Acer's $169 Windows 10 Laptop Brings Microsoft's New OS To The Ultra-Cheap Sector

Acer has taken the wraps off its new Aspire One Cloudbook series, which offers Windows 10 laptops at the price of a decent Chromebook.

Announced on Tuesday, the laptops come in 11 and 14-inch screen sizes, with the options of 16GB and 32GB storage for the smaller model and 32GB and 64GB for the larger model. The headline feature, however, is the price: the 11-inch model starts at $169, while the 14-inch model starts at $199. North America will receive the 11-inch model in August and 14-inch model in September, while Europe will receive the 11-inch model in September and the 14-inch model in October.

While they are full-fledged computers, the low onboard storage means the laptops are ideal for those looking to primarily use cloud-based services in their day-to-day work. The laptops come with a one-year subscription to Office 365 and 100GB of Microsoft OneDrive online storage, support for which is baked into Windows 10.

The laptops are also ready for voice assistant Cortana, with two microphones for better voice recording quality. Both laptops have 1366 x 768 screens, 2GB RAM and Intel Celeron processors. In terms of connectivity, they come with HDMI, SD card, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 slots.

Windows 10 has so far seen widespread adoption, with up to 1500 installations per second and over 18 million devices currently running the software. The new operating system supports universal apps, which means that apps will be able to run anywhere where Windows 10 is installed, even on mobile phones.

Microsoft is betting on cloud services, like the Office 365 subscription included with Acer's laptops, as the foundation for its future.