Acer Swift 14 AI Review

Introduction

The Acer Swift 14 AI (2024), as the name suggests, goes all-in on the AI craze we’re in at the moment, extending not only into the laptop’s software but also even into its design.

It is, otherwise, quite a conventional Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus-powered Windows ultrabook that’s designed to compete with the likes of the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024) and the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 (2024).

At £1199/$1099, it’s well in the mix against some of our favourite Arm-based Windows ultrabooks, and has a decent spec sheet to match, too.

The Swift 14 AI (2024) packs in a Snapdragon X Plus SoC alongside a larger 1TB SSD, 16GB of DDR5 RAM and a 2.5K resolution 120Hz IPS display. It’s also lightweight and rather sleek, too. I’ve been testing Acer’s laptop to see how well it compares against the competition and whether it’s one of the best ultrabooks we’ve tested.

Design and Keyboard

• Smart aluminium chassis
• Solid port selection
• Reasonably tactile keyboard, although a smaller trackpad

The Swift 14 AI (2024) makes for quite a smart laptop, with a space grey aluminium chassis that not only looks classy, but also feels excellent, too. It carries quite the premium feel against some other laptops that opt for a more plasticky chassis I’ve used in recent times. There is an intriguing curved pattern across the lid and even on the trackpad, which Acer simply refers to as an ‘AI’ pattern. It looks cool, although I don’t really see the point of it.

A 1.32kg weight makes it rather portable too, and while it may be on the heavier side for a 14-inch laptop, it remains easily stowable for putting in a bag. This is also helped by a sub-15mm thickness, which is rather similar to Dell’s own Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024), which comes with similar dimensions and weight.

Being on the thicker side against other ultrabooks gives the Swift 14 AI (2024) a solid selection of inputs. These include a pair of USB4-capable Type-C ports that support both display and power delivery, as well as two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports and a headphone jack. There isn’t a full-size HDMI, nor an SD card reader here, though.

The keyboard here is a more compact option, taking the form of a conventional layout that we’re used to seeing on smaller trays. The keys themselves offer a snappy experience, although aren’t quite as tactile as other ultrabooks, such as the Dell XPS 13 (2024). There is an even white backlight across the keys too, which does an excellent job of illuminating them for after-dark working.

With regards to the trackpad, it isn’t the biggest against other laptops I’ve tested in recent months. However, it still provides a decent size for your fingers and solid tactility.

Display and Sound

• Solid resolution and motion
• Middling black level and contrast
• Decent speakers

The Swift 14 AI (2024) springs a small surprise with its display, opting for a 14.5-inch 2.5K, or 2560×1600, resolution IPS panel with a 120Hz refresh rate. This means we’re getting solid detail and wonderfully smooth motion across a sensible-sized panel.

It’s the fact Acer has sprung for an IPS screen which is the surprising bit, as some other ultrabooks in this price range offer an OLED panel with characteristically inky blacks and fantastic colour accuracy.

The Swift 14 AI (2024)’s IPS panel is still solid, with a decent peak brightness of 363.1 nits. It may not be the brightest, but it’s serviceable for indoor and outdoor use. The black level, contrast and colour temperature are perfectly serviceable too, with respective results of 0.21, 1380:1 and 7000K, which makes for decent all-round images. An OLED panel will offer more dynamic range and deeper blacks, though.

My colorimeter also measured perfect mainstream colours with 100% sRGB coverage recorded, while the 78% Adobe RGB and 80% DCI-P3 results mean that you could feasibly use the Swift 14 AI (2024) display for more colour-sensitive work. I’d probably stick to another laptop for this purpose, though.

The speakers are better than other laptops I’ve tested in the sense they don’t sound too thin, provide lots of volume and a decent overall experience. Of course, with the laptop’s headphone hack, you’re better off plugging in a headset, but for general listening to music or video playback, they’re perfectly fine.

