Acer Chromebook 15 CB315

Updated on June 3, 2026

The Acer Chromebook 15 CB315 (CB315-1HT) is a 2018-vintage 15.6-inch Chromebook that has aged into a specific niche: an existing unit still on someone’s desk, with an Auto Update Expiration date of June 2027 that keeps ChromeOS security patches arriving for roughly another year. The hardware is an Intel Celeron N3350 “Apollo Lake” paired with 4GB of LPDDR4 and 64GB of eMMC, a 1920x1080 IPS touchscreen, a full-size keyboard with a dedicated numeric keypad, two USB-C ports (with DisplayPort and charging) alongside two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, and a fanless plastic chassis weighing 3.97 pounds. New-condition retail stock is no longer in active circulation; this page is now primarily an owner reference, with the original list price ($279.99) retained as a spec marker rather than a buy recommendation.

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Acer Chromebook 15 CB315 Comparison Chart

	Acer Chromebook 15 CB315
Price	List Price: $279.99 Amazon Prices: Check Price on Amazon
Model number	CB315-1HT-C4RY / NX.H09AA.002
Performance Rating	2.8
Chromebook Plus	No
Processor	Dual-core 1.10 Ghz (max 2.40 Ghz) Intel Celeron N3350
RAM	4 GB
Internal Storage	64 GB eMMC
Screen Size	15.6"
Screen Resolution	1920x1080
Screen Type	IPS
Touch Screen	Yes
Stylus / Pen	No Stylus Support
Dimensions width x length x thickness	15 x 10.1 x 0.79 inches (381 x 256.54 x 20.07 mm)
Weight	3.97 lbs (1.8 kg)
Backlit Keyboard	No
Webcam	1280x720
WiFi	802.11 a/b/g/n/ac
Bluetooth	Bluetooth 4.0
Ethernet	No
Cellular Modem	No
HDMI	No HDMI
USB Ports	2 USB 3, 2 USB-C (with DisplayPort and charging)
Thunderbolt Ports	No
Card Reader	microSD Card Reader
Battery	3 cell, 4670 mAh, Lithium Ion
Battery Life	10.0 hours
Fanless	Yes
Auto Update Expiration Date	June, 2027

What the CB315-1HT actually was

Acer released the CB315-1H (non-touch) and CB315-1HT (touch) in mid-2018 as the budget half of its 15.6-inch Chromebook strategy. The premium half, the CB515-1HT, used a Pentium N4200 and a brushed-aluminum chassis at around $399. The CB315-1HT sat one tier down: Intel Celeron N3350, plastic body, and an MSRP of $279.99. Both shared the 15.6-inch Full HD IPS panel and the same fanless thermal approach, but the CB315 was the configuration aimed at price-sensitive students, libraries, and family-room couches rather than the office-laptop crowd.

The Celeron N3350 is a 14nm dual-core Apollo Lake part with a 1.1 GHz base and a 2.4 GHz burst clock, two cores, two threads, and a 6W SDP. That is enough silicon to drive Chrome, render a small handful of tabs, and play YouTube, but not enough to keep up with the way ChromeOS has evolved since 2018: PWAs, Android apps, and the optional Linux container all assume more memory and more cores than the N3350 supplies. Side by side with a modern N100 or N150, the gap is not subtle; an N100 has four cores at roughly three times the multi-thread throughput.

The display, by contrast, is the part of the package that aged best. A 1920x1080 IPS panel was already above class in 2018, when most budget Chromebooks still shipped 1366x768 TN screens, and seven years later it still reads as the right resolution for a 15.6-inch laptop. The matte finish reduces glare in fluorescent-lit rooms, and the IPS technology delivers viewing angles that a TN equivalent simply cannot match.

What the reviewers actually said

Editorial coverage of the CB315-1HT in 2018 was thin: most press attention went to the aluminum CB515-1HT sibling. Two YouTube reviews on this page cover the device directly, and they agree on the same headline points.

Now & Then Tech framed it as a step up from smaller Chromebooks rather than a competitor to a real laptop. The reviewer called out the size and keyboard as the central wins: “it’s a 15.6 inch Chromebook, much larger display, and in fact now comes with a full keyboard as well, which is sick.” The verdict was conditional rather than enthusiastic: “for those looking for a new Chromebook or looking for a Chromebook just larger in size, this should be a good default.” The two cons that came up repeatedly in the review were the front-facing camera, which the reviewer dismissed as poor for video calls, and the speakers: “sound output is not great at all.” The reviewer also noted a small ergonomic quirk: the bezel around the touchscreen has a slight groove that makes hitting the very corners of the panel awkward when trying to close a window with a finger.

