Acer isn’t as popular in enterprise circles as Dell, HP, or Lenovo, but it’s been in the market for a long time, and the TravelMate series has its merits. Recently, I took the TravelMate P6 14 AI with me on the road, and while it’s not exactly flashy, it should fit right in at your next business meeting.
I tested a 14-inch version based on Intel’s latest Core Ultra line that comes in what Acer calls Galaxy Black. The top cover is carbon fiber, and the bottom is a magnesium-aluminum alloy. It measures 12.37 by 9.04 by 0.75 to 0.82 inches and weighs 2.39 pounds (3.07 pounds with the included 65-watt charger). Lately, I’ve seen a few laptops with smaller GaN chargers, but overall, this is among the lightest 14-inch laptops I’ve carried.
It has a 1,920-by-1,200 (WUXGA) display with up to 400 nits of brightness, and this looked quite good. The webcam and IR sensor are located in the top bezel, which is a bit thicker than on some current machines, but still not a problem. The keyboard has 1.55mm of travel and a dedicated Copilot key, but unfortunately, no indicator light on the mute key. (Dell machines typically don’t have one either; HP and Lenovo do. It’s a trivial feature, but one I miss when it’s not there.) All in all, it feels like a very solid modern laptop.
It also has a good selection of ports. The left side has an HDMI 2.1 socket, a USB-A port, and two USB-C/Thunderbolt ports, while the right side has a locking slot, another USB-A, and an audio jack. I would prefer to have USB-C/Thunderbolt on both sides, as it would make for more convenient charging, but I’ve only seen that on a couple of machines.
Performance
The version I tested had an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, close to the top end of the Lunar Lake family. This processor has four performance cores and four efficiency cores, with a base speed of 2.2GHz and a peak turbo of 4.8GHz. It also has Intel Arc Graphics, 32GB of memory, and support for Intel’s vPro enterprise manageability.
I’ve seen this chip or the Core Ultra 7 268V (which has a slightly higher top clock speed) in most of the Intel-based enterprise laptops I’ve tested this year, and the TravelMate P6 reported similar benchmark results. In other words, it’s quite speedy at most things, especially for a very light laptop. Though in general, laptops based on the latest AMD Ryzen AI 9 series (Strix Point) do better on very heavily multithreaded tests.
On my toughest tests, transcoding a video in Handbrake took an hour and 52 minutes—not a very good time, even considering that recent Lunar Lake laptops seem to have gotten much slower at this, probably due to some OS-level changes. But on Excel, it calculated a very complex data table model in 38 minutes, one of the fastest times I’ve seen.
On AI tests, it also did reasonably well, in some cases a little faster than other Lunar Lake machines I’ve tested on Procyon’s AI Image Generation and Computer Vision tests, and running local versions of Stable Diffusion and Llama 3.1 using LM Studio. But note that Ryzen laptops do notably better on these tests. It’s a Copilot+ PC, and all those features—Studio Effects, Image Creator, and Live Captions with translation—worked well.
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Despite the low weight, battery life was quite good. On PCMark 10’s Modern Office test, it lasted over 27 hours at 100 nits of brightness, one of the best scores I’ve seen. In real-world traveling, I was able to use it for two days without charging it, with Wi-Fi on, but the machine in “Best Efficiency” mode.
AV and Applications
The biggest downsides are the video and audio features. Although it has a 5M 2,880-by-1,800 webcam, in practice, it didn’t seem quite as sharp as the ones on some of the other leading machines. Despite “Ultra boost” speakers, a triple microphone array, and a PurifiedVoice application designed to enhance the sound of your voice, I thought the sound quality was acceptable but not ideal.
The machine comes with a QuickPanel app that opens when you start the webcam. This includes Acer’s PurifiedView, which uses the NPU to enhance your image through some basic controls. However, most people will probably use the tools built into their web conferencing apps or Windows Studio Effects.
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It has the security features I’ve come to expect on modern laptops, including what Acer calls UserSensing 2.0. This uses the IR sensor to detect people, so it can lock the screen when you move away from it and log you back in with Windows Hello when you return.
It has some unusual applications, mostly bundled together in the TravelMateSense app, which you can get to by just pressing a dedicated “A” key near the upper right-hand corner of the keyboard. Perhaps the most important features deal with security, including a USB device filter, a file shredder, Acer ProShield to encrypt individual files, and a personal secure drive for storing more sensitive information. (You can also get to these functions directly through the ProShield app.) An “Experience Zone” has a number of applications, such as Vision Art, which provides AI-generated wallpaper.
From the TravelMateSense app, you can download Acer Assist, an AI chatbot that uses a local large language model. You select a dataset based on a folder on your PC, and the system indexes it and uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation to let you ask questions about it, apparently using Microsoft’s Phi-3.5 model. I’ve seen similar applications on HP and Lenovo laptops this year, and it’s an interesting idea because by running the models locally, they could theoretically be more secure. But in practice, the models usually seem to be well behind what you’ll find on the open web.
Acer Assist is also supposed to help you better understand your machine, but in practice, this was hit or miss. For instance, it told me that to turn on dark mode, I should turn the brightness down on the screen. (The actual control is in the Settings app.) I’m still not convinced that any vendor has this working very well right now.
The version I tested had 32GB, which is packaged with the processor, and a 1TB SSD. It has a list price of $1,999.99, but I see it for as little as $1,691 on Newegg as I write this. While none of the high-end laptops are inexpensive, this is a good price for this level of configuration.
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Michael J. Miller
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