Acer Swift 14 AI Review: Lightweight but Capable

The Acer Swift lineup has always been essentially the brand’s slim, lightweight, ultraportable model of laptops, and has been around for quite some time. The design has remained relatively minimalist and clean.

So, fresh from IFA Berlin 2024, we’ve taken a good look at the new Acer Swift 14 AI and here’s our full review.

Design and Construction

The Acer Swift 14 AI is a simple-looking yet sleek and beautiful ultraportable laptop. During the IFA Berlin 2024, Acer refreshed this line-up a little bit and named it the Swift 14 AI, with AI being added and reference to the massive popularity of integrated artificial intelligence on mobile devices like smartphones, tablets and laptops.

The laptop is made up of an aluminum chassis with diamond-cut edges and is certified for MIL-STD-810 military grade durability. Despite that, Acer managed to keep the weight at 1.26kg and under 0.6 inches thin.

The lid has this small holographic Acer logo and a dot symbol in the upper-left corner which symbolizes AI.

On the right side, there’s a single USB port and 3.5mm headphone port along with an LED power indicator.

On the left side, there’s another USB port, two Type-C ports and a full-sized HDMI port. You can also charge the laptop via any of the two USB Type-C ports here.

Along the top bezel, they managed to put 1440p web camera with a physical privacy shutter and IR sensor for facial recognition to use with Windows Hello login.

The power button on the top right corner of the keyboard also has a fingerprint sensor for biometric login.

The keyboard layout is simple and straightforward with very little deviations from the normal layout, making touch-typing easier and more manageable. The chiclet-type keys comfortable to type on, has average surface area and enough key travel to feel the feedback and avoid typing errors.

There are two custom keys included — the AcerSense key between F12 and Delete and the CoPilot key between the Left arrow key and the Alt Gr key. And oh, the keyboard is also backlit so that’s another plus.

Using TypingTest.com, I benchmarked my typing speed at 53 words per minute with 98% accuracy or a 52WPM net speed. This is comparable to my usual typing speed using my MacBook Air M3 at 54WPM with 96% accuracy or 52WPM net speed.

The trackpad is large and generous, has that deep physical travel when you click but a light tap would also do the trick. There’s also another logo or symbol (AI Lighting Effect/Activity Indicator) on the top-right corner of the trackpad which lights up when:

• When boot on device: The lighting is on gently and slowly, then off gently and slowly later (100% brightness)
• When press Copilot key: The spinning light (100% brightness) is on.
• When NPU is processing.
• You can turn on/off in AcerSense.

Lastly, you can place it lie-flat with its 180-degree hinge so you can have more ways to configure and use the device in a way that’s most comfortable for you.

Display and Multimedia

Open up the Swift 14 AI, and you’re greeted by a 14-inch OLED panel with a large 3K resolution or 2880 x 1800 pixels in a 16:10 aspect ratio.

The screen is quite bright too, and the borders are relatively slim apart from the top portion which houses the 1440P camera. Acer does say it has support for 100% DCI-P3 wide color gamuts.

The built-in speakers are fine, nothing to brag about, but they’re loud enough for watching movies or streaming YouTube.

Hardware and Configuration

The Swift 14 AI is powered by the latest Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor. This is part of the Series 2 of Intel Core Ultra processors that include 4 Performance-cores and 4 Low Power Efficient-cores for a total of 8 cores in the single processor.

The Performance-core Max Turbo Frequency is 4.8GHz while the Low Power Efficient-core Max Turbo Frequency is 3.7GHz with both having a base frequency of 2.2GHz.

As for the graphics unit, the chipset comes with an Intel Arc 140V GPU with 16GB of RAM. This is paired with a generous 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 1,024GB of PCIe NVME SSD internal storage.

Performance and Benchmarks

With the 8-core Intel Core Ultra 7 processor with Intel Arc 140V, we expect good to very good performance and benchmark results.

