Acer Swift Edge 14 AI review

The actual 'AI' bit of new-wave 'AI laptops' isn't always that exciting. Their real highlight is that you kinda get everything else you'll want: power, portability and extra-long battery life.

The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI attempts to nudge things a step further in a couple of areas, though.It weighs less than 1kg for starters, despite having a fairly rigid frame. And the keyboard has more heft to it than the thin-and-light norm, which many will prefer for all-day working.

The downsides? The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI is not the best-looking in its class. Opinions will vary, of course, but its lid design arguably isn't a great fit for the kind of laptop this is, there's a silly little AI LED motif on the touchpad, and the keyboard backlight is quite inconsistent.

Price & Availability

However, the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI is also a better deal than it initially appears.

While the UK's £1399 / $1499 asking price seems to be a lot – in the UK it's a little less from Amazon, or around that sum at Currys – that nets you 32GB storage and a 1TB SSD.

To bring a MacBook Air to the same standard would cost you about a third more. Acer's offering is also massively more affordable than the Lenovo Yoga X1 Carbon, which – enterprise nonsense and a mouse nipple aside – the Swift 14 AI does get close to replicating those key appeals.

Design

When you want to get a laptop that's below 1kg in weight – the 14-inch Swift Edge AI is 975g, according to my scales – there are always going to be some compromises involved. Not least, it's going to feel unusually insubstantial the first time you pick it up.

And you basically can't use a full aluminium casing, because that metal is just too heavy at the thicknesses required. Acer has done a good job of styling out the compromises here, though.

The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI’s panels are made using aluminium-magnesium alloys. The latter, magnesium, is basically the key to making a laptop this light that still feels good.

Like every model in this ultra-light class, the instantly metallic feel of aluminium is not quite there. What is here, though, is a decently rigid keyboard bed. There’s some flex just above the touchpad, but not in the actual keyboard – until you apply unrealistic pressure.

Managing this at sub-1kg is impressive, and gives you far more confidence in the real-world portability of the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI.

Acer hasn’t had to use a basic plastic screen covering to hit its weight goal either – it’s glass. This is Acer's long-standing practical streak pulling a blinder.

It's only when the company's designers go out on a limb that I'm sometimes less persuaded. The gold lettering, AI touchpad insignia and sharp streaks across the lid may divide the crowd, landing somewhere between gamer and Dubai chic. Trust your own eyes on this one.

Display

The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI has a top-quality screen that is even more versatile than many contemporaries thanks to its matte finish. It's a bonus when outdoors or under harsh strip lighting in particular.

This finish also has no obvious effect on perceived display sharpness, and colour still appears ultra-poppy. There’s a neat reason too: the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI was the first laptop announced to feature Corning’s Gorilla Matte Pro, a treatment that does seem to bring together a best-of-both worlds of matte and glossy.

This is a 14-inch OLED screen with fantastic colour depth, and fairly high pixel density thanks to its 2880 x 1800 resolution.

It's also brighter than plenty of OLED laptops I've reviewed in recent years, although you'll only see what it can really do in very particular scenarios. When simply using the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI as normal it can reach a decidedly ordinary 380 nits. This rises to a still-familiar 430 nits when HDR (high dynamic range) is switched on.

The actual peak I recorded during testing was 647 nits, when playing HDR video. That's well above the brightness this PC needs to meet the DisplayHDR True Black 500 standard advertised on keyboard surround sticker.

This aside, the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI also delivers a 120Hz refresh rate, it's a touchscreen, and it can fold back 180 degrees for easier sharing of content. The one missing part is stylus support, but otherwise it’s fantastic.

Keyboard & Touchpad

The keyboard was perhaps the biggest surprise of the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI. This laptop's design suggests it's going to be a wafer-thin thing, clicky and shallow, like so many ultra-thin laptops. It's not that, though.

The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI has one of the deeper-feeling keyboards in this class, which many will find a benefit for longer-form typing. Acer calls it a "soft-touch keyboard", basically signalling it doesn't rely on a sharp click for feedback.

It’s satisfying to type on, and less fatiguing than a MacBook Air keyboard. It is not a million miles removed from Lenovo’s current-gen ThinkPad laptop keyboards.

As already noted, though, the keyboard backlight isn't the most refined-looking around thanks to an inconsistent light level across the keys and bleed between them. It's a two-level light, a pure white one. Practically speaking it’s fine. It’s the look that isn’t top-tier.

In other laptops over the last year or so, Acer has gone big on using plastic touchpads even in pricey laptops. The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI has a much nicer glass one. It doesn't use a haptic touchpad and has a classic mechanical clicker instead, but it also has an unusually minimal dead/soft clicker zone at the top. But this is a quality touchpad.

The only questionable bit of it is that Acer AI symbol, which lights up occasionally when using AI features. It's not useful, it seemed to fire up unpredictably for the most part, and the pattern is visible when not lit. But it doesn't affect the surface layer as the markings are under it so is truly just a visual effect.

Performance

There's only one spec of Acer Swift Edge 14 AI at the time of writing. It has an Intel Ultra 7 (258V), with Arc graphics (140V), 32GB RAM, and a 1TB SSD.

The 258V is effectively just the 32GB version of the Ultra 7 (256V), for those wondering. They are both punchy processors, but are still designed for low power draw compared to the more performance-driven Ultra 9 (288V) and Ultra 7 (255H).

You're not realistically going to notice the difference with light day jobs and general use. But both of those other processors have better multi-core performance. The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI is a good all-rounder PC, but not a workstation-replacer.

There's no dedicated graphics here either, which wouldn't be remotely realistic to expect at under 1kg. The Arc integrated graphics can do a decent job with some console-grade titles and indie ones, and having 32GB memory shared across CPU and GPU doesn't hurt with some games either. But keep your expectations realistic.

I tried Cyperpunk 2077 and found at Medium settings, 1200p resolution, it runs the game’s benchmark at an average of up to 52fps. That may not satisfy the 60fps-or-bust crowd, but shows there’s plenty of scope to play demanding games at decent resolutions.

The laptop does use a fan, rather than passive cooling, but the fan noise is not offensive or particularly loud.

Battery Life

Acer says the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI can last up to 21 hours between charges. The reality with most normal kinds of use isn't going to be close to that, especially given the laptop has a fairly ordinary-capacity 63Wh battery.

When streaming video, 6 hours of YouTube took 53% off the battery, suggesting we’re looking at somewhere in the ballpark of 11 hours of light use. You’ll get similar results when writing documents with perhaps a little bit of light browsing.

You can take that all the way down to around 100 minutes when playing a game that maxes-out the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI. I played Cyberpunk 2077 for 50 minutes and that snipped 50% off the charge level.

Acer gives us a little bonus, though, by packaging a 100W power adapter rather than the usual 65W type. The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI will charge at 100W for part of the cycle when you close the lid – this isn’t the kind of laptop that can actually draw close to that kind of power when actually running, so the benefits are more about charging speed than performance.

Features

One of the few disappointments of the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI is its speakers are pretty unremarkable. They use two little housings built into the laptop’s underside, bouncing sound off the surface on which the Acer is sat.

Top volume is decent enough but, as with most Acer laptops, the sense of any real representation of bass sound just isn’t there. It’s a real missing piece of the puzzle in a laptop like this Acer could do some more work on in future.

The webcam is solid, though. It uses a 1080p camera, the norm for today's standards, and its image holds up better than most in sketchy indoors lighting.

The Swift Edge 14 AI also has above average connectivity for a super-light laptop, without offering anything too special. There are two Thunderbolt-grade USB ports, one of which you'll use for charging.

There’s a classic USB-A on each side and a full-size HDMI port, specced to the 2.1 standard. And there's a 3.5mm headphone/headset jack too.

None of the fluffier bits are left out either. You can both use the webcam to avoid entering a sign-in password, or a fingerprint scanner built into the power button.

Acer Swift Edge 14 AI review: Verdict

The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI combines the practical and desirable in a way that makes this one of the very best laptops for pure portability and travel use.

Note, however, that newer-gen Intel chips – the Series 3, known as 'Panther Lake' – are incoming – so it could be worth waiting for a likely price drop.

The Swift Edge 14 is ultra-light yet doesn’t feel flimsy. It has a new kind of anti-reflective screen that doesn’t dull the impact of the underlying OLED panel. It even has a keyboard and touchpad combo that feels made for real work, not just faffing about in cafes.

You can get even longer-lasting laptops in this class, though. And the ways Acer has tried to make the Swift Edge 14 AI stand out from the competition visually may not be to all tastes. But for pure substance it’s a winner that's knocking on the door of 5-stars in many respects.

Also Consider

You have a few other options in the sub-1kg club. First up is the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, which is great but extremely expensive when brought up to the Acer’s level. We’re talking over two-thirds pricier, officially, but you can find it for much less at the time of writing.

For even better battery life consider the Asus Zenbook A14, which also looks and feels alluring thanks to its Ceraluminum finish. It’s an overall more contentious laptop, though, as its Qualcomm Snapdragon processor can cause compatibility issues with some apps. And despite a fairly high price, it doesn’t use a top-tier chip either.