Review: Acer Swift 16 AI

How do you know Acer means business when it comes to AI? It’s putting “AI” right into the names of its latest laptops. Front and center in the new lineup, you’ll find the Swift AI series—available as a 14- or 16-inch laptop, and I've been testing the latter.

Let’s start with the tale of the tape, beginning with the spacious 16:10, 3,840 x 2,400-pixel resolution touchscreen. It's so bright and clear that it stands as an easy highlight of the Swift's user experience, and it's one of the best screens I’ve encountered in recent months. It is, however, powered by a rather basic Intel Core Ultra 7 256V CPU and an even more basic 16 GB of RAM, which makes the unit seem underpowered at first. The good news is the inclusion of a 1-terabyte solid state drive, which at least provides solace that you won’t run out of storage too quickly.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Port selection is fine if short of being mind-blowing: two USB-C ports with USB4 support, two USB-A ports, and a full-size HDMI jack. The 1440p webcam, mounted in a small notch on top of the display, is on the low end of the resolution spectrum but at least acceptable. The hinge design allows the display to be opened 180 degrees, the rear of the lid gently propping up the keyboard a few millimeters. Because of this design, all ports are side-mounted.

While the specs aren't flashy, the input experience is top-shelf. The keyboard, complete with a narrow numeric keypad, is uncommonly quiet and gentle on the fingers. It’s not mushy, but some may find the key travel to be a tad too short. The numeric keypad, however, is quite cramped for sustained use.

Thankfully, the touchpad is the perfect size, made of Gorilla Glass and featuring a crisp response when depressed. You won’t be able to miss the added lighting effect in the top-right corner. This purely decorative effect oddly pulses whenever you’re using an AI app (or when you press the Copilot key). It's supposed to pulse at startup, but this didn't happen in my tests. Either way, I found the pulsing effect quite soothing and ultimately wished there was an easy way to keep it on all the time. Alas, the bundled AcerSense software only lets you turn it off, with no configuration options.

The overall design is fairly no-nonsense—an aluminum shell with a soft-touch powder coating, entirely black with little more than the Acer logo to interrupt it. It won’t turn heads, unless you catch folks ogling that pulsing touchpad effect.

Performance is slightly better than expected from a unit with a fairly low-end CPU and the bare minimum of RAM. You won’t find yourself waiting for browser pages to load or spreadsheets to recalculate—even AI tasks like real-time translation were responsive in my testing. That said, intense processing tasks will get bogged down, particularly when graphical tasks are in the cards. Otherwise, performance is fine for a midrange system.

Major props for Acer’s thermal management here: I couldn’t even get the fan to kick in no matter what I threw at the Swift AI, and the device stayed comfortably cool throughout my testing. The speakers are not particularly noteworthy, though they were plenty loud in various testing conditions. Battery life was shy of 13 hours on a full-screen YouTube playback test, which is a bit low for a laptop in the 16-inch category but good enough for most users.

The only major complaint I found during testing involved charging the device, as the Swift AI did not like charging via a third-party power brick. The included 65-watt adapter (which is nicely tiny in size, by the way) worked in all conditions, but with a drained battery, my third-party adapter couldn't get the laptop going. Quite strangely, once the battery had some charge from the official adapter, the third-party adapter began to work fine.

The Swift 16 AI feels big and spacious, physically and digitally, though at 3.4 pounds with 20 mm of thickness, it’s plenty svelte for a 16-inch system, and it feels light whether in the hand or resting on the lap. Best of all, at $1,049, this Windows machine is a solid bargain, offering more than enough in performance and features to justify its asking price. It may not have much in the way of frills—well, maybe that one frill on the touchpad—but as it turns out, it doesn’t seem to need them.