Acer Aspire Vero 16 (2025) review: Acer's eco laptop is now even better for business

Slightly dull, eco-friendly, capable, and affordable – it's a formula that has served Acer's Vero line well over the past few years. We described last year's Acer Aspire Vero 16 as a PC you wouldn't call exciting, but that was solid, practical, and useful. In many respects, this year's update is no different. The design, heavy on recycled plastics, isn't going to sell the new Aspire Vero 16 to those tempted by a MacBook Air or the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition. The spec has been updated, but it's hardly cutting-edge. Yet a handful of key improvements could be enough to transform the Aspire Vero 16 from a good business laptop into a great one that's versatile enough to handle a wide range of use cases and roles.

Acer Aspire Vero 16: Design

The physical design hasn't changed much since last year, with the new Vero 16 having the same 359 x 247mm desktop footprint and 16.5mm thickness. 70% of the plastics in the shell are post-consumer recycled or formed from a bio-based oyster shell material, and the slightly mottled appearance, with yellow flecks in the grey surface, is typical of the Vero line. If anything has changed, it's that those surfaces feel smoother to the touch than on previous models, making them slightly more comfortable to rest your hands on while working long periods if you're sensitive to that kind of thing.

Plastic laptops can get a bad rap, usually thanks to poor experiences with cheap and nasty budget models that creak and bend under the slightest pressure. The Vero 16 doesn't have those problems. The base feels robust and the surfaces don't flex bar some movement in the lid. Acer still claims that the chassis meets MIL-STD-810H standards for resilience and that the laptop will remain carbon neutral throughout its lifecycle. Nor do the eco credentials end there. The 12 screws securing the lower part of the shell can be opened with a standard screwdriver, and the battery and SSD can be replaced later if you want to prolong the Vero 16's working lifespan.

One area where the Vero 16 beats more minimalist laptops is connectivity. You have two USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left, plus a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port on either side. The left-hand side also features an HDMI 2.1 output, giving you an instant hook-up to monitors, TVs, and projectors. There's even a good old-fashioned 3.5mm audio socket on the right. True, there's no Ethernet port, but with Wi-Fi 7 onboard, that arguably won't be a problem; you have scope to handle the latest wireless network standard if your office or home network has a Wi-Fi 7 access point or router.

Acer did a great job with the ergonomics last year, and hasn't fixed what wasn't broken. The keyboard is large and spacious, with a slim numeric pad. When you tilt the screen back the desk rises to a comfortable typing angle, and the large palm rests give your palms and wrists plenty of support while you work. There are some oddities, like the split left-shift and backslash key and the undersized function keys, but nothing you can't adjust to fairly quickly. We'd like an action that wasn't quite so soft and had a bit more click, but the keyboard's quiet, responsive, and consistent. The more we've used it over the last week, the more we've come to appreciate its basic, easygoing virtues.

Much the same goes for Acer's OceanGlass plastic touchpad. It doesn't feel at all luxurious, but it's reliable and gets the job done. We had a few issues with the built-in fingerprint scanner registering fingerprints during setup, with the scanner only accepting every other tap. It's been absolutely flawless during daily use, just working instantly every time we log back in.

Acer Aspire Vero 16 (2025): Display

Screen performance is pretty much the same as on last year's model, for good and bad. On the good side, it's surprisingly bright for a business laptop, reaching 432.5 nits. That makes it usable in most lighting, with the exception of direct sunlight, and helps whites look white and colors vibrant, even when you have the brightness turned down by a few notches. Color performance is also very good by business laptop standards. The IPS screen covers 99.8% of the sRGB gamut and 81.2% of DCI-P3, while the average Delta E is just 1.72. This isn't a device for creative professionals, but that doesn't mean you can't edit photos or generate AI images and get a consistent and reliable view.

And the bad stuff? As before, we'd love to see a screen this size with a QHD+ resolution; a 16-inch screen just looks sharper when it has more pixels crammed in. All the same, the 1920 x 1200 resolution and 16:10 aspect ratio make for a large and comfortable working space for productivity and communications, which is how we suspect most people will be using the Aspire Vero 16.

Acer Aspire Vero 16 (2025): Performance

Performance was arguably the biggest issue with last year's Vero 16. The first-gen Core Ultra 7 Meteor Lake chip delivered reasonable all-around speeds, but lacked the GPU and NPU performance of the newer second-gen Lunar Lake CPUs. Now we've got one of the latest Arrow Lake chips: the Core Ultra 7 255H, with six performance cores running at up to 5.1GHz and eight efficiency cores running at up to 4.4GHz, plus a further low-power cores running at up to 2.5GHz. It also has an integrated Arc 140T GPU and a 13 TOPS NPU.

The latter is still fairly weak by NPU standards, and means the Vero 16 doesn't match Microsoft's minimum Copilot+ PC requirement. That's not going to be a deal breaker for everybody, though, especially when some AI features can still use the GPU (74 TOPs) to accelerate performance, and business apps that actually use the NPU are still relatively thin on the ground.

Otherwise, performance is impressive. The Geekbench scores – 2767 single-threaded and 14800 multi-threaded – put the Vero 16 in the same league as the Asus ProArt P16 and ProArt X13, with their AMD Ryzen AI 9 processors. The Asus laptops pull ahead slightly in the PC Mark 10 benchmark, but not by a huge amount. And while the Core Ultra 7 255H isn't a 3D powerhouse, it has enough grunt for 3D applications and a little lightweight gaming. Scores of 3711 in 3DMark's TimeSpy benchmark and 3463 in the Steel Nomad Lite benchmark are not to be sniffed at. It's not a graphics or AI specialist, but the Vero 16 is a fast productivity all-rounder.

Mainstream business laptops sometimes skimp on storage, but the Vero 16 surprises here by offering plenty of it - 1TB on our review sample - and making it fast. With sequential read/write speeds of 6797MB/sec and 4848MB/sec, the SSD is speedy enough for almost anything bar advanced, multi-layered 4K video editing and compositing. If anything, it's overkill for your average business tasks.

The best news of all is on the battery life. The previous Vero 16 had already surprised us by last 15 hours in our video rundown test, but the new one surpasses that with an epic 17 hours and 16 minutes. Remember, this isn't for a device with a 14-inch screen and an energy-efficient but weedy CPU, but a device with a big 16-inch display and a beefy mainstream processor. Plus, while battery life takes a hit with the screen brightness turned up, we could still comfortably get a day's work out of the Vero 16, plus a few additional hours before it needed plugging in again.

Acer Aspire Vero 16 (2025): Is it worth it?

Unquestionably. Like previous Vero models, it's distinctive without being exciting, but the 2025 Vero 16 could work well in almost any business scenario. It's well-built and comfortable to work on with good overall performance and impressive battery life. As long as you don't need a higher resolution, the screen is one of the best we've seen on a mainstream business laptop. The old Vero 16 was already a solid, affordable option for small businesses and corporate fleets alike. The new Vero 16 is an even better choice.

Acer Aspire Vero 16 specifications