Acemate S10 Pro Announced

By / September 7, 2026 / 7 minutes of reading
Acemate S10 Pro Announced header

I spent a good chunk of the summer testing what turned out to be one of the best ball machines I’ve used. The Acemate S10 drives itself around the court, catches your shot and rallies it back, and I was convinced that was a solved problem in search of a gimmick. It was not. It gave me the best practice session I have had off a machine, and the only thing I really held against it was the effort of getting it from the car to the baseline.

So when Acemate recently announced the S10 Pro, I read the specification sheet with a fairly specific set of questions. Not whether the concept works, because I already know it does, but whether the things that actually limited my sessions have been fixed.

I have not hit with the Pro (yet), so none of what follows is a verdict. It is what the announcement says, read against real court time with the machine it replaces.

Quick take

Most of the upgrades are pointed at the right problems. The hopper is bigger, the quoted battery runtime is more than double, and a new launch system means the machine can change the direction of the shot without turning itself to aim. The five training modes are a tidier way of describing what the machine does, and one of them, serve practice with a simulated return, fills a gap in this market.

It doesn’t, however, look like portability has been improved.

Key specifications

SpecificationDetail
Maximum ball speedUp to 120 km/h
Horizontal coverageUp to 180 degrees
Launch angle7 to 40 degrees
Trajectory height1 to 8 metres
Feed interval1 to 15 seconds
SpinFlat, topspin and backspin
Ball capacity100 balls
BatteryUp to 5 hours per charge
CamerasDual 4K HDR binocular vision
Training modesRally, Drill, Serve, Ball Machine, Battle
ControlPhone, compatible smartwatch or gesture
Court surfacesHard, clay and grass
WeightNot published

What’s changed

The machine underneath looks much the same. Dual 4K binocular vision, omni-directional movement on Mecanum wheels, the same three court surfaces. Acemate has not reinvented the S10, it has gone after the ceilings.

Ball speed rises from about 97 km/h to a claimed 120 km/h. The hopper goes from 80 balls to 100. The quoted battery runtime jumps from around two hours to five. And the launch mechanism has been rebuilt, which is the change with the most interesting knock-on effects.

ACE+ SHOT & where the ball can go

The new launch system, which Acemate calls ACE+ SHOT, changes the direction of the shot inside the machine rather than swivelling the whole unit to aim. That gives it up to 180 degrees of horizontal coverage from wherever it happens to be standing, with the launch angle adjustable from 7 to 40 degrees and trajectory heights anywhere between 1 and 8 metres.

This one is worth paying attention to, because it targets something I noticed within about twenty minutes of hitting with the S10. The machine has to physically get itself lined up before it sends the ball, and there is a moment of setup you can read. It is subtle, and it did not spoil anything, but once you have seen it you cannot unsee it, and you start anticipating rather than reacting. Taking the aiming out of the movement should close that gap.

It is also the claim I would most want to put through a proper session, because 180 degrees on a spec sheet and 180 degrees of accurate, repeatable placement are not the same thing. Wide launch envelopes are exactly where these machines tend to get found out.

Five Match modes

The S10 gave you a big drill library with the rally concept sitting on top of it. The Pro splits the same territory into five named modes, which is a clearer way of explaining what you are buying.

Rally is the familiar one, where the robot catches your in-bounds shots and returns from wherever the ball landed. Drill adds target zones and scoring, so placement work has a number attached to it. Ball Machine switches the clever parts off and gives you a plain repeatable feed, which was one of my favourite things about the S10 and is good to see promoted to a proper mode. Serve tracks your serve speed, spin and net clearance, then simulates a return so you have to play the next ball. Battle puts you against an AI opponent with four preset styles covering defence, attack, topspin and variety, with the points tracked.

Serve mode is the one I would use most. Almost nothing you can buy will make you play the shot after your serve, and that is precisely where club matches are won and lost. If it works, it is a better reason to buy this machine than any of the headline numbers.

Battle mode is the one I would want to see before believing. An opponent that reads your patterns and plays a recognisable style is a much harder engineering problem than putting a ball on a spot, and a preset labelled Defence could just as easily turn out to be a slower feed with a lob thrown in. I would want several sessions before taking that at face value, and I would want to know whether the four styles still feel different in week six.

Behind all of it sits a five stage loop of train, track, analyse, review and improve, with the app logging session data and turning it into targets for next time. That is an extension of what the S10 already does rather than something new.

The battery is the real upgrade

If you gave me one of these changes and made me bin the rest, I would take the runtime.

Very few club players need a ball arriving faster than 97 km/h, and the ones who do are typically not short of hitting partners. What actually shaped my S10 sessions was the battery and the ball collecting. Two hours is one practice session, and you plan around it. Five hours is a coach getting through a morning of lessons without thinking about power once, and that is a different product.

The twenty extra balls matter more than they sound too. Because the machine catches and reuses so much of what you hit, hopper capacity works harder on this design than it does on a static feeder, and I was picking up less often than the raw number suggested even on the S10.

What Acemate has not given us

Portability was the one real drawback in my review. At 17.8kg the S10 ended up on my front passenger seat because it would not sit sensibly anywhere else, and getting it out of the car, through two gates and up a step to my nearest courts was a proper effort. That is with about as easy an access situation as most club players get. It was enough to put me off using it for a spontaneous hit, which is a shame for a machine I otherwise enjoyed so much.

A bigger hopper, a bigger battery and a rebuilt launch system all push in the same direction on the scales. If the Pro is heavier and still has no extendable handle and wheels, it inherits the S10’s biggest practical problem and makes it worse. Solve the carrying, and that would be a more useful upgrade than anything in the table above.

For how the conventional machines handle the same trade-offs, our best tennis ball machines guide covers the market, and the Pongbot Pace S Pro and Tenniix reviews cover the two machines the Pro will be measured against most.

Price & availability

Acemate has set the S10 Pro at £2,999 in the UK, with equivalent pricing of $2,999 in the United States, €2,999 in Europe, CAD $3,999 in Canada and AUD $4,599 in Australia. Preorders are open on the Acemate site with a refundable deposit, and the machine is on show at IFA in Berlin. Prices and preorder terms are correct at the time of writing and will move.

That is a clear step up from the S10 and puts the Pro at the very top of the home market. At that money it has stopped competing with ball machines and started competing with coaching hours, which is the comparison anyone spending this much should be making.

We’re hoping to get our hands on a unit for full testing later this year.

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