Details of the chipset is shown by CPU-Z below:

We also ran a limited number of benchmarks and this is what we got from Geekbench 6.3:

CPU Score: 2729 (Single-Core), 10,343 (Multi-Core)
GPU OpenCL Score: 29,224

As for the NVMe SSD, here are the speed test for read and write:

Connectivity and I/Os

The laptop comes with a plethora of ports — two (2) USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, both support DisplayPort video output and power delivery (PD) for charging the laptop. This is complemented by two (2) USB-A 3.2 ports, an HDMI output, and a 3.5mm combo port.

Both the USB-A ports can also charge external devices like smartphones even when in sleep/hibernate mode or when the laptop is turned off which is a nice feature.

As for wireless connectivity, it comes with Bluetooth 5.4 and WiFi-7 support so you’re safe to assume that it will be compatible with your existing WiFi-6/6E WiFi routers and future WiFI 7 routers that will come out any time soon.

Operating System and Software

For the OS, we have a freshly installed Windows 11 Pro which is an edition of Windows 11 that’s designed for businesses and organizations. It includes all the features of the Home edition, plus additional security and networking features, and is intended to help manage a fleet of computers — plus Hyper-V for virtualization, connect to another PC using Remote Desktop, allows users to join a domain.

It also includes Windows Information Protection, BitLocker device encryption, and Windows Update for Business. Acer also added a 1 month trial for the new Microsoft 365.

Aside from that, I also found a few bloatware preinstalled — Booking.com and Dropbox on the Navigation bar, McAfee pre-installled and running on start-up, plus a few others in the Start button.

Lastly, since the Intel Core 7 Ultra comes with an NPU (Intel AI Boost, NPU Peak TOPS 47), it also a CoPilot+ PC. On top of that, the Swift 14AI has the following AI features built-in:

Live Captions – Automatically provides speech captions and translates live or pre-recorded videos from 44 languages into English.

Cocreator – Uses visual or written prompts to co-create AI images and texts.

Auto Super Resolution – Automatically upscales graphics resolution and frame refresh rates of games in real-time.

Windows Studio Effects – Automatically improves lighting conditions and cancels out unwanted noise in video calls.

Battery and Charging

The Swift 14 AI has a built-in 3-cell 65-Whr Li-ion battery which is already pretty generous for the laptop’s size and weight.

The charging brick is also rated at 65W and plugs via a Type-C port and can fully charge the laptop in 1 to 1.5 hours depending if the device is off or on and running something on the background.

Acer promises up to 29 hours of multi-day battery. However, in our own test (using a full HD movie played locally at 50% brightness and 50% volume with WiFi turned on) the laptop lasted about 15 hours and 46 minutes. That’s already pretty impressive in our experience.

Conclusion

Modern laptops like the Acer Swift 14 AI have made great strides in all the important aspects of mobile productivity — a powerful and capable machine, slim and lightweight yet packed with enough battery life to last and entire day and even more, has all the fast connectivity options and access to AI, all at the palm of our hands.

The Swift 14 AI checks all the boxes that we’d all want in a great ultraportable with a perfect marriage of hardware and software, both maximizing the capabilities of local computing and cloud computing.

What we liked about it:
* Very light and portable
* Powerful processor
* Generous RAM allocation
* Great display quality
* Very long battery life

What we did not like:
* A few unnecessary bloatware

Acer Swift 14 AI specs:
14-inch 3K OLED SlimBezel, 16:10 @ 3K Resolution (2,880 x 1,800 pixels), 120Hz
Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor
Intel Arc 140V iGPU 1.95GHz
Intel AI Boost, NPU Peak TOPS 47
32GB LPDDR5X RAM
1TB NVMe, Over PCIe 4.0, UFS 4.0 Storage
WiFi 7 support
Bluetooth 5.4
Two USB 4.0 Type-C (supporting DisplayPort, USB charging), Two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, headphone/speaker jack
Windows 11 Pro
65 Whr 3-cell Li-ion battery