A Beautiful Screen Connected to a Bad Chassis

The big reason you would want the Swift 16 over the Swift 14 is the sweet, 16-inch AMOLED. At the least, it is a nice and pretty screen. Either way, Acer promises nearly 20-hour actual use battery life and all the Copilot+ PC goodness in a thin package. That thin package also has issues when I push down on its keyboard. It’s bendy and surprisingly uncomfortable.

I also have issues with the sound quality of its twin speakers and its battery life, which doesn’t quite match the promise of this machine. I would have loved to see if it could hold an Intel Core Ultra 9 chip like all its promotional material says, but that may not be available before the end of 2024. If the screen is all you want, the Acer Swift 16 AI has that, but for a price. Still, at $1,200 MSRP, you may find far better build quality elsewhere.

Acer Swift 16 AI Review: Build Quality

I want to like the Swift 16 AI for its low-key color, thin body, and 3.37-pound light frame, but Acer’s design has serious structural flaws. There are plenty of I/O ports for this shape and size, with an HDMI, two USB-A, and two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports. I also appreciate the WiFi 7 connectivity, numpad, and 1 TB SSD, suggesting this could be a great workhorse laptop.

Setting up this workhorse is another matter. The chassis has a noticeable sag when you press too hard on the keys, and it’s also noticeable around the area where you rest your palms. It’s a shame because the rest of the device, including the cover, feels sturdy. Essentially, most of the structure is held by the sides of the device, but the middle is especially bendy. Pressing the area closest to the screen with a modicum of force can sink close to half an inch.

The keyboard also has some idiosyncrasies. The keys aren’t clacky but have a mechanical, rubbery noise that’s not unpleasant, just different. On a desk, it’s easy to type using my usually forceful style, but typing from my lap feels like it takes too much effort. The mousepad also feels nice, but it’s occasionally let down with some palm rejection issues. Nobody likes typing a paragraph only to find that your cursor has moved and clicked on another part of your document.

At least it’s thin, which can also be said about the Acer Swift 16 Go from earlier this year. At least the screen can lie flat, and you have touchscreen capabilities. Otherwise, it all feels too substandard.

Acer Swift 16 AI Review: Performance

My configuration came with the Intel Core Ultra 256 V Lunar Lake processor launched in September, incorporating ARC 140V onboard graphics. Acer’s press materials and its product page promote how this PC can house up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 288V, currently the most powerful of Intel’s new Lunar Lake chips. I would have loved to see it in action with Acer’s slim laptop, but my unit uses the mid-to-low-end 256V. At the time of reporting, Acer’s store page for the 16-inch doesn’t stock any other options for the higher-end chip.

At the very least, the 16-inch chassis does have slightly improved performance over the 14-inch models from other OEMs with the same chip. The 256V from Intel is still a good chip for its core counts compared to chips with more cores and threads, but for a few hundred dollars more, you can find similar laptops with the 258V, though it may still not perform as well in some multi-core tests compared to the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. As for how it compares to the M4 MacBook Pro, there’s really no beating Apple’s strength in pure benchmarking.

In Cinebench scores, the Acer Swift 16 AI was sizably better than a 14-inch laptop with the same chip as the Asus Zenbook S 14 and the Dell XPS 13.

Still, it lagged behind the Snapdragon X Elite and a MacBook Air’s M3 chip in pure rendering performance. That difference becomes more stark in 3DMark graphics tests. The Arc 140V graphics are good enough for some purposes but not for any real heavy lifting. In our Blender benchmarks, where we get the PC to render a scene of a BMW stressing the CPU and GPU individually, the Intel chip takes about 4 minutes and 40 seconds, which isn’t bad. Still, this PC will certainly not be the best fit for a designer, despite the lovely display.

The 256V still lags far behind in our transcoding test. We used the open-source Handbrake program to transcode a 4K movie into 1080p, which still took more than three minutes longer than an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, the top end of Strix Point. This PC is great at productivity tasks but not more intensive activities.

Acer Swift 16 AI Review: Screen, Sound, and Webcam

The big reason you get the 16-inch over the 14-inch Swift model is the 3K OLED display. It’s a luxurious touchscreen you can muddy with your oily fingerprints. It can reach a max resolution of 2880 by 1800 and a peak full-screen brightness of 340 nits. It’s not the brightest screen, and you might lose some fidelity in direct light, but it’s a satisfying viewing experience for regular use.

If you want this to be your favorite mobile machine for watching movies, I’d recommend investing in a good pair of headphones. The audio from the Acer Swift 16 AI sounded thin and too tinny. The device is supposed to contain two stereo speakers, but even with that at max volume, it didn’t have much bass.

I don’t find webcams to be a very exciting part of the laptop puzzle. I don’t think anybody cares about your visual quality during the week’s 4th subsequent Zoom meeting. Still, the Swift 16 AI does include a QHD webcam that can show a resolution of 2560 by 1440.

I used the Swift 16 AI during a video call and found the image quality was fairly detailed, even in relatively dim light. Acer’s webcams also include a popup for its PureView and PureVoice. This software is supposed to use AI to enhance the clarity of your image and the sound of your voice. If it helped all the other people on the other end of the call, I couldn’t tell. Nor could I see much difference with it at my end. That’s fine, and I don’t mind it running in the background. However, the popup screen for PureView kept reappearing multiple times during my call.

Acer Swift 16 AI Review: Battery Life

After about three hours of work using Google Chrome for basic browsing tasks, I was sitting at around 50%. Even with Windows’s power settings on Balanced mode on medium screen brightness, I was sitting at around 50%. Acer promises you can get about 13 and a half hours of browsing, though it may be less if you use performance-hog browsers like Google Chrome. It’s not a 20-hour battery life, but it’s fair enough for most work purposes. I can get close to a full day from it with constant use.

In our battery tests, where we ran the laptop on basic power settings at low brightness with a 24-hour YouTube video, the Acer Swift 16 AI went from 55% battery to 0 in close to 8 hours. It’s close, but not quite the 19.5-hour video playback battery life promised by Acer. The 70Whr battery and Lunar Lake give you decent mileage but won’t tide you over multiple days of constant use.

Acer Swift 16 AI Review: Verdict

If I had the choice of a thin Intel Lunar Lake laptop, the Swift 16 AI wouldn’t be my first choice. It doesn’t have the build quality I would expect when spending over $1,000. Its screen is very nice, though not very bright. Otherwise, it doesn’t have the qualities you look for in a laptop at this price point, save for—to some extent—battery life. I don’t find much reason to spend $1,000 on a device that bends so much when using it.