Acer - Swift Edge 16 - 16" 3.2K 120Hz OLED Laptop – AMD Ryzen 7 7840U with 16GB LPDDR5 memory– 1TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD - Olivine Black

FIRST: Best Buy is the ONLY place to get this in the US and it's the best bargain laptop ANYWHERE!!! I was shocked they had it. I went from a solid Ryzen AMD 12 core Desktop to this system. This one runs Ableton with huge sessions at the same level of efficiency. This runs UAD Audio Hardware perfectly FINE of the USB4 port BTW and connects to everything through my Satechi USB4/TB4 UB. I guess there's just some sort of TB emulation going on. I ALSO have a Macbook AIR m2 with 32GB of RAM and it runs Ableton ALSO at the SAME level of CPU usage. The Air cost over 2X as I got this one for a $200 discount @ $1099. WOW The value was insane. See photos of both machines. The disk speeds are insane on the internal drive, like 4K read write. The ONLY drawback which is every Win Laptop is that crazy CPU stuff does drive the fan. I'm gonna try a cooler and play with it. See my journey below. I am using my Mac mostly for audio, but have a ton of Ableton sessions on WIN desktop. Being remote mostly, I rolled the dice on this. I cloned the desktop drive from Win 10 there using Macrium reflect imaging (not clone) and upgraded to Win 11 here on this box. Go to Toms guide for some Github installers to upgrade as it was giving me fits with TPM2. (and still doesn't recognize. See below). I purchased a Win11Pro key online from the gamer site and it worked perfectly. (The purchased machine was authed for Home. Blah!) Device encryption on the System info tab says TPM not usable. Go figure. It's enabled in the bios and everything, but I'm winning big time anyway. Once upgraded I installed every acer driver from their site manually as the Acer care did squat. That's a bit strange. But alas, a few tweaks, re-authorizing Brainworks and Native plugs and others to this machine, plugging in Ilok, which is way easier for most of my plugs, and everything runs perfectly! The screen is AMAZING It's soooooooooo light! PIX: Mac and Acer together Acer with Ableton Zoomed in on 168 tracks in my session with a zillion plugs that aren't UAD accelerated. My estimate is about 100 in the session. Don't worry about memory. The drive is so fast that the machine is spunky multitasking with

Many great aspects of this laptop, with a few shortcomings that could be an issue if it matters. lets start with the pros: - incredibly light. This thing is lighter than lots of 14-inch laptops, making it easy to carry around. The weight really helps it be very portable and easy to carry around. -Generous port selection. They definitely did not compromise on port selection on both sides, especially the 2 USB-A ports so you can connect both a mouse and a keyboard if you'd like. Also, it's nice that most of the ports are on the left side, so if you're right-handed your mouse does not interfere with cables. -the display is truly incredible. If you enjoy watching movies, this laptop screen is phenomenal for it. high resolution and high refresh rate also means it's a pleasure to use daily. (The screen is set to 60hz out of the box, so make sure to go into settings and change that.) -the processor is powerful and modern, which will help with the longevity of the laptop. -the color is black, but in some lights it's a very dark shade of green. (Hence the name Olivine Black) Now onto the cons: -the keyboard and trackpad are fine, but not great. They definitely work, but if you really care about keyboards then this might disappoint. the trackpad is also fine, but not stellar. -the battery life, as mentioned in other reviews, is not good. It's the consequence of having such a thin and light laptop with an OLED screen as well. Make sure you're near an outlet if you get this. Thankfully, in this day and age, outlets are plentiful. Expect 4-6 hours of normal use, and more if you set it at lower brightness, and refresh rate, and do lighter tasks. Overall, if you're looking for a large laptop with a beautiful screen and excellent portability and you're not particularly concerned about super long battery life, this thing is a fantastic option. Especially on sale.

My thoughts (have had the laptop for 4 days now): Good------------------- BIG SCREEN HUGE yet laptop is light AF. 16:10 great for viewing documents/office work. Build quality seems pretty great, feels solid, like a quality/premium product. Performance for daily/office tasks seems totally OK (not sure how the 16 gb RAM will fare in the long run though, I would've gotten the 32 GB if it was available in the US). I ultimately opted to get this because of the 999 USD sale + my state's tax free weekend. So i really did just pay 999 USD for this! The Love how the laptop has the Ryzen 7840U for the great iGPU (40-50% better, in some cases, than Intel IIRC?) I love having the numpad. There's a neat battery maintenance option with the Acer care center for having the battery charge to 80% only. Battery life is not that great but I knew that going in and wanted a laptop that maximized weight savings over everything else (I usually have the laptop plugged in so it's no issue for me, I just need to be able to bring it around the place). I LOVE knowing (and feeling) that this is a laptop that's specialized towards weight savings. It's also really thin. Keyboard seems totally fine for me - i wish the keys were spaced closer together (i don't like chiclet keyboards) but it seems to be the case for many keyboards nowadays. Webcam is OK, supposedly has a 1440p one but it doesn't seem all that special to me, I might be spoiled because I've been using Droidcam to make my smartphone's camera my webcam Bad-------------------- I've heard reports of the touchpad rattling. Mine seems OK but when I double tap to left click I feel/hear a slight rattle. Wish there was Windows Hello. Speakers are eh but I use this for work so in the office I just have headphones in. The fans are LOUD when at full speed - generally the laptop doesn't spin it up to full speed though. However, I might have a defective laptop - I actually don't mind the loud fan noise, but mine seems to have a faint, but piercing and annoying high pitched noise when at full speed. Going to see if it goes away if I exchange the laptop. This is an Achillies heel issue that really stops me from being super happy with the product/device. Overall thought/TLDR---------------------- LOVE going all in on the lightweight aspect (sacrificing battery size, having loud fans, eh speakers), but am getting a high pitched sound that I'm thinking of exchanging for/just getting used to. Nabbing the laptop new for 999 USD makes the downsides totally acceptable :p