Acer Swift 14 Review (2023): A Well-Rounded, Powerful Laptop

Acer’s new Swift 14, which replaces the Swift 5, is the corporate’s MacBook Pro—which is to say, it is a well-built, svelte, slickly designed, all-metal transportable with sufficient energy that can assist you get issues performed irrespective of the place you might be.

It’s not good. Battery life might be higher, and there are another choices for particular use circumstances, however for the value—$1,400 as examined—you would be hard-pressed to beat this bundle as an all-around nice Windows laptop computer.

Swift Names

Laptop makers appear to have lastly give you a typical naming conference, centered across the mannequin identify paired with not a random quantity, however the display screen dimension of the laptop computer. Revolutionary. Genius. Wait till you inform your grandkids it took the trade three many years to give you that. Thanks to Dell and Apple for main the way in which. Anyway, right here we’re, lastly. The Acer Swift 5 is gone. The Acer Swift 14 is right here (as is the Swift Go, which replaces the Swift 3).

This 12 months the Swift lineup options the Swift Go, which gives an OLED display screen, the Swift X, which gives a devoted GPU, and the plain Swift, which has a considerably extra premium look, coming in inexperienced or blue with gold accents, however not the OLED display screen or a devoted GPU.

The Swift 14 appears to be like almost similar to final 12 months’s Swift 5, with an aluminum and magnesium chassis that has barely any flex to it. Not even when carried it with one hand on the nook, which I do not recommend you make a behavior of, however it’s one thing I do to each laptop computer I check. The good ones, just like the Swift 14, do not flex. My ThinkPad T14 was jealous.

The unit I reviewed had an Intel Core i7 (13700H) processor with Iris Xe Graphics (shared reminiscence), 16 gigabytes of RAM, a 1-terabyte SSD, and a 14-inch IPS WQXGA touchscreen (2,560 x 1,600-pixel decision and a 60-Hz refresh charge). The display screen is 16:10, which I’ve come to a lot choose to 16:9. That little further bit is simply … good. There’s additionally a less expensive Swift 14 mannequin that makes use of a 1,920 x 1,200-pixel decision display screen, which is barely higher than 1080p. All of that is wrapped in a 2.65-pound bundle that is simply 12 inches huge and 0.59 inches thick.

Power at a Price

The largest information within the Swift 14 is the brand new Thirteenth-generation Intel Core H-series processors, that are surprisingly snappy for Evo-certified processors. If you are considering video enhancing or mild gaming, the Swift X, with its devoted Nvidia GPU, is the way in which to go. But in my testing, the Swift 14 was lots quick in on a regular basis use, together with net searching with a disturbing variety of tabs open, utilizing chat apps, videoconferencing, and picture enhancing utilizing Darktable—which I ran by way of Windows Subsystem for Linux, and it was nonetheless speedy.