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7.8 / 10 Score Cnet Score CNET provides expert, unbiased reviews of products and services. When we assign a score, we use a scale of 1-10. Each product we score is evaluated by criteria specific to its category with most assessing pricing, quality, features and performance. Read more on: How we test Acer Swift 16 AI (2026) $1,800 at Acer Pros Giant, gorgeous 16-inch OLED display
Incredibly thin and light for its size
Strong overall performance from Intel Panther Lake CPU
Quiet and cool operator Cons Poor audio output from underpowered speakers
Huge haptic touchpad is so big that it gets in the way
Some flex to the thin aluminum top and bottom panels
Cannot expand memory or storage
The Acer Swift 16 AI gets a bump from Intel Lunar Lake on last year's model to Panther Lake this year. While application and especially graphics performance have improved, pricing has also gone up, which is not unique to Acer's laptops, thanks to the global RAM shortage. Pricing for this year's models is near the point where the benefit of the integrated Intel B390 GPU with its 12 Xe cores starts to lose its shine because laptops with dedicated Nvidia RTX graphics cost roughly the same or not much more.
The other change Acer made to the Swift 16 AI is adding a gigantic haptic touchpad that comes with pen support and an included pen. I'm generally a huge fan of huge haptic touchpads, but the Swift 16 AI's is a case of too much of a good thing. And my biggest criticism of last year's model still applies to this year's version: the speakers stink. And that's a shame given the entertainment prospects of the roomy 16-inch OLED display.
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