Acer Aspire Vero 16 (2025)

Introduction

The Acer Aspire Vero 16 (2025) feels more like a satisfying sequel to a film you already like, rather than one that seeks to reinvent the whole theme.

Compared to the Aspire Vero 16 (2024), there are upgrades such as a powerful Intel Core Ultra 7 255H processor, plus a new oyster-shell chassis that’s even more environmentally friendly than before.

Other than that, this is a functional big-screen laptop that’s sure to impress generalists with a 16-inch 1920×1200 IPS screen, a good port selection, solid endurance from the 53Whr battery, and good battery life for a reasonable £999 price tag.

I’ve been testing the new Aspire Vero 16 (2025) for the last couple of weeks to see if it’s one of the best laptops you can buy.

Design and Keyboard

• Oyster-shell chassis gives real environmental credentials
• Solid port selection
• Snappy keyboard and smooth trackpad

The design philosophy of Acer’s Vero lineup of laptops is well-established after several years’ worth of versions, and the Aspire Vero 16 (2025) doesn’t necessarily deviate too much from that philosophy.

This is a laptop that prioritises function over form, so it ditches classically slender frames and ultrabook-style curves. With this in mind, its chassis comes with even stronger environmentally-friendly credentials than before, with the speckled green chassis being made from oyster-shell material that makes it both carbon neutral and fully recyclable. The packaging of this Vero is also plastic-free.

Granted, it is a plasticky chassis that has some flex to it, but the 1.8kg weight of this 16-inch model at least provides some reassuring heft. It is still quite hefty to try and take around with you, especially when you can get large-screen laptops that take a few hundred grams off this figure, such as the slender LG Gram Pro 16.

A thickness of less than 20mm at least provides good room for a selection of ports. The left side houses two Thunderbolt USB-C ports, plus a USB-A and a proper HDMI port, while on the right, you get a further USB-A and a headphone jack.

Opening up the Aspire Vero 16 (2025)’s lid reveals a virtually full-size keyboard, complete with arrow keys, function row and number pad. I do feel that with this kind of layout that the number pad is a little squished up in the right corner, although it’s still useful to have. Key action feels positive under the finger, with a short and sharp travel. For after-dark working, there is also a bright white backlight you can utilise.

The trackpad here is a decent size, with a squarer shape and a slick, smooth finish for responsive tracking. The top left corner houses a fingerprint reader, meaning you don’t have to go searching for it across the keyboard, as with some other laptops.

Display and Sound

• Solid resolution across a larger screen
• Decent black level and contrast
• Middling speakers

I wasn’t necessarily expecting Acer to spring any surprises with the Aspire Vero 16 (2025)’s screen, particularly for the price. It comes with a large 16-inch 1920×1200 IPS panel with a basic 60Hz refresh rate that gets the job done with decent detail. While a higher refresh rate and an OLED panel would have been nice, this is okay.

My colorimeter measured an out-of-the-box black level of 0.15, meaning reasonable depth for an IPS screen, while the 1000:1 contrast ratio is typical and okay. Cranking the brightness up to its peak yielded worse blacks, but boosted the contrast to 1150:1.

A peak SDR brightness of 397.2 nits gives displayed images some punch, and makes the Aspire Vero 16 (2025) suitable for both indoor and outdoor use.

Colour accuracy here is fine, with 98% sRGB coverage, meaning we’ve got mainstream colours represented rather well for productivity workloads. The 81% for both the DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB means this screen is just good enough for potential use with more creative tasks, although you may want a higher resolution panel than 1920×1200 for that.

The speakers on the Aspire Vero 16 (2025) provide decent quality audio with okay definition and bass, although they are on the quieter side.

Performance

• Surprisingly excellent power
• Beefy Arrow Lake-H processor
• Fast SSD and okay RAM configuration

As well as its environmentally friendly chassis, it’s inside the Aspire Vero 16 (2025) where things get quite interesting. Acer has decided not to go for one of the Core Ultra 200V chips that are powering lots of ultrabooks, but instead for a beefier Arrow Lake-H chip in the Core Ultra 7 255H.

For reference, this is a 16-core and 16-thread processor with cores split between six Performance cores, eight Efficiency cores, and two Low-Power Efficiency cores. That’s double the cores and threads you’ll get in a Core Ultra 256V or Core Ultra 258V-powered laptop, and gives you potentially more oomph than the Ryzen 9 AI HX 370.

In running the Aspire Vero 16 (2025) through the customary Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 tests, I found it to offer some potent single-core performance that powers ahead of the Core Ultra 200V chips and largely in line with the Ryzen 9 AI HX 370. 

It’s in the multi-threaded scores where those extra cores count, making the Core Ultra 7 255H a powerful chip against AMD’s chip with fewer cores but more threads, and pulling even further ahead of the Core Ultra 200V chips.

Combine this with Intel’s Arc 140T iGPU, and you’ve also got a solid score in the 3DMark Time Spy test, making the Aspire Vero 16 (2025) a capable laptop for intense creative tasks and a bit of AAA gaming.

16GB of RAM is the bare minimum for a laptop these days, while the 1TB SSD is pleasant for capacity at this laptop’s more modest price tag. With measured read and write speeds of 6996.51MB/s and 5790.06MB/s, respectively, it’s also no slouch.

Software

• Reasonably clean Windows 11 install 
• Some Acer-specific apps pre-installed
• Not enough AI horsepower to be a Copilot+ PC

The Aspire Vero 16 (2025) comes running Windows 11, and with some strange options installed by default, such as a link to Booking.com and a Dropbox promo in the taskbar.

There are some Acer-specific apps, such as Jumpstart, which provides a link to the brand’s website, and AcerSense, which gives you access to check your system’s vitals and enable settings such as different power modes and battery charging settings. Nothing too untoward.

The Core Ultra 7 255H inside doesn’t have enough AI horsepower to make the Aspire Vero 16 (2025) a Copilot+ PC, although Microsoft’s AI assistant is there by default and can be summoned using the Copilot key on the bottom row of the keyboard

Battery Life

• Lasted for 14 hours 23 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for one to two working days

Acer hasn’t put a massive battery inside this new Aspire Vero 16, opting for a modest 53Wh cell. With this in mind, they claim up to 19 hours of runtime, which would make this a mighty efficient laptop if true.

In my testing dialling the brightness down to the requisite 150 nits and running the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery test, this Vero lasted for 14 hours and 23 minutes. That’s a respectable result. It means you’ll be able to get two or so working days out of the Vero before needing to go back to the mains.

The 65W charger is also about average in terms of putting power back into the device, taking 30 minutes to get it to 50%, while a full charge took 70 minutes.

Should you buy it?

FAQs