Acer TravelMate P6 14 Review: Solid performance, less-than-solid battery life

The Acer TravelMate P6 14 manages essential business tasks quite well, though more mobile workers may find its less-than-optimal battery life to be a problem.

Score: 3/5

In this review

Specifications
Design
Performance
Battery
Conclusion

Design

If you’re after a laptop that looks like it costs a packet or came from the future… then the Acer TravelMate P6 14 really isn’t going to excite you at all in any way, shape or form.

This is about the most “laptop” looking laptop I’ve tested in years, almost to the point where if you told me it was a reference design to build future products around, I’d believe you.

Then again, that’s not the point of the Acer TravelMate P6 14.

This is a business-centric laptop built much more for function than form, based around a 14 inch 2880x1800 pixel 90Hz capable OLED display with some pretty prominent bezels around the screen. Those prominent bezels also house an FHD webcam, which has a simple mechanical slider to ensure privacy when needed.

The display OLED is quite nice, however, with a 16:10 aspect ratio that again points to its pitch as a business-centric PC rather than a consumer one.

The keyboard is nicely built with a mostly silent key click on each tap, even at the speeds at which I tend to write.

There’s no particularly fancy features around its trackpad like specialised access zones or anything, but it’s functionally fine, and the use of Corning Gorilla Glass on the trackpad should mean it’ll survive more than a few bumps and knocks too.

The Acer TravelMate P6 14 comes in black and... well, that's it. Disaster Area's manager would approve, methinks.

Again, this is a machine built to impress with its business prowess, not its flashy colourful designs. That's fine, but the one downside with the all-black frame is that it picks up fingerprints like crazy, which might not make the best business impression.

One nice feature here for a business laptop is in the generous quantity of ports on offer. Around the sides you’ll find dual USB-C ports, full sized HDMI, USB-A, microSD socket and a combination microphone/headphone jack.

Compared to a device like the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip, it’s nice to see a wider array of choices here.

On the connectivity side it supports Bluetooth 5.3 and Wi-Fi 7, but if you’re more the classic Ethernet type, Acer also bundle in a USB-C Ethernet adaptor in the box.

That’s not something you see with every laptop for sure, even in the business space, where it’s typically expected you’ll have to shell out extra if you want wired networking capabilities.

Performance

The Acer TravelMate P6 14 is built around an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD storage, running Windows 11 Pro. As far as I can tell, it’s only sold in that one configuration, though that might work well within a business context where having identical configurations can be more efficient.

So how does that compare against what else you could get for this kind of money? Here I’ve only got the one Core Ultra 7 machine to compare to – the recently reviewed HP OmniBook – so I’ve thrown in a mix of other comparable systems to give you a more complete picture of how it runs across PCMark 10’s productivity benchmark, as well as 3DMark’s Time Spy:

Its PCMark 10 score is decent, which makes sense for a laptop designed for productivity work, though its GPU performance isn’t quite up to snuff.

To be fair to the Acer TravelMate P6 14, it’s never pitched as a gaming laptop where the Acer Predator is very much that kind of critter, but then the HP has the same underlying CPU/GPU and managed better here.

Where this matters isn’t so much in the arena of blasting your foes in online battle, but more if you did have work that leant more heavily on the GPU, like for example video editing.

The Acer TravelMate P6 14 runs on Windows 11 Pro with full Intel vPro certification, meaning that it’s compatible with a wide range of business-centric applications and security measures. I honestly don’t have the capability to assess that set of features, but it’s certainly present if it matters to your workflow.

You can’t have a laptop in 2024 without some level of AI on board, and for the most part this is covered off by Microsoft’s Copilot software.

I’m absolutely on the record as not being a fan of AI-generated word babbles, but I can’t ignore the fact that for a lot of business work it’s fast becoming the norm to use these kinds of features on a daily basis. If that’s you, then… yay, I guess? The Acer TravelMate P6 14 can do those kinds of AI tasks, albeit in the exact same way as every other Copilot PC to date.

Battery

Acer’s claim for the Acer TravelMate P6 14 is, by most laptop standards a moderate one at just 12 hours of battery life. Most laptops, and especially those trying to woo the business crowd tend to claim quite a bit more in this space.

Sometimes it’s wise to aim a little lower, however, because it gives you a lot more wriggle room when it comes to actual day-to-day usage. That’s absolutely the case for the Acer TravelMate P6 14, because its battery life… well, I’ll let the benchmarks tell the story.

The apps you use do utterly determine day to day battery life, but to give this some kind of comparative picture, I typically run two tests.

Firstly a “soft” battery test, looping a 1080p video at maximum brightness and moderate volume to the point of battery exhaustion on standard battery settings. Video playback is very much a solved problem for laptops, but this gives me a “best case” battery life scenario.

To compare that, I then run PC Mark 10’s Gaming Battery benchmark. This isn’t a gaming laptop, but the point here is to put the system under significantly more serious battery stress, providing an effective “worst case” battery life picture.

Here’s how the Acer TravelMate P6 14 compared within those test parameters:

With just 10.4 hours of softer video playback under its belt, the Acer TravelMate P6 14 is ultimately a little disappointing in battery life terms, especially when you consider that the similarly equipped HP Omnibook managed seven hours more in the exact same test.

It’s the same story for higher workload use too, because while gaming laptops like the Predator always have notoriously bad battery life, the Acer TravelMate P6 14 only manages two minutes more under that test scenario.

When it comes time to recharge the battery, you do so via USB-C, which means it’ll also work quite nicely with suitably powerful USB-PD chargers as well.

Acer TravelMate P6 14: Alex’s Verdict

The Acer TravelMate P6 14 is a decent machine for business purposes where a standardised kind of laptop is required, though there’s not too much here that’s all that exciting as a result.

For everyday applications it’s perfectly fine, though it’s not going to suit more mobile workers away from their desks for extended periods of time due to its lower-than-expected battery life.

Acer TravelMate P6 14: Pricing and availability

The Acer TravelMate P6 14 retails in Australia at $3,699

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