There's nothing more frustrating than hardware that's almost great. Whether it's a phone with a sub par screen, a tablet with poor battery life, or a laptop with a lackluster keyboard, there is no disappointment quite like the product that does everything right—you know, if you ignore the one or two crucial things that it does poorly.

Acer's Aspire S7 Ultrabook was one of those almost-great systems. For some time now, Acer has been trying to shed its image as a purveyor of bargain-basement laptops, and the well-built, attractively styled S7 was its most convincing effort yet. But two major shortcomings held the laptop back: a poor keyboard with a strange layout and shallow key travel, and a battery barely worthy of the name.

Now the S7 is back, and it's packing Intel's Haswell processors. The 2013 MacBook Air has already shown us what those chips can do for your battery life, but can they do the same thing for Acer’s Ultrabook? And does the Haswell version of the system have the same keyboard problems that the older version did?

Body, build quality, and screen

Specs at a glance: Acer Aspire S7 (2013) Screen 1920×1080 at 13.3" (166 PPI) OS Windows 8 64-bit CPU 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-4200U (Turbo up to 2.6GHz) RAM 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 (non-upgradeable) GPU Intel HD Graphics 4400 (integrated) HDD 128GB solid-state drive Networking 802.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 Ports 2x USB 3.0, HDMI, mini DisplayPort, card reader, headphones Size 12.7" × 8.8" × 0.51" (322.6 mm × 223.5 mm × 12.95 mm) Weight 2.87 lbs (1.30 kg) Battery 6280 mAh Warranty 1 year Starting price $1,399.99 Price as reviewed $1,449.99 Other perks Webcam, backlit keyboard, stereo speakers

The Haswell S7 looks and feels pretty much the same as the Ivy Bridge version. That’s a good thing—PC designs are often changed for the sake of change, and it can be difficult to find a design you like one year that isn’t changed drastically a year or two down the road. The laptop is still very thin-and-light (2.87 pounds, compared to 2.97 pounds for Toshiba’s Kirabook and 2.96 for Apple’s 13-inch MacBook Air), so it’s no trouble at all to sling it in a shoulder bag and carry it around all day.

The computer is made primarily of three different materials: glass, which coats the screen and is used on the lid of the laptop; aluminum, which is used around the edge of the screen and for the palmrest and keyboard area; and plastic, which is used for the bottom of the computer. While it’s not quite as sturdy as the aluminum unibody construction of the MacBook Air—both the lid and the bottom of the laptop bend and flex under pressure—it’s still very good. In fact it's good enough to make you forget about the cheap plasticky stuff that Acer (and, to be fair, every other PC OEM) put out at the low end of the market.

The laptop’s white glass lid is especially striking, and it’s unique among the mostly metal or plastic lids used by other similar laptops. The glass on both sides of the lid is Gorilla Glass 2, so it should stand up to scratches, cracks, and chips as well as most phone and tablet screens do. However, using glass for the lid still makes me just a little nervous—I’ve seen enough screens cracked from rough handling during air travel that a lid made of the same stuff gives me pause.

Everything on the other side of the lid is pretty close to ideal. The S7’s screen is still a 13.3-inch, 1920×1080 IPS panel with 166 pixels-per-inch, and it’s bright and clear and colorful. The viewing angles are likewise excellent, and colors shift very little even when you’re looking at it from extreme horizontal or vertical angles. The bottom bezel is perhaps a bit thicker than it needs to be—Toshiba’s Kirabook crams a 13.3-inch screen into a laptop that is smaller in depth and width (12.44 by 8.15 inches for the Kirabook, compared to 12.7 by 8.8 for the S7)—but otherwise this is one of the nicest screens you can get in an Ultrabook.

The one potential issue with the screen has nothing to do with the screen itself but with Windows. At 13 inches, a 1080p screen is just dense enough that you’ll probably need to turn on Windows’ desktop scaling to make some items readable. As we’ve seen before, the results can be inconsistent (even in Windows 8.1). If you’re sticking to the Start screen and apps from the Windows store, scaling is more predictable and generally better-looking, though the paucity of apps in the Windows Store makes living entirely in that environment difficult (especially on a full-fledged laptop).

Density issues aside, the touchscreen is accurate and responsive, and the hinge is rigid enough that you don’t tilt the screen just by interacting with it. There’s no undue wobbling, but it’s still possible to lift the screen up without having to hold the base of the laptop down. The weight of the all-glass lid is enough to shut itself if it’s open at too shallow an angle, but in actual use this doesn’t really cause any problems. Like the Ivy Bridge version, this S7’s hinge will open to a 180-degree angle.

