A beautiful display coupled with a bad chassis

The main reason you want the Swift 16 over the Swift 14 is the sweet, 16-inch AMOLED display. Anyway, Acer promises almost 20 hours of actual use battery life and all the goodness of a Copilot+ in a slim package.That slim package also has issues when I press the keyboard.It’s lopsided and surprisingly uncomfortable.

I also have issues with the sound quality of its twin speakers and the battery life, which doesn’t quite live up to the promise of this machine in materials, but it may not be available until late 2024. If a screen is all you want, the Acer Swift 16 AI has it, but at a price. However, at an MSRP of $1,200, you can find much better build quality elsewhere.

Acer Swift 16 AI Review. Build quality

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

The placement of this workhorse is a different matter. The chassis bends noticeably when you press the keys hard, and it’s also noticeable where you rest your palms. It’s a shame because the rest of the device, including the lid, is solid Basically, most of the build is held up by the sides of the device, but the middle is especially curved. The part closest to the screen can sink in about half an inch.

The keyboard also has some idiosyncrasies. The keys have a mechanical, rubbery noise that isn’t unpleasant. It’s easy to type on the desk, but typing on my lap takes too much effort feels good, but sometimes it goes down due to some palm issues.No one likes to type a paragraph only to find out that your cursor 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 be flat, and you have touchscreen capabilities. Otherwise, everything feels too low quality.

Acer Swift 16 AI Review. Performance:

My configuration came with an Intel Core Ultra 256 V Lunar Lake processor that included ARC 140V onboard graphics. Acer’s press materials and its product page show how this computer can accommodate up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 288V, which currently The most powerful of Intel’s new Lunar Lake chips. I’d like to see it in action with Acer’s slimline laptop, but mine uses a mid-range 256V. At the moment, Acer’s store page has no other options for the 16-inch for a high-end chip.

At the very least, the 16″ chassis offers a slight improvement over other OEMs’ 14″ models with the same chip. Intel’s 256V is still a good chip for its core count compared to chips with more cores and threads, but several hundred. For a dollar more you can find similar laptops with 258V, although it still may not perform as well on some multi-device.-core tests compared to the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite.As for how it compares to the M4 MacBook Pro, Apple’s power doesn’t really beat the benchmarks.

In Cinebench benchmarks, the Acer Swift 16 AI significantly outperformed a 14-inch laptop with the same chip as Asus Zenbook S 14 and: Dell XPS 13.

However, it fell short of the Snapdragon X Elite and the MacBook Air’s M3 chip in pure rendering performance. That difference becomes even more pronounced in the 3DMark graphics tests. Arc 140V graphics are good enough for some purposes, but not for real workloads. In our Blender benchmarks, where we force the PC to render a scene where the BMW emphasizes the CPU and CPU separately, the Intel chip takes about 4 minutes and 40 seconds, which isn’t bad. However, this computer will certainly not be the best for a designer, despite the beautiful screen.

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

Acer Swift 16 AI Review. Screen, sound and webcam

The main reason you’re getting the 16″ over the 14″ Swift is the 3K OLED display. It’s a gorgeous touchscreen to smudge with your greasy fingerprints. It can reach a maximum resolution of 2880 x 1800 and 340 nits. at full screen brightness This is not the brightest screen and you may lose some fidelity to direct light under, but it’s a sufficient viewing experience for regular use.

If you want this to be your go-to machine for watching movies, I’d recommend investing in some good headphones. The Acer Swift 16 AI’s sound was thin and too small at maximum volume, it didn’t have much bass.

I don’t find webcams to be a very interesting piece of the laptop puzzle. I don’t think anyone cares about the visual quality of your next Zoom 4 meeting. However, the Swift 16 AI includes a QHD webcam , which can display a resolution of 2560 by 1440.

I used the Swift 16 AI during a video call and found the image quality to be quite detailed, even in relatively low light.Acer’s webcams also include a pop-up for its PureView and PureVoice the software will use AI to enhance your picture clarity and sound. If it helped everyone else on the other end of the call, I couldn’t tell. Neither could I big difference with it on my end. It’s fine and I don’t mind it running in the background. However, the PureView popup screen kept popping up during my call.

Acer Swift 16 AI Review. Battery Life:

After about three hours using Google Chrome for basic browsing tasks, I was sitting at about 50% is that you can get about 13 and a half hours of browsing, although it can be less if you use efficient browsers like Google Chrome. That’s not 20 hours of battery life, but quite fair for most work purposes I can get about a full day out of it with constant use.

In our battery tests, where we ran the laptop at low brightness with a 24-hour YouTube video, the Acer Swift 16 AI went from 55% battery to 0 in about 8 hours. That’s close, but not quite 19.5 hours with the video playback battery life that Acer promises, the 70Whr battery and Lunar Lake give you a decent run, but won’t stop you from using it continuously for a few days.

Acer Swift 16 AI Review. Verdict

If I were to choose a thin Intel Lunar Lake laptop, the Swift 16 AI wouldn’t be my first choice. It doesn’t have the build quality I’d expect for over $1000. it doesn’t have the qualities you’re looking for in a laptop at this price point, save some battery life bends over.