Over at Acer’s booth, I managed to get some alone time with one particular laptop that wasn’t given much (if any) stage time, the Swift Air 16. Granted, it’s no Panther Lake laptop but considering what’s on tap for it, and the fact that it wasn’t kept inside a Perspex enclosure, it was still worth a look.
The first couple of things that caught my attention is both its size and weight. It’s a 16-inch laptop and yet, Acer managed to the reduce its weight down to less than a kilogram. As I’ve mentioned before, ultra lightweight laptops are nothing new with the brand and its Swift series.
But to bring that weight loss to something larger, such as a 16-inch form factor? That’s is an achievement right there. That said, I still can’t hold it up pinching it with two fingers, but still, being able to swing it around with virtually no resistance? That’s a plus.
Of course, and unsurprisingly, there are some trade-offs to shedding off the weight and with the Swift Air 16, that price is the perceived quality of the chassis. Let’s be clear about one thing: there’s nothing cheap about the material Acer is using here, and Magnesium-Aluminium for a chassis is considered as one of the more durable and lightest alloys on the market.
Unfortunately, because the weight of the Swift Air 16 comes in at less than a kilogram, just typing on it the laptop feels hollow and worse, there’s a flexibility and bounce back , as well as an echo in the base that most laptops do not typically produce. At least, not with laptops I’ve used in the past couple of years.
Speaking of typing, the keys on the Swift Air 16 feels tactile, even more so than the keyboards on its other laptop lineups, such as the Predator Helios 18P AI that I recently had a look at. For another matter, I’m not quite a fan of the keyboard layout and design; it’s very obvious that Acