface temps on the keyboard deck and bottom chassis cooler than expected, it does mean that power-hungry workloads like video rendering may heat things up a tad. For most home-office and student or media consumption use, this is fine. If you were looking to run the laptop docked to a USB-C hub, leaving the lid closed, you may run into throttling problems.

Because of this limitation and the lack of Thunderbolt, the Swift 5 isn’t what I’d call a workstation laptop. Being unable to close the display while docked is a serious oversight for this price point.

The keyboard is fully backlit, so maybe you wouldn’t want to waste the feature by closing the display. The default BIOS settings allow the backlight to dim after 30 seconds, and you can turn this behaviour off.

The display is a matte 14-inch IPS panel with a resolution of 1920 x 1080. At 125% scaling text and graphics are sharp, although the panel itself could do with a bit more colour accuracy and brightness. Working outdoors shouldn’t be a huge problem, but avoid having the sun behind you. Acer’s displays tend to display green incorrectly, so I’d recommend using a wallpaper that doesn’t have as much green as the default.

Brightness levels are probably around 220 nits, compared to my HP G6 with a 1080p VA panel coming in at 200 nits of brightness. But I can’t see the HP’s display outdoors, so Acer does well here.

Eleven Philips head M2 5×5 screws hold the service panel on to the chassis. Clips on the edge of the service panel keep it in place, but they’re not designed to snap off when opening the laptop (cough! Lenovo cough!). There are no warranty void stickers to take note of. Acer allows you to swap out components before you even turn the Aspire 5 on! Bravo.

In terms of upgrade options, we have RAM, SSD, and the WiFi card available to end-users. 4GB of DDR4-2666 memory is soldered on to the motherboard, and the extra DIMM slot will be good for a 32GB module to slot into. The M.2 slot is a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface and only supports NVMe drives.

The WiFi module is a Mediatek MT7921, a WiFi 6-capable adapter with Bluetooth 5.0. It has Linux drivers, but this is Mediatek we’re talking about. I expect to replace this with an Intel AX210 at some point if connectivity is reported to be an issue.

There are other surprises here. The heatsink has a single large pipe directly removing heat from the CPU, and the fan pushes it out a thin fin stack. This notebook does not get hot enough to be uncomfortable, and the fan did not noticeably ramp up in my brief testing. The fan can be removed for cleaning without taking anything else apart.

Acer also includes the SATA connector for a second 2.5-inch drive, and includes all screws not just for the bracket, but also for the hard drive itself in the box.

This is such an unexpected addition that I was genuinely surprised to find it included. Nowhere on the product lists for this SKU of the Aspire 5 does it mention this. Having space for up to 4TB of additional storage space is good stuff.

In terms of hinge design, Acer gets this one right. The hinges screw into a stainless steel body that serves as the backplate for the entire laptop, not plastic. One screw on each corner also fixes the service panel to the hinge.

This gives the Aspire 5 a very rigid feeling when opening or closing the lid, and the action is very smooth. It’s not able to be opened by one hand, unfortunately.

Everything in the Aspire 5 is modular. This is a substantial change compared to previous notebooks, even those from Acer. Everything uses the same screwdriver. QR codes lead you to part numbers. The left and right speakers are detachable. The battery and CMOS battery are user replaceable.

Nothing is complicated to take apart, routing for cables is sensible, and the only thing I’d complain about is the fact that the keyboard is secured by rivets. The display can be replaced by removing the WiFi antennae, detaching the display cable from its ZIF socket, and removing four screws.

Aside from the highly integrated nature of notebook motherboards today, everything in here can be replaced easily by anyone. Assuming that the mainboard continues to work, spares will always be easy to come by.

Let’s move on to the software and BIOS, and close out this hands-on.

The integrated 720p webcam is adequate and has issues with bright backgrounds and limited exposure bracketing. Like every cheap webcam everywhere, this one is included just to tick the box.

Audio is clear, at least.

By default the notebook came with Windows 10 20H2. Being a year out of date isn’t a good thing, but I was going to blow Windows away with a clean install anyway. In terms of bloat, there’s the usual cruft – “App Explorer” from SweetLabs, Acer’s in-box apps, and then whatever the hell Norton Security “Ultra” is.

The word “Ultra” should not be thrown around as some marketing term. Either it’s the bee’s knees of antivirus suites, or it isn’t. Considering Norton 360 exists, I think the marketing department at Symantec needs to lay off the shrooms for a while.

Also, Firefox is here. That’s bizarre. Since when does Mozilla pay for product placement?

What really caught my eye was the partitioning scheme. Acer does not have their standard recovery partition here, nor do they have a separate one for their drivers. You get 99% of the available capacity on the SSD and that’s it. My only complaint is that the recovery partition is at the end of the partition table, rather than just after the EFI partition.

The BIOS is spartan. The defaults are all sane, but F12 and Network boot options are disabled by default, and Fast Boot is enabled. This isn’t a business notebook, to be fair, but enabling F12 should be done as a courtesy to IT admins who get one of these in and then need to wipe it immediately for a custom installation. Or if you want to blow away Windows and install Linux like a crazy person.

To that end, there’s two Gotchas. The first is that you must set a supervisor password in order to change any of the Secure Boot settings. And you must keep that password enabled. You can’t enter it and then disable Secure Boot either – that must always be enabled, and you will only ever have UEFI booting available to you. This makes booting distros like Arch or Mint much less straightforward. Whatever Linux distro you choose, it needs to support UEFI and Secure Boot using Microsoft’s keys.

The second issue is that you need to use Intel’s RAID drivers to boot off the NVME drive. The Windows 10 installer had no clue what to do without it, and Linux distros I briefly tested, namely Fedora 34 and Ubuntu 21.04, could not install to the drive.

