Customer Ratings & Reviews

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.

This laptop is the best I’ve ever seen from Acer when it comes to build quality. It features a premium aluminum-alloy chassis that looks nicer than Acer models I’ve used in the past. I like the gold accent lines on the lid. It’s incredibly lightweight and thin, yet still manages to give you 2 USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, 2 USB-A, HDMI, a microSD card reader, and a headphone jack. There’s a little bit of flex on the keyboard deck, but otherwise this is a very solid machine. The 16” display is amazing. It’s a 3K OLED at 2880x1800 with support for HDR and a 120Hz refresh rate. Colors in videos pop, games are fluid, and blacks are truly black. This is one of the best screens you can get on this type of device. The speakers are not as bad as what I had feared. Acer could have done more to improve them, such as making the speaker slits not only much larger but also placing them more on the side of the laptop, Acer claims up to 24-hours of battery life, but my own tests showed I got around a 12-hour runtime while playing a 4k YouTube video at 50% screen brightness and 50% volume. The haptic touchpad is really good and feels like it actually clicks but it does not move. The trackpad is about a half-inch less in width and an inch less in height than the screen of an iPad Mini. The trackpad does go all the way to the bottom of the device. Palm rejection is good, it doesn’t register an input if it’s bigger than a typical finger. However, because the trackpad is so large I do sometimes hit it accidentally while typing which sends my cursor flying into a new location within my text. I saw earlier reviews say this is a problem, but I don’t think it’s that bad. It can probably be mitigated with more practice or software updates. The keys are chiclet style, with good spacing between them. The backlit key-labels are large and easy to see. It also includes a number-pad, which I personally appreciate after spending years using a ten-key eight hours a day in a bank. The number pad does throw the keyboard off center but again just takes some getting used to. An active pen is included in the box, but the pen does not work on the screen, only on the trackpad, which feels like a missed opportunity. I’m not sure why it couldn’t work on both, since every other touchscreen with stylus support lets you use it on the screen. I did test the pen with some drawing applications and found it to be very capable. It supports the Windows Ink API with pressure and tilt sensitivity. While it’s not quite as accurate as a Wacom pen tablet, it comes remarkably close for a solution built into the touchpad of a laptop. I think sketch artists, note takers, or anyone who needs to capture signatures will love this feature. Performance is good overall. My Geekbench single core score were 2818 and 15395 multi-core. It felt snappy when getting it setup and installing software. The fans will kick on but are quiet, suitable for an office or school environment. AI performance I would give it an average rating. It did not score that high in my tests against older laptops with discrete graphics. Like many 2026 laptops, AI support is heavily marketed, but those capabilities are lost on most people as they don’t know what that means and I don’t think even the manufacturers know what it’ll be used for. It does have an NPU which is where some low-power AI processing like Recall, live translation and webcam features happen. However, most people who are doing real work with AI locally are going to want a system with not only a dedicated graphics card but one with a lot of fast memory. This one has 16gb of shared video memory which will be a limiting factor in both games and AI applications. Speaking of games, in the past, an Intel integrated graphics chip usually meant the machine was not ideal for gaming. However, the Panther Lake platform changes this entirely. The 358H comes with an integrated Arc B390 GPU which is a major revolutionary step for gaming on thin and light non-gaming laptops. It plays older or less demanding games like Minecraft, Ball x Pit, or Hades II very well, even on battery power. More demanding games such as Halo Infinite and Hogwarts Legacy were still playable with the graphics settings and resolution lowered. However, there were several games including Halo that would display a warning saying I didn’t have enough video memory to run the game, but the game would start anyway. This is my first laptop with a presence sensor, and it seems to work well. The laptop will turn back on from sleep when I sit down in front of the computer without me pressing the trackpad or a key. It also supports some basic eye tracking such as a feature called multi-screen assistance, which will let you move your cursor or entire windows to external monitors just by looking at them. So for the bad, let’s start with the webcam: it’s horrendous. Even in good lighting, the video looks grainy and low resolution. I would not want to use this laptop's web camera iif I needed to be on video in Zoom calls all day. Secondly, there is too much bloatware. I do not like antivirus software and you are forced to uninstall it twice on this laptop, and even then, it’s begging you to keep it because you have an “active subscription”, one that I never signed up for. There’s also adware for things like travel sites, games, cloud storage, and VPN services installed. There’s even a second Solitaire installed that is full of ads and a completely unnecessary third-party app store. All of these can be removed but it takes time to do so and really, they have no business on a laptop with a price tag of this one. Pros: - Thin, lightweight, premium build - 120Hz 2880x1800 OLED Screen w/ HDR True Black 500 - Intel Core Ultra 7 358H 16-core CPU - Intel Arc B390 is revolutionary for gaming on non-gaming laptops - Keyboard with number pad - Full-size HDMI 2.1 and USB-A 3.2 ports (Gen 1 & Gen 2) - 2 USB 4 Ports - Killer WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3 - Webcam with Windows Hello and built-in sliding cover - All day battery life - Includes the active stylus for touchpad - Includes soft carrying case - 1TB SSD - Large multi-touch haptic trackpad Cons: - Pen only works with the touchpad - Preinstalled Antivirus and Adware - Webcam quality is poor Overall – this laptop prioritizes a premium build and a thin and light design. Aside from the disappointing webcam, it’s excellent for productivity, schoolwork, light gaming, and development. Artists and creatives who already use pen tablets will appreciate the digitizer that’s built-in to the trackpad.

With only small caveats, Acer has a great looking, premium work or everyday laptop here. The OLED is gorgeous (2880x1800 120hz), and it still gets solid battery life even with the OLED (around 6-8+ hours with normal/higher brightness, 120hz, and wireless + bluetooth on). The 3rd gen Intel Core Ultra X7 is a very fast and efficient chip, plus it’s specced with the top Intel iGPU, the B390. (It also comes with the largest trackpad I have ever seen, even beyond that fruit company's biggest, 4.25” x 7”!) I will start with the biggest issues I have with this 2026 Swift 16 AI 1) First is the MASSIVE amount of Acer bloat, like I haven’t seen in years! Like a crazy amount of Acer apps that are unneeded plus some are hard to remove. 2) 16gb of shared system memory, no matter how fast, does not belong in this level of laptop, especially with the level of iGPU that is included. (even with the AI “ram crisis”) It should be 32GB, that way you can allow the B390 iGPU to use up to 8GB and have 24gb left for the system. 3) This is just a nitpick, but the charger, even though it is USB-C, is still stuck in the past with the power cord to brick to the attached cable. Should be a solid long USB-C cable with a 100w brick. Otherwise, everything else has been stellar! (I touch on a few below) The Core Ultra X7 is a great chip, the CPU performance is extremely solid, but the B390 iGPU takes the cake. (Just remember to manually get the latest drivers from Intel, I saw a *19fps* gain at the exact same settings on Forza Horizon 5 benchmark!) The OLED is phenomenal, 2880x1800, 120hz, accurate touch. Brightness gets quite high, enough that it almost hurts my eyes when it's dark and I leave the brightness up at “daytime” levels. The build quality, keyboard, the massive trackpad, all work extremely well, and its top tier especially for an Acer product. Windows hello seems to work much better on this vs other newer systems I’ve used, guessing the camera/LEDs work better. Good port selection, 2x thunderbolt, 2x USB (one seems to be 5gbps and one 10gbps) HDMI 2.1, headphone jack, plus a microSD slot. Overall a very good system with a few negatives that don't really pull it down enough to not be recommended!