 By a qualifying Intel product and get entered in the Intel Dynamic Ticket Giveaway for a chance to win great prizes. Visit IntelGamingPromo.com to learn more. Welcome to one of the unboxings that I am most excited about. We've actually got quite a few products in the unboxing queue right now, but this one, yeah, this one jumped the queue. Because I am stoked to check it out. Now I saw this already once at Computex 2013, but this is the next generation Haswell based Acer Aspire S7 392. Now, you might be saying, Linus, really? You're getting excited about an Acer notebook? No, that was the old Acer. The Acer that didn't build things that were absolutely drool worthy. For a long time, I was afraid that if I needed a notebook, I was going to have to buy a MacBook. Because there was no one else building anything that was very compelling. Not true anymore. The original S7 has been my companion for the last few months, but I did have some complaints about it. Number one, battery life ain't that hot. You had to use an extended battery life to get what I really consider to be acceptable, sort of seven to eight hour, maybe nine hour sometimes, battery life out of it. Not that impressive. It's also quite loud. The keyboard has an extremely short key travel, which you have to kind of understand because it's extremely slim and the touchpad is a little bit finicky. All right. All of those complaints. They're addressed. So this is officially in my mind, at least from sort of from my usage case, because I don't need the power. This is as good as it gets for me. So, ah, OK, let's open this up. So first of all, it comes with a little sort of, you know, fake leathery carrying case. So this looks like it actually hasn't changed since the last gen. There you go. Side by side comparison looks pretty similar. All right. Next up, we've got a little quick start guide, whatever Windows 8. OK, if you haven't used Windows 8 before, I do actually recommend checking it out. We've got the notebook itself, which is actually slimmer than the old one, even, which is kind of cool. The power adapter has actually been changed quite a bit. So it comes first of all with the final run, the thin DC wire that goes into the notebook itself, which has been altered. So the older one had a very fragile connector and a very sort of small plug. This one has the same small, fragile connector, but a slightly different shaped plug. So that much has been changed, at least. Also, the shape of the power brick itself has been altered, too. So it comes with little adapter pieces that you can go ahead and plug into that as well as into the wall piece here, which is quite large. The older one just had a standard wall plug. So not quite so bulky and then had more of a flat pack style power brick. The only problem I had with the old one, though, was that this didn't connect very well, at least on my sample anyway. So it sometimes would come out. But at any rate, so they've changed that sort of more tubular design. All right. And that's pretty much it in terms of included accessories. There's a quick start guide, your Windows Koa, and then on to the notebook itself. So the old one actually included an extended battery because Acer must have known that the battery life just wasn't good enough on its own. The new one does not need to include any such thing. So Acer uses Gorilla Glass on the top of the notebook itself. They're actually the first ones to make Gorilla Glass anything other than aesthetic, as far as I can tell, with the original S7. So Gorilla Glass offers improved rugged ability, more resistance to damage from things like flexing or dropping or scratching, anything like that. Then let's go ahead and have a look at the overall slimness. So they've actually made it slightly slimmer. Although when I pulled out my 391 at Computex and held it up side by side with the 392, it was awfully hard to tell. So here, let's go ahead and put them side by side there. Wow, they actually kind of start to add up in terms of weight once you start stacking them like that. So anyway, there you go. So it is slightly slimmer than the old one. It uses the same aluminum unibody design, which in addition to the Gorilla Glass gives it enough strength that you can't actually flex the thing too much. In spite of its slimness and the hinge is what they're calling their dual torque hinge. So I actually do really like the hinge on this notebook. You can see it opens up slightly more than 180 degrees, which I did find myself using from time to time. So, you know, just walking around holding it like this, it's almost like a tablet in terms of its lightness as well as in terms of its size. So it's a 13.3 inch display. It's 1080p in North America. However, it's 2560 by 1440 by default in Europe, you lucky dogs, which I would love to have. Once we open it up, we actually find one of the other upgrades. So right here, I hope you guys are able to see this, but I'm not sure if you'll be able to. But the keys have a deeper travel. So the aluminum around the keyboard is actually indented, whereas on the old one, it actually was indented, but it was much less. So that gives a more satisfying tactile response to the keys. In fact, you can hear the difference. And they have also revised the touchpad to be slightly less twitchy when you are double clicking or whatever else. You can also see that because they've reached the battery life target set out by Intel, the ultrabook branding is now on the new S7, whereas the old one was not technically an ultrabook, even though it was a very, very slim notebook. It uses the same EL backlit keyboard, so it only lights up in situations where you need it and it has a very satisfying blue glow. And in terms of I.O., they haven't really changed much to speak of. So over here, we've got a mini display port as well as HDMI, full size HDMI. Oh, that's kind of cool. OK, they've changed a lot. This is better. One USB 3.0 port on this side, a headphone microphone combo jack. Then over on the other side, we've got an SD card reader now. Oh, no, the old one had a card reader. OK, OK, I forgot about that. Another USB 3.0 port, the on off switch as well as the power input. They've changed the cooling, but I can already tell the new one runs a little bit warmer than the old one. So basically, Acer has tuned the cooling internally with what they're calling their twin air cooling design. And because Haswell has lower power consumption, because Haswell does run cooler, they've also tuned the fans to be significantly quieter. But it seems like it does run a little bit warmer, particularly here right in the middle of the back. The back uses a plastic composite material where you're going to find two stereo speakers as well as air intakes. And other than that, it is extremely clean and simple looking, just like the old one, except that I have that add on battery pack sort of strapped on there in terms of other upgrades to the specs. So, yeah, it's Haswell and you can get it with either a 4200U or a 4500U. But they've also got either 4 gig or 8 gig RAM options. They've got RAID 0 SSD. It's funny to me to see manufacturers moving towards RAID 0 because it's just, I mean, it decreases reliability. However, with solid state storage, it's less likely to be damaged in a drop or whatever else like that. Like there's kind of arguments for or against. But RAID 0 is a more complicated configuration. And it is not something that I really feel that strongly positive about, to be perfectly honest. But either way, it's got RAID 0 in either a 128 or 256 gig configuration and it will give better performance, particularly for SSDs. And B-roll is leaning on my thing there. It's got a dual array mic now. So that means it should be able to pick out your voice when you're using it for voice communication or video communication or whatever else. And it supports wide eye now. So Acer is quoting a 7 to 8 hour battery life for this guy, which puts it right in line with where the old one was, maybe a little bit below the old one with the weird bulky battery wart that sticks out of the bottom. So there you have it, guys. The notebook that I personally like more than anything else that's out there. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos. Let me know in the comments what you thought of the video. What you think of the Aspire S7 392. Is this the new Acer that you would consider using? Or can you not sort of lose them in your mind as sort of that commodity machine builder? And last but not least, like the video if you liked it and dislike it if you disliked it. Later.