52 PCWorld MARCH 2021REVIEWS PORSCHE DESIGN ACER BOOK RS
moderately steep price tags, but they’re
much more reasonable that the $2,495
premium that 2017’s Porsche Design Book
One commanded.
A third SKU, the Porsche Design Acer
Premium Collection (AP714-51GT-76L3,
$2,000 from Acer [go.pcworld.com/20ac]),
bundles the pricier laptop with the Porsche
Design Acer Travelpack RS, an accessory pack
(available separately for $330 from Acer;
go.pcworld.com/33ac) that includes a
snazzy, angular Bluetooth mouse (with an
aluminum-framed left button that looks like a
gas pedal), a polyester laptop sleeve, and a
leather pouch and mousepad. The sleeve,
pouch, and mousepad all snap together with
hidden magnets, making for a handsome—if
pricey—way to tote the Porsche Designlaptop. (The leather smells great, too.)
At first blush, our test unit has an impressive
configuration. Intel’s new 10nm Core i5 Tiger
Lake processor promises a substantial jump in
performance over 10th-gen Ice Lake CPUs (stay
tuned for our benchmarks). Iris Xe delivers
gangbuster graphics performance for an
integrated GPU, although (as we’ll see) it’s
more oriented toward content creation than
gaming. The 8GB of RAM is adequate for most
uses, while the 512GB SSD is roomy enough
for Office and a modest media library. The
fingerprint reader will let you unlock Windows
with a fingertip swipe—although for this much
money, we would have liked to see IR facial
recognition, too. Wi-Fi 6 networking means
the Porsche will play nice with cutting-edge
routers. The state-of-the-art Thunderbolt 4The chamfered front and rear edges of the Porsche Design Acer Book RS give it a refined, understated look.