Steven Merrill

Project Gaming Chromebook: What a difference 8 years makes

This is the first post in my Project Gaming Chromebook series in which I chronicle getting a refurbished Acer 516 GE and turning it into the ultimate beater laptop.

In mid-2016 I had just started at a new gig and I got the premiere web dev machine at the time, the final iteration of the pre-Touch Bar (thank goodness) 15" Retina MacBook Pro. That machine had great specs for the time:

It cost about $2000 new; the only upgrade available was a dedicated AMD graphics card, and since I was going to primarily be doing web dev / cloud infra, I didn't need that.

That machine served me quite well until about 4 years later when I swapped it out for a much more powerful Dell mobile workstation running Linux so that I could run native Docker setups at maximum speed.

Fast-forward 8 years after I got that MacBook Pro to 2024. I was looking for a computer that I could throw into a bike bag and not be worried if it got a scratch or a dent. I found a listing for an Acer 516 GE, one of a few models of gaming Chromebooks. I was quite impressed with the specs, especially for the price. For $290.05 on eBay you could get a reburished model with the following specs:

The Acer 516 GE benchmarks about 173% higher than the MacBook Pro based on multiple assessments. I'm quite impressed at the value for the money!

It's not perfect; the screen is lower quality than the MacBook's excellent display (although it is 120 Hz, which I consider a requirement for computers I get these days) and it has half as much RAM.

That said, it fits the niche of "computer I don't feel bad throwing into my bike pannier" quite nicely, and the value for the money is off the charts. Dear reader, I wrote this very post on said gaming Chromebook while enjoying a coffee at my local coffee shop. In future installments of this series I'll discuss putting Linux on it and getting around a few of its limitations.