Acer is Onto Something in the Premium PC Market (Premium)

While most of the PC market has rallied around gaming and premium PCs for growth, Acer may have found another lucrative market to target. And if it’s right, don’t be surprised to see much of the rest of the industry follow it down this new path.

Acer traditionally holds two major launch events each year, one in New York in the Spring and one in Berlin in the Fall. This year, conspicuously, the firm moved its Spring event, called next@acer, out of Manhattan and into trendy and hip Brooklyn. It also spent an inordinate amount of time during this event discussing a new family of PCs and peripherals aimed at creators called ConceptD.

Those two things are related. With years of success with gaming PCs in particular, Acer discovered something interesting: Not only were gamers using their expensive rigs for non-gaming, often productivity-focused tasks, but creative professionals and other creators were increasingly interested in its gaming PCs because traditional PCs weren’t meeting their needs.

Technically speaking, neither were gaming PCs, as they tend to be big, bulky, and loud, thanks to the increased cooling needs of high-end CPUs and dGPUs. But perhaps there was an opportunity there, for Acer to create what is essentially a hybrid class of PC that takes couples the performance and high-end specs of gaming PCs with the quiet, understated elegant of premium PCs that are often chiefly focused on looks and materials.

“This new idea emerged from our success in gaming,” Acer Co-COO Jerry Kao told me at the event last month. “And as we learned more about creators, and better understood their needs, we realized there was a big potential market there.”

The result, ConceptD, is interesting on a number of levels.

The most obvious is the sheer breadth of the offering: ConceptD doesn’t just consist of a few PCs and the obvious handful of peripherals. Instead, it’s already a broad and deep product family that spans a wide range of price points and collectively should meet the needs of most creators. In that sense, ConceptD isn’t so much an experiment as it is a fully fleshed-out new line of products.

This stands in sharp contrast to Acer’s competitors, which are often quite bigger, especially here in the United States. For example, Dell, HP, and Microsoft all make specialty computers for the creator market---Canvas, Sprout, and Surface Studio, respectively---but each is perhaps most notable for their uniqueness within their firms’ respective product lineups. Or perhaps for their sky-high pricing. Acer, meanwhile, has come to market with several different PCs, both desktops and laptops, and at different price points.

ConceptD also fully embraces the modern role of the PC, which has evolved into a purely productivity-focus device type in the wake of the mobile revolution.

“This isn’t for productivity,” Kao said, holding up his phone. But ConceptD does embrace some positive attributes of mobile---most...