Acer Swift 16 AI ZDNET's key takeaways The Acer Swift 16 AI is regularly priced at $1,250.
Its 16-inch OLED display, well-designed lightweight form, and marathon battery work together to create a laptop that feels more premium than its price would suggest.
Its speakers, however, leave much to be desired, and it has its fair share of bloatware. View now at Best Buy
Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.
Acer's Swift 16 AI is a thin and light laptop with a gorgeous OLED display, nice full-sized keyboard, and Intel Core Ultra 7 or 9 "Lunar Lake" processor starting at $1,200: a competitive price for a device that feels more premium than you'd expect.
I've been commuting with the Swift 16 AI for the past month, and it's become a surprise favorite of the year. It stands out as a great-value ultraportable that's as versatile as it is capable and has fantastic battery life.
Also: Microsoft said my PC can't run Windows 11, but I upgraded in 5 minutes anyway - here's how
The Acer Swift 16 AI features a minimalist build, with an all-over, metallic matte black coating that looks a lot like the LG Gram Pro 16. Its full-sized keyboard and generous selection of I/O make it practical for a variety of uses. All in all, it's rather non-descript (in a good way) with one subtle Acer logo to identify it.
The configuration I tested had an Intel Core Ultra 7 256V, 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and a 1TB SSD -- a flexible loadout that can do a little bit of everything. It's particularly well-suited as a work device with Wi-Fi 7 and a responsive, very comfortable keyboard with a slight upward tilt thanks to Acer's hinge design.
I was happy to see that both USB-C ports support Thunderbolt 4, which is great for folks who want their external monitors. Otherwise, you also get an HDMI port that supports up to 8K resolution. The webcam is also surprisingly good, with 1440p resolution for a crisp image during video calls.
... continue reading