Acer Swift 14 Ai Review: Abandon it for ports

The Acer Swift 14 is everywhere in the place. He has powerful flea options, an exceptional battery life and port loads for such a laptop computer. The keyboard and the trackpad are solid, which is not always given at any cost. But the screen and the webcam are poor, and the speakers are pure and simple.

The battery life, performance and ports are important, and it is logical to prioritize those, even if it means reducing costs elsewhere. These are the difficult types of compromises that budgetary laptops must do.

Unfortunately, the Swift 14 AI is not a budget laptop.

OUR Configure SWIFT 14 AI is delivered with a Core Ultra 7 Series 2,258V (Lunar Lake) processor, 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB SSD to a PDSF of $ 1,299.99. There are many Swift 14 variants, including $ 1,199.99 AMD Ryzen ai 9 365 Config (which I also tested) and a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus / Elite Model with a better screen. Acer also makes a 16 -inch intel version With an OLED screen, and it’s actually $ 50 cheaper than the 14 but with less RAM.

At 2.95 pounds and 0.63 inches thick, the Swift 14 AI is not the thinnest or the lightest, but it has four USB ports – Two USB -A 3.2 and two USB4 – plus an audio socket of 3.5 mm and HDMI 2.1. I am used to thin and bright laptops in this price range having just a few USB-C ports, maybe A USB-A or owner load port, and an audio socket. Having all these I / O on a laptop of this size is a treat when you need it.

The other big treats, in Intel Lunar Lake and AMD Ryzen AI models, are the battery life. Both are perfect for daily productivity tasks such as the execution of many chrome tabs, Google Docs edition, long video calls and frequent use of messaging applications such as Slack and Signal. The Intel model is an impressive Sipper battery, suunup duep at sunset well passed under lighter workloads. In our battery harvesting test, it lasted almost 5 p.m. – corresponding to Edition will have 15 inches Lenovo yoga slim 7i and beaten only by Snapdragon laptops based on ARM as the new 13 -inch surface laptop And last year HP Omnibook 10.

The AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 version, which is almost identical to Lake Intel Lunar, with the exception of a different design and color color, sacrifices a little battery life for multi-world and graphic performance. But it can still last for a long day of average use, then some, and he got 15 hours in our battery harvesting test.

The keyboard and trackpad are not showstoppers, but they are solid. The keyboard is a bit thin, but it has touches of size decently with just enough tactile feedback so as not to feel pasty. Mechanical trackpad is decent, easily clicks and is surprisingly silent. He has a design in his upper right corner reminiscent of a sort of neural route. It shines when the neural treatment unit (NPU) is used, to indicate that it is “to think”, but it sometimes lights up unexpectedly during daily tasks.

Start the SWIFT 14 AI for the first time and you have encountered two of its most obvious faults: a mediocre screen and a flagrant Bloatware. The 14 -inch screen 1920 x 1200 / 60Hz can reach a brilliant nits of 400, but it seems a little weak and lack of visual punch. Your eyes can adapt to it, but as soon as you spot a better screen on something like a surface laptop or a MacBook Air, you remember the Swift shortcomings.

Bloatware is not too difficult to eliminate, but it is a little more invasive than other laptops. You may have wanted Dropbox anyway, but I doubt you want it to harass you with subscription offers as soon as you have configured your computer. Then there is the shortcut of the taskbar to Reservation.com And pop-up windows for Google Play Games and Dreck free. Bloatware is a way to subsidize the price of a laptop and keep the price down, but I’m not sure that the Swift 14 AI is cheap enough to justify it. But at least it is easy to uninstall.

Unfortunately, you cannot uninstall the speakers or the webcam. Configuration to two speakers is a crime against music. You better launch the volume on your phone. The zoom and the calls of the Google meeting are in a way always too noisy or too silent – I had to continue to change the volume during meetings to accommodate the voices of different people. And the webcam is just a little better. I saw him make a correct image in shiny lighting, but once you are even in slightly lower lighting, it falls apart. Acer’s integrated software offers an improvement in the image, but it simply increases contrast and overruns, which makes everything crunchy.

You can certainly get A worse laptop for more money. But for about the same price, you can get the same processor or similar with a more pleasant screen, better speakers and a lifespan of the equivalent battery Lenovo’s Yoga Slim 7i (It’s just a bigger touch, with a worse trackpad). Or you can spend a little more and get a Asus Zenbook S 14 With an excellent OLED screen and slightly better specifications (although a USB-A port less). And if you can work with macOS or Windows on the arm and support fewer ports, then the 13 inch MacBook Air M4 Or 13 -inch surface laptop are much better versatile packages for less.

Part of me always really likes the Swift 14 AI. The battery performance and lifespan are of first order, the selection of the port is ideal for a thin and a light, and almost everything else is at least decent. If you can get it well below its $ 1,300 PDSF – Say, around $ 1,000 – the poor screen and the horrible speakers are more unpaid. And it seems to be on sale quite often. Do not forget your headphones.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge