Customer Ratings & Reviews

The Acer Swift 16 AI is a nice laptop that looks great and is nicely made, but it makes a terrible first impression with just a breathtaking amount of bloat and advertising junk loaded on top of Windows. After all of that is cleared off it’s good, but it’s not something that you should have to deal with in a premium laptop. In the box you’ll find the laptop, a 100W USB-C charger, a pen, and a carrying sleeve that holds the laptop and the charger. I always appreciate when laptop manufacturers include a sleeve, even just a basic one, so this was a nice touch for me. The 100W USB Power Delivery charger is pretty generic with a built-in USB-C cable and a separate AC line cord, but fortunately you can swap that for any other PD charger. The Swift 16 is very thin and light and the back has a nice design etched into it. The keyboard deck and display both have a small amount of flex, but it’s not something I noticed unless I was deliberately pressing down on them. It weighs about as much as an equivalent MacBook Air at just under 3.5 lbs. The build quality overall is very good, though not the very best I’ve seen. This model has the new Intel Panther Lake Core Ultra X7 358H with 16GB of RAM. The Panther Lake processors are supposed to have better performance and efficiency compared to the previous generation, but the headlining feature is the Arc B390 integrated GPU with 12 Xe cores. The 16GB of RAM is soldered on and cannot be upgraded, which is becoming the norm for laptops these days, though it’s understandable given the 7467 MT/s speed. The 1TB SSD is a PCI 4.0 NVMe drive rated for 6000 MB/s read speeds. The built-in Intel Killer BE1775 supports the latest Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 specifications. For USB ports, there are 2 Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports on the left-hand side and USB-A 3.2 ports on either side.There’s an HDMI 2.1 output on the left side and the right side has a microSD reader and headphone jack. I do think it was a mistake to not have a USB-C port on each side since they are used for charging and having them only on the one side can make things inconvenient. I also think the utility for a microSD reader is more limited compared to a full size one, but it’s still nice to have for action cameras and drones. Overall it’s a good range of ports for a thin and light laptop. The laptop can be opened with a Torx T6 bit and a plastic pry tool to reveal the RAM is soldered on, but the SSD can be upgraded Booting up and using the Swift 16 for the first time, it follows the standard Windows 11 setup process of signing into your Microsoft account and downloading and installing updates. This process took me about 30-40 minutes and most of that was just waiting for updates to install. Once I was passed this and booted into the desktop this was where I had my first really negative experience. The Swift 16 has what I can only describe as a breathtaking amount of bloatware. Windows PCs in general have gotten a lot better about this over the years and this felt like returning to the bad old days. The start menu is packed with apps that I would refer to as junk, as well as things that aren’t even apps but just internet shortcuts for even more junk. McAfee Antivirus jumped out immediately, but also ads for Booking.com, Forge of Empires, Elvenar, IrisGo, and more. Removing these took me the better part of an hour. Most of them can be uninstalled, but some items like the Booking.com ad are just shortcuts that are placed in the start menu folder structure that you have to navigate to and remove manually. There are also a ton of Acer applications that serve either duplicate or unnecessary functions like an AI image generator and an app store. Of what looked like 10+ Acer applications that were preinstalled, I whittled that down to just 2 or 3. Even after uninstalling things like the AI image generator though I still see it running in the background and appearing in the context menus. These things mostly don’t drag the actual performance down and I know that all laptop manufacturers load up their own ads and utilities on top of Windows, but the breadth of what’s here, the effort required to remove it, and the amount of stuff that still can’t easily be removed outside of just doing a fresh non-Acer Windows install left a bad taste in my mouth. In terms of performance, the Swift 16 tore through everyday tasks with no problems and for me generally stayed silent or barely audible on the Normal performance preset. Apps load quickly and it’s also quick to sleep/wake, so it’s ready at a moment’s notice. This is by no means a laptop for gaming, but the B390 GPU offers a compelling experience as long as you’re okay turning down settings and utilizing upscaling. I was able to get Forza Horizon 5 running on the high preset at a mostly consistent 60FPS with XeSS set to quality. The 16GB of RAM will be a limiting factor for higher-end games since the system RAM and VRAM are both shared by this pool of memory. When the fans did kick into high gear they were still pretty quiet. The keyboard on white Swift 16 includes a small numpad, which some may not like but I appreciate its inclusion for productivity tasks. It’s backlit and while you do have to adjust your hands a little off-center to type on it, it’s nice to use once you’re used to it. I did have occasional problems with the palm rejection, but for the most part it didn’t significantly interrupt me. The trackpad is large and also functions as a surface for the included pen to work on, similar to a Wacom tablet. I didn’t find much utility for the pen, but it seems fine and I can see the use case for artistic purposes. The trackpad also uses haptic feedback instead of a mechanical click, which I didn’t realize until I turned the laptop off, so that is implemented well and the simulated click is convincing. The OLED touchscreen on the Swift 16 looks nice and the 3K resolution fits the 16” size well. It also supports a 120 Hz refresh rate. It doesn’t get particularly bright, but it should be okay in indoor settings. The speakers are not great. They are loud and clear enough for calls, but music sounds terrible on them, even with the included DTS:X license enabled. The webcam is also not great. The image is washed out and grainy. It will work fine for video calls in good lighting, but it won’t impress anyone. You do at least get Windows Hello functionality built-in and there is a physical privacy shutter. The Swift 16 has a 70 Whr battery. I haven’t yet had a chance to run it all the way down. Acer rates the battery life at up to 24 hours, though this is based on a video rundown test and not really representative of real world use. My experience so far has indicated this should get through a full work day with some battery to spare. And the battery does not drain significantly when sleeping. Overall, I think the Swift 16 is a good laptop once all the junk is gone - it’s just unfortunate that it’s there in the first place and many people who purchase this will likely not go through the trouble of removing it and just deal with that subpar experience. It makes this one hard to recommend for that reason, but if you’re willing to put in the effort to debloat this it could be a good option.