Milo B. came at it from the opposite direction: longer-term use rather than first impressions. The display gets the strongest praise: “the colors pop, it gets very bright, and this is also a touchscreen, which is quite amazing to see on the screen this size.” The port layout drew an unprompted endorsement: “whenever I see two USB-C, two USB Type-A, I’m happy; I don’t need anything more.” The trackpad, historically a weak point on budget Chromebooks, also surprised: “the trackpad is actually better than most of the other ones I’ve used.” The video is light on cons (the reviewer is candid that there isn’t much they want to complain about for the price), which is worth noting as a caveat rather than a contradiction; it lines up with the Now & Then Tech take on the screen and ports while saying less about performance limits.

Read together, the two reviews describe the same machine: a usable 15.6-inch Chromebook with a good panel, a useful port layout, a numeric keypad most laptops at any price tier omit, and budget compromises on the camera and speakers. Neither reviewer pushed it as a heavy-lifting device, and neither suggested it could replace a more powerful laptop.

Build, ports, and the desk-replacement angle

The CB315-1HT is not a portable in any meaningful sense. At 3.97 pounds, a 15-inch width, and a 0.79-inch profile, it is heavier than most 13-inch laptops and roughly the size of a budget consumer laptop from the same year. Acer leaned into that with a layout that treats the 15.6-inch chassis as a feature rather than a limitation: the full-size keyboard includes a dedicated numeric keypad, the speakers are top-firing grilles flanking the keys, and the trackpad sits below an island layout rather than a tiled one.

Port-wise the loadout is genuinely good for a 2018 budget Chromebook. The two USB-C ports both support charging and DisplayPort output, which means a single dock or hub can drive an external monitor and provide power, leaving the two USB 3.0 Type-A ports free for legacy peripherals. A microSD reader sits on the right edge, useful for both transferring photos and (in a pinch) expanding the otherwise modest 64GB of eMMC storage. The omissions, which were standard for the budget tier at the time, are HDMI (handled instead via USB-C DisplayPort), an Ethernet jack (which a USB ethernet adapter can substitute for), and a backlit keyboard. WiFi is 802.11ac, which still works on every consumer router shipping today, and Bluetooth is the older 4.0 spec.

The fanless design is one of the genuinely durable wins. There is no fan to clog with dust, no fan to wear out, and no fan to make noise in a quiet room. After seven years of use, that translates into a noticeably lower failure rate than a fan-cooled budget laptop of the same vintage; the most common failure mode on an N3350 Chromebook is the battery, not the cooling system.

What it is good for in 2026, and what it is not

The realistic 2026 use case for an existing CB315-1HT is a fixed-location ChromeOS terminal: a guest computer in a family room, a kitchen-counter unit for recipes and music, a workshop or garage machine for parts lookups and YouTube tutorials, or a checkout-and-email station at a small organization. The numeric keypad makes it useful for any task that involves entering numbers (basic bookkeeping, inventory, grading), and the large touchscreen makes it pleasant for casual web browsing and video playback.

Where it falls short is anywhere the workload involves more than a small handful of Chrome tabs or any meaningful Android app activity. Modern web apps assume more memory and more CPU than the N3350 and 4GB of RAM can supply; the “4GB Chromebook trap” article on this site goes into detail on why that ceiling now bites harder than it did in 2018, even on lightweight Chrome OS. Linux container workloads (Crouton-style or the official Linux beta) are technically supported, but the hardware will struggle visibly with any real Linux desktop session.

The N3350 also lacks the AV1 and modern VP9 acceleration that newer Chromebooks use to play 1080p YouTube and Netflix at low CPU load. In practice this means a single 1080p video plays cleanly, but multiple streams or browser tabs running video at once will warm the chassis and slow the rest of the UI noticeably.

Auto Update Expiration: one year of official ChromeOS left

Google lists the CB315-1H and CB315-1HT family under entry 22 of the Chrome Enterprise auto-update policy with an Auto Update Expiration of June 2027 and extended-support flag set. Today (June 2026), that leaves roughly one year of official ChromeOS feature and security updates ahead of the device. After June 2027, the unit keeps running, but it stops receiving new ChromeOS builds, which over time means web apps will start to fail and the browser will fall behind upstream security fixes.

For an owner, that timeline matters more than any spec on this page. A device with one year of AUE remaining is a usable secondary machine for the next twelve months and a candidate for ChromeOS Flex or a Linux conversion after that, if the hardware itself remains in good condition. Neither path is a perfect substitute for a current ChromeOS device, but both extend the useful life by years.

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