Everybody needs a little laptop in their lives, the kind that doesn’t cost too much but will happily let you get on with invoicing, planning, putting together presentation decks and sitting in interminable video meetings. If that laptop happens to come with more than the average amount of recycled materials in its construction, then all the better.
Acer’s 2025 Vero 16 is just that laptop, and can be picked up from the Acer Store, down from $749.99 to $649.99, right now (or £250 at Currys if you live in the UK).
The cost of the Vero 16 isn’t huge to begin with, so getting that extra money off might well tip it into affordability territory for students or freelance creatives who are looking for a second machine.
When we think of a laptop for creatives, we often think of something with a great big GPU attached that can fly through graphics work and get a bit hot doing so. The Vero is not that laptop, though it can hold its own and is one of the few machines using Intel’s integrated graphics solution that managed to complete every test in the Creative Bloq benchmark suite. It just did it a little more slowly than some other computers.
So the Vero is a versatile laptop that can be put to work in Photoshop and Premiere Pro (though you’re not going to see top speeds in Blender or AutoCAD) if you need it to, but that’s not its big selling point. Instead, the Vero trades on its eco credentials, and as such provides a list of the recycled materials used in its construction.
Carbon neutral zone
This extends from recycled plastic (70% of the chassis, 50% of the keycaps and power adapter) to there being a small amount of ‘bio-based oyster shell’ material in its own shell. Acer is “committed to carbon neutrality throughout its lifecycle”, something which is revealed in the small print to involve carbon credits. To underline this, it reverses its R and E keys and colours them green, and there's a custom ‘For the Planet’ logo on the screen as it starts up. Little green feet underneath and a green shutter over the webcam complete the look. Otherwise, it’s a fashionable shade of grey, with little yellow flecks if you look close enough - the shell has a unique texture too, rougher than many other laptops, especially those hewn out of metal, and with a bit of flex in the chassis if you hold it by the corner.
Battery life is decent, at just under 12 hours of constant video playing, though this will go down if you start really stressing the laptop by making it work hard, and the combination of reasonable processing power, a nice 16 inch 1920 x 1200 IPS screen that’s plenty colourful enough for most uses, and the price - made even better by the current money-off deal - means it all adds up to an excellent laptop for all the office tasks, emails and pitch decks you need to work on.
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