Expert's Rating
Pros
- Long battery life
- Light and portable
- A good price for a business laptop
Cons
- Keyboard is a t ad mushy
- No NPU for future Windows AI features
- Consumer laptops deliver similar specs for a lower price
Our Verdict
The Acer TravelMate P6 offers excellent value for a business laptop, with long battery life, a surprisingly light weight, and more ports than a typical consumer laptop.
The Acer TravelMate P6 is a business laptop through and through. It’s packed with ports, delivers long battery life, is surprisingly lightweight, and has a nice matte screen designed to avoid glare in normally uncomfortable lighting conditions.
It’s a nice and supremely practical piece of hardware, and I’d be happy to get a machine like this from my job. Starting at a retail price of $1,329, it’s a bargain as far as business laptops go, especially if a workplace is getting a discount for buying a bunch at once! But if you’re just looking to buy a single laptop for your own personal use, a consumer laptop may be better bet.
Looking for more options? Check out PCWorld’s roundup of the best laptops.
Acer TravelMate P6: Specs
IDG / Chris Hoffman
IDG / Chris Hoffman
<div class="scrim" style="background-color: #fff" aria-hidden="true"></div>
</div></figure><p class="imageCredit">IDG / Chris Hoffman</p></div>The Acer TravelMate P6 comes with 16 GB of RAM, 1 TB of solid-state storage, and an Intel Core i5-1335U CPU. This is one of Intel’s 13th-generation Raptor Lake CPUs, released in 2023. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The latest Meteor Lake CPUs are more focused on power efficiency and AI performance.
The latest Meteor Lake CPUs aren’t necessarily faster, but you are missing out on the neural processing unit (NPU) found in the latest Meteor Lake CPUs. These will make it possible to run more AI features locally on your own PC hardware rather than relying on the far-off cloud servers that power features like Microsoft Copilot today. Rumor is that Windows will soon take much better advantage of NPUs to deliver all sorts of AI features. And there’s no NPU here.
- CPU: Intel Core i5-1335U
- Memory: 16GB LPDDR5 RAM
- Graphics/GPU: Intel Iris Xe
- Display: 14-inch 1920×1200 display with a 16:10 aspect ratio and 60Hz refresh rate
- Storage: 1TB PCIe NVMe SSD
- Webcam: 1080p webcam with privacy shutter
- Connectivity: 2x USB Type-C (Thunderbolt 4 / USB4 40Gbps with DisplayPort over USB-C, Power Delivery), 1x USB Type-A (USB 3.2 Gen 1), HDMI 2.1, microSD card reader, headphone jack, Kensington lock slot
- Networking: Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3
- Biometrics: IR camera for Windows Hello facial recognition, fingerprint reader
- Battery capacity: 65 Watt-hours
- Dimensions: 12.34 x 8.93 x 0.79 inches
- Weight: 2.65 pounds
- MSRP: $1,329 as tested
Acer TravelMate P6: Design and build quality
IDG / Chris Hoffman
<div class="lightbox-image-container foundry-lightbox"><div class="extendedBlock-wrapper block-coreImage undefined"><figure class="wp-block-image size-large enlarged-image"><img decoding="async" data-wp-bind--src="selectors.core.image.enlargedImgSrc" data-wp-style--object-fit="selectors.core.image.lightboxObjectFit" src="" alt="Acer TravelMate closed lid" class="wp-image-2306592" width="1200" height="904" loading="lazy" /></figure><p class="imageCredit">IDG / Chris Hoffman</p></div> </div></figure><p class="imageCredit">IDG / Chris Hoffman</p></div>The Acer TravelMate 6’s design is pretty simple: Black with squared off edges and slightly rounded corners. Nothing too crazy or unusual, a workhorse of a laptop with nothing particularly unusual about it. It’s a workhorse. The name “Acer” appears in silver below the screen, and there’s also an “Acer” badge on the back of the laptop, but that’s extremely understated.
This laptop is quite light thanks to the magnesium-aluminum alloy that makes up its chassis. At just 2.65 pounds, it’s nice and easy to pick up and throw in a bag. (It’s only a tiny bit heavier than the famously lightweight and much more expensive Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, which weighs 2.42 pounds.) There’s a little bit of flex to the screen and case, but nothing that seems bad. In fact, that flex may help the laptop stand up to life on the road.
Acer touts the TravelMate 6’s ruggedness — it’s MIL-STD 810H-tested and Acer says the ports are reinforced with additional metal brackets to hold up wear and tear. It also includes an “Acer Dust Defender” feature that will reverse the laptop’s fans every six hours of use to prevent dust buildup. (At peak performance, when the fans are needed, Dust Defender won’t interrupt anything, it’ll wait until later).
While this laptop may not look particularly exciting in a photo, it has a classic design that fades into the background, and that light weight is very nice.
The included promotional software is a little disappointing. Out of the box, for example, a Dropbox promotion is pinned to the taskbar. One of the benefits of business laptops is that they tend to provide a stripped-down selection of included promotional apps, and the included software is on the busy side for a business laptop. Of course, this is something you can uninstall very easily.
Acer TravelMate P6: Keyboard and trackpad
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