Performance

• Snapdragon X Plus SoC offers surprisingly brisk performance
• Lacking in some graphical horsepower
• Speedy and capacious SSD inside

The Swift 14 AI (2024) offers the lower end of the two Snapdragon X SoCs in going for the 10-core Snapdragon X Plus, the same as is in Dell’s Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024). Its performance is virtually on-par with the X Elite-powered ultrabooks, save for a few points in synthetic benchmark tests such as Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23.

With this in mind, Acer’s option felt zippy for productivity tasks and for some more intensive workloads in my testing, and I didn’t notice much of a difference between the Plus SoC inside the Swift 14 AI (2024) against the Elite SoC inside the laptops I’ve used in comparison.

The only issue here is its sub-par graphical performance, which is also the same as with Snapdragon X Elite-powered options. This comes despite the Adreno GPUs being different for both SoCs, and the results in our 3D Mark Time Spy benchmark test being only a few points different to that in Snapdragon X Elite laptops.

The Swift 14 AI (2024) offers a sensible 1TB SSD that offers solid capacity as well as excellent speeds with tested read and writes of 6391.17MB/s and 5612.57MB/s respectively. In addition, the 16GB of RAM here makes sense for general computing tasks and a slither of more intensive workloads.

Software

• Proper Windows 11 with minimal bloatware
• Windows Studio effects for webcam are nifty
• Prism translation layer offers solid compatibility with some small hitches

The Swift 14 AI (2024), as with other Windows ultrabooks running these Snapdragon SoCs, runs full-fat Windows 11, and comes with little in the way of bloatware, such as pre-installed antivirus software.

There are more Acer-specific apps than anything else, such as Acer Jumpstart, which provides a link to the brand’s website, and AcerSense, which gives you access to check your system’s vitals and enable settings such as the AI lighting on the trackpad.

The Swift 14 AI (2024) also comes with Microsoft’s AI functionality, being a Copilot+ PC and all. The main thing here is the addition of its Copilot key, which acts as a wake button for Microsoft’s AI assistant. It brings up a window where you can ask the AI all manner of things, such as to write some text, or you can ask it a range of information.

You also get the benefit of generative AI in Windows system apps such as Photos, where you can add filters or an interesting background. The Photos app on a Copilot+ PC also has an Image Creator function, where you can give the system a prompt and it’ll generate an image for you with reasonable accuracy. Microsoft Paint also has similar smarts, where AI can help you add detail to images using the CoCreator tab where it can turn your image into everything from pixel art to an oil painting.

The laptop’s webcam also benefits from Windows Studio webcam effects to keep you in frame, as well as to offer convenient features such as background blur, which works a treat for conference calls. There are also useful extras including a way of adding live captions to videos directly within Windows, which is handy.

Microsoft’s controversial  Recall feature is still missing however. This would have taken screenshots every few seconds of use so you could look back and remember things you’ve looked at, even if you didn’t manually bookmark them in a browser or take a manual screenshot using the Snipping Tool. It will be available, although only for Windows Insiders.

Of course, being Arm-based, the Swift 14 AI (2024) has some minor compatibility issues against x86-based ultrabooks as apps have had to be translated to Arm through Microsoft’s Prism translation layer. For the most part, I had few issues with compatibility in running a range of benchmark software, as well as Photoshop and similar apps. The PCMark benchmark app didn’t run fully on Arm-based Windows in my testing, though, and there have been reports that games such as Dirt 5 and some VPN apps also refuse to load from elsewhere, too.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 20 hours 36 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for two working days

The Swift 14 AI (2024) also impresses with its battery life, garnering one of the best results I’ve seen from any laptop. In dialling the brightness down to the customary 150 nits and running a video loop test, this Acer laptop lasted for 20 hours and 36 minutes. That’s better by several hours than a lot of the Arm-based competition, excluding the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, which lasted for another two hours over the Swift 14 AI (2024).

This means this particular laptop will easily be able to last for between one and two working days before you need to reach for the charger. When you do, the 65W brick that the Swift 14 AI (2024) comes with is also on par in terms of its recharging speed. It took 45 minutes to get the laptop back to 50%, while going from zero to fully charged took 101 minutes.

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