It seems that Intel has itself a winner in the new "Panther Lake" CPU series (also known as the Core Ultra X7 Series 3 - here, the 358H). These new CPUs bring mobile performance, battery life and integrated graphics to a place where they haven't been before. Sure, you could buy a top notch performing CPU in a laptop and/or a top notch discrete GPU. But the battery life would suffer terribly and you'd have a heavy laptop and power cable to lug around. Not so with these new chips, and this Acer Swift 16 AI is a great example of what they can do. While it's not the smallest laptop out there given that it has a 16" screen (which is a gorgeous OLED with HDR+), this Acer is still plenty portable with a slim profile and fairly light weight. It also can be powered by any 100W USB-C PD charger, allowing you options in smaller chargers to take with you. But you won't ALWAYS need it, as the new CPUs do allow you to spend longer times away from the charger - even when doing light gaming or other CPU intensive tasks. And when you ARE doing those tasks, you'll have plenty of power for them. The 358H is a 16 core part that has the power to really bring it when you need - on battery or when plugged in. And the integrated ARC B380 GPU is a powerhouse for integrated graphics - the example here scored over 6,400 points in the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark (compare that to 3,000-3,500 for most recent handheld "gaming" PCs) so you can definitely play some games on the go. The 16GB of memory is a bit disappointing - I'd like to see 32GB but RAM prices are a bit high these days and 16GB will certainly do. And the 1TB SSD is a standard 2280 size that is easily replacable, though they've put it under a ribbon cable so it takes a bit more effort than some other laptops. The laptop opens with a number of Torx T6 screws on the bottom and a few clips to pop out - but the only things you can change are the (1) SSD, (2) WiFi card and (3) battery (so not the memory or such). The laptop is mostly plastic but has a decent build quality and should prove to be reasonably durable in normal use. The selection of ports is good, though I do wish they'd split the USB-C ports up instead of putting both on one side. The HDMI port and 2x USB-A ports are a welcome departure from other laptops with fewer "legacy" ports. The keyboard is backlit and feels good to type on, with a condensed number pad available as well. Perhaps the only things I don't like about the laptop are the (1) huge trackpad and (2) Acer software that has issues. While I get the trackpad doubles as a drawing slate with the included stylus (which DOES work surprisingly well), for me it also gets in the way of typing and I definitely got some accidental presses while typing though I can see that fading with time as a I get into different typing positions. Frankly I'd prefer a smaller one (still centered though!) that didn't have the writing support. The software is similarly well intentioned - particularly Acer Sense that centralizes many key settings - but in practice has lots of bugs / has to be reset and reinstalled frequently and just overall is frustrating to use. So, there you have it. This Acer is a showplace for the new Panther Lake CPUs at the mid/high mobile end. And (if you can ignore a couple small issues), it's a great one that can be good at just about anything. If that sounds good to you, give it a try today!

This is an Acer laptop with the new Intel core ultra X7 chips. The X means it has the beefer integrated GPU's with 12 Xe cores. The non x chips I believe has like 2 Xe cores. These according to Intel is comparable to a Nividia 4050 laptop GPU. Specs: 16 inch 3K OLED display that's officially rated at 380 nits if brightness Intel core ultra X7 358H 16GB of LPDDR5X ram 1TB SSD The other bright point of this laptop is the gorgeous screen. It's 16 inches OLED panel that they say can get to 340 nits in SDR and is 500 vesa black rated. I don't have the tools to rate it but in SDR it seems brighter then that and I have a M3 pro MacBook pro which has a 600nits of SDR and 1000 I think peak sustained brightness and 1600 peak brightness. This gets close to my MacBook SDR . The screen is also 120hz refresh rate which is nice. With the new Intel series 3 chips on panther lake I've gotten the best battery life out of an Intel powered laptop in a long time. Competitive with my MacBook actually. In terms of performance though this shines for what it is. It can run games quite well actually if you don't max out the graphics and don't expect to run games like cyberpunk at 120 fps. You'll get a respectable fps of around 60 which for an integrated GPU that's good.