This is stupid.

Acer’s decision to not give users the option to change their boot settings is extremely boneheaded, and it is exactly the same issue that I encountered in my review of the Swift 7 some years back. Intel’s RST does nothing substantially different to the regular Windows 10 and 11 NVME driver, and it definitely makes no sense to do this when someone who does end up blowing Windows away isn’t educated enough about this issue to know that they need to load the Intel RST drivers during the install.

If I buy a machine for my personal use, I need to be given all the control that this entails. As an advocate of free software, not being able to put Linux on this laptop would personally be a dealbreaker, and I know that Acer is capable of rectifying this because they have programs to support firmware for their devices not just in Linux, but they also ship laptops with Linux in developing countries.

The good value this laptop offers is tainted by Acer’s decision to lock booting to Windows OSes only. This is the kind of thing I’d love to put Fedora on, but it’s just not going to be possible.

That Computer Chip Shortage Will Be Around for Longer Than You Think

One of the more positive headlines to come out of the tech industry news cycle includes proclamations that the current chip shortage is both a temporary problem and not repeatable. Vendors like Intel, AMD, STMicro, Acer, Dell, and TSMC have all targeted 2023 as the year we return to normalcy.

That would be nice if it were true. It’s not that anyone is lying about the market’s recovery, but they are at best inaccurate about the actual date or year. The more they zone in on it, the further it seems to stretch out.

Consider the problems currently facing most suppliers with their own factories in China. They are all running at 100% capacity (or are trying to). They are all trying to keep staff working and productive. They are all trying to get people to put in overtime to keep up with demand. They have been doing this since harsh COVID-19 lockdowns lifted in affected provinces, running ragged since March 2020 because the rest of the world suddenly needed to work from home.

This potent combination of overwork and oversupply due to extreme levels of demand has created a problem for China’s power grid. The over-use of resources in the past year has started to affect the price of coal and gas that feed local power plants, and they’re building new coal plants as fast as they’re legally allowed to. They must construct additional pylons at all costs to avoid brownouts, load shedding, and grid failures, because expansion is the only way China’s economy keeps on functioning.

However, China recognises the need to reduce carbon emissions, which makes coal power unsuitable for long-term planning. So whatever they come up with now is only temporary.

Beijing moved to put a lid on the power shortages by decreeing that power utilities that rely on coal plants must increase their output, and factories must reduce their power consumption. They cannot operate on weekends. They cannot operate for an entire week, in some locations. This is in addition to other limits that are imposed on residential areas, in shopping centres, and in cities with high pollution levels. Pundits who have been watching the situation closely argue that it has been coming for a long time, but perhaps no-one could have seen it coming so quickly.

Especially not the aluminium smelters that have had to shut down operations.

Everything that could go wrong, and is currently going wrong, seems to be doing so all at the same time. China’s energy crisis is taking place at the same time as a debt bubble from housing investments looks set to burst, and international pressure mounts in response to the genocide of the Uyghurs.

The chip shortage is a small taste of the future that we’ll have to be comfortable with. Climate change, power consumption, resource availability, and the lack of truly recyclable plastics and materials is catching up with us faster than we predicted. The increasing pressure put on economies as large as China’s inevitably will affect the entire world, and they’re not the only one dealing with these issues.

Lead times for chip orders should gradually increase as the industry winds down to celebrate the Chinese Lunar new Year. Well, they didn’t.

Everywhere you look, these problems are becoming increasingly nuanced.

We can’t just solve one aspect of China’s power woes, there’s an entire chain of things that need to be fixed to support their switch to using renewables and nuclear energy to maintain growth. That chain has multiple points of failure, including the lack of political will to fix these issues. And then once that’s done there’s a water crisis to address, and a wage gap crisis, and an aging population, and a distinct inability to order computers and servers at short notice. The list just grows with each passing second.

Robin Hanson wrote in 1996 that interpretations of the Fermi Paradox lend themselves to suggesting that there is a “Great Filter” on a universal scale that dictates how and when intelligent life may eventually give rise to advanced colonisation of space. Becoming spacefaring is a future goal of humanity, we’re so close to achieving Type-1 status on the Kardashev Scale. We’re beginning to see where that threshold could be.

The Great Filter could be one or any number of things together that we need to avoid or overcome:

  • We achieve dominance across our own solar system, but nuclear war amongst ourselves is what kills us.
  • We run into multiple brick walls that prevent our advancement because our technology isn’t advanced enough, and we die through the collapse of ecosystems here on Earth.
  • We create the conditions to reach a technological singularity in general artificial intelligence, and our creation turns on us because it predicts our doom at our own hand (that’s a popular one).
  • Unkillable bacteria spreads throughout our population like wildfire (a personal favourite).

Perhaps it is the case, universally, that an intelligent, warring, and highly exploitative species being unable to responsibly consume resources – and build an efficient and effective supply chain to match – is where the filter itself lies. Having a growth mindset only works if you can grow at all.

The chip shortage and China’s power woes are going to extend things beyond 2023, but what we’re running head-first into is probably, maybe, quite likely the Great Filter. For the first time since 1983 we have several global superpowers at loggerheads with each other, each armed with intercontinental ballistic missiles equipped with nuclear warheads and armies of drone swarms.

We all agree that climate change is inevitable and a major problem. We all agree that putting all our manufacturing capabilities into one country just so that we can get cheap labour out of it is unsustainable. We all agree that not being able to buy a graphics card or a PlayStation 5 from local stores is a major problem for the computer industry. We all know how dangerously close we are to ecosystem collapse. We’re still not doing anything about it.

But anyway, that’s why you can’t get a graphics card this week. And next week. And next month. And next year.

Yikes.