Acer Swift 16 AI Review: A Bargain 16-Inch Laptop

Thankfully, the touchpad is the cleanable size, made of Gorilla Glass and featuring a crisp effect erstwhile depressed. You won’t beryllium capable to miss the added lighting effect successful the top-right corner. This purely decorative effect oddly pulses whenever you’re utilizing an AI app (or erstwhile you property the Copilot key). It's expected to pulse astatine startup, but this didn't hap successful my tests. Either way, I recovered the pulsing effect rather soothing and yet wished determination was an casual mode to support it connected each the time. Alas, the bundled AcerSense bundle lone lets you crook it off, with nary configuration options.

The wide plan is reasonably no-nonsense—an aluminum ammunition with a soft-touch pulverization coating, wholly achromatic with small much than the Acer logo to interrupt it. It won’t crook heads, unless you drawback folks ogling that pulsing touchpad effect.

Performance is somewhat amended than expected from a portion with a reasonably low-end CPU and the bare minimum of RAM. You won’t find yourself waiting for browser pages to load oregon spreadsheets to recalculate—even AI tasks similar real-time translation were responsive successful my testing. That said, aggravated processing tasks volition get bogged down, peculiarly erstwhile graphical tasks are successful the cards. Otherwise, show is good for a midrange system.

Major props for Acer’s thermal absorption here: I couldn’t adjacent get the instrumentality to footwear successful nary substance what I threw astatine the Swift AI, and the instrumentality stayed comfortably chill passim my testing. The speakers are not peculiarly noteworthy, though they were plentifulness large successful assorted investigating conditions. Battery beingness was shy of 13 hours connected a full-screen YouTube playback test, which is simply a spot debased for a laptop successful the 16-inch class but bully capable for astir users.

The lone large ailment I recovered during investigating progressive charging the device, arsenic the Swift AI did not similar charging via a third-party powerfulness brick. The included 65-watt adapter (which is nicely tiny successful size, by the way) worked successful each conditions, but with a drained battery, my third-party adapter couldn't get the laptop going. Quite strangely, erstwhile the artillery had immoderate complaint from the authoritative adapter, the third-party adapter began to enactment fine.

The Swift 16 AI feels large and spacious, physically and digitally, though astatine 3.4 pounds with 20 mm of thickness, it’s plentifulness svelte for a 16-inch system, and it feels airy whether successful the manus oregon resting connected the lap. Best of all, astatine $1,049, this Windows instrumentality is simply a coagulated bargain, offering much than capable successful show and features to warrant its asking price. It whitethorn not person overmuch successful the mode of frills—well, possibly that one frill connected the touchpad—but arsenic it turns out, it doesn’t look to request them.