Acer’s new Swift 14, which replaces the Swift 5, is the company’s MacBook Pro—which is to say, it’s a well-built, svelte, slickly designed, all-metal portable with enough power to help you get things done no matter where you are.
It’s not perfect. Battery life could be better, and there are some other options for specific use cases, but for the price—$1,400 as tested—you’d be hard-pressed to beat this package as an all-around great Windows laptop.
Swift Names
Laptop makers seem to have finally come up with a common naming convention, centered around the model name paired with not a random number, but the screen size of the laptop. Revolutionary. Genius. Wait until you tell your grandkids it took the industry three decades to come up with that. Thanks to Dell and Apple for leading the way. Anyway, here we are, finally. The Acer Swift 5 is gone. The Acer Swift 14 is here (as is the Swift Go, which replaces the Swift 3).
This year the Swift lineup features the Swift Go, which offers an OLED screen, the Swift X, which offers a dedicated GPU, and the plain Swift, which has a somewhat more premium look, coming in green or blue with gold accents, but not the OLED screen or a dedicated GPU.
The Swift 14 looks nearly identical to last year’s Swift 5, with an aluminum and magnesium chassis that has barely any flex to it. Not even when carried it with one hand at the corner, which I don’t suggest you make a habit of, but it is something I do to every laptop I test. The good ones, like the Swift 14, don’t flex. My ThinkPad T14 was jealous.
The unit I reviewed had an Intel Core i7 (13700H) processor with Iris Xe Graphics (shared memory), 16 gigabytes of RAM, a 1-terabyte SSD, and a 14-inch IPS WQXGA touchscreen (2,560 x 1,600-pixel resolution and a 60-Hz refresh rate). The screen is 16:10, which I’ve come to much prefer to 16:9. That little extra bit is just … nice. There’s also a cheaper Swift 14 model that uses a 1,920 x 1,200-pixel resolution screen, which is slightly better than 1080p. All of this is wrapped in a 2.65-pound package that’s just 12 inches wide and 0.59 inches thick.
Power at a Price
Photograph: Acer
The biggest news in the Swift 14 is the new 13th-generation Intel Core H-series processors, which are surprisingly snappy for Evo-certified processors. If you’re interested in video editing or light gaming, the Swift X, with its dedicated Nvidia GPU, is the way to go. But in my testing, the Swift 14 was plenty fast in everyday use, including web browsing with a disturbing number of tabs open, using chat apps, videoconferencing, and photo editing using Darktable—which I ran via Windows Subsystem for Linux, and it was still speedy.