The port layout is altered slightly from the Ivy Bridge model, and the changes are all smart ones. The left side now houses the power jack, power button, one USB 3.0 port, and the SD card slot. The right side is home to a headphone jack, another USB 3.0 port, a full-size HDMI port, and mini DisplayPort.

This altered layout fixes three things we disliked about the last model. First, putting the edge-mounted power button closer to the hinge of the laptop makes it more difficult to bump the button accidentally. Second, having one USB port on each side rather than both on one side gives you access to at least one port even if one side of the laptop is blocked for some reason. Third, having both a full-size HDMI out and a mini DisplayPort out makes it much easier to connect the S7 to external displays than the previous model’s lone micro HDMI port. Micro HDMI is also rarer than either full HDMI or mini DisplayPort when it comes to cables and adapters.

Acer’s reviewers guide also says that the new S7 has a quieter fan, and the laptop does seem to stay relatively cool and quiet even under sustained load. In a room with light background noise, the laptop was basically inaudible while I was writing, Web browsing, and battery life testing. (You can still expect audible fan noise if you’re exporting video or gaming for hours at a stretch though.) The bottom of the laptop is largely unadorned—its flat, white polycarbonate is only broken up by its four rubber feet and its two Dolby-branded stereo speakers. These are acceptable for casual use but are tinny and lack bass, just like most other laptop speakers.

Keyboard and trackpad

The S7’s keyboard was its worst aspect in the Ivy Bridge version, and while the situation is slightly better this time around, it’s still far from our favorite Ultrabook keyboard.

The first and largest problem is still the keyboard’s strange layout, with its lack of a dedicated row for function keys and its squished little caps lock key (seriously, when you spend a big chunk of your day in the Ars virtual office, you need quick and reliable access to your caps lock key at all times). It’s not for lack of space, either—there’s a wide swath of unused palmrest above the keyboard.

The S7 used to come in both 11-inch and 13-inch flavors that used this same keyboard. While the keyboard was obviously built to fit more snugly in the smaller 11-inch chassis, one could at least see the rationale for using the same keyboard in both models to reduce component costs. Acer tells me that it has no plans to release a Haswell version of the 11-inch model, so sticking with this same keyboard in a laptop that could easily fit a larger, better one is particularly befuddling.

A second, less pressing issue is the keyboard’s dim, bluish backlight. It’s better than nothing, but it’s still uneven just as it was in the Ivy Bridge version of the laptop. Even changing the backlight’s color from blue to white would help make the letters stand out a bit more from the silver plastic keys.

What does feel better is the key travel, which was very shallow and unsatisfying in the first version of the S7. It feels a bit better here (Acer says it increased the travel from 1.0mm to 1.3mm). It’s still a Chiclet keyboard, but once you get used to the layout quirks it actually doesn’t feel too bad to type on. I wrote a big chunk of this review on the S7’s keyboard, and after the couple of days it took for me to ramp up to my normal speed and accuracy, I actually found the keyboard to be decent. It does occasionally seem to miss letters, but that may be a problem with me and not with the keyboard. It’s not quite a keyboard I can love, but it’s one I can live with.

The trackpad is in a similar boat, even with the latest drivers from the Acer support site installed. It’s fairly accurate and not bad with things like two-finger scrolling and the Windows 8 trackpad gestures. It behaves less well when presented with other multitouch gestures—clicking and dragging, for example, can sometimes be problematic, and we occasionally had issues with palm rejection. These trackpad woes are all things that Windows users should (unfortunately) be used to by now.

Software

Perhaps tired of our constant complaints about bloatware, Acer shipped me the Microsoft Signature version of the Haswell S7 for review. As we’ve written, this means that the laptop comes with only Windows 8, all the drivers the laptop needs to work properly, and the Windows Essentials apps installed (there’s also an Acer tool installed to create factory install media, which can be dismissed or uninstalled by creating media or by uninstalling it). While there’s still an “Acer Picks” section of the Windows Store, downloading and installing any of it is left up to the user (as well it should be).

Raging about pre-installed bloatware is passe at this point, especially for our audience—many of you have the know-how you need to install a fresh copy of Windows yourself anyway. It’s way more of a treat than it should be to get a Windows laptop that just runs Windows when you take it out of the box, and it’s sort of ridiculous that you need to buy systems straight from Microsoft to get that from most of the OEMs. The PC makers could add a lot of value for their users if they’d just stop trying to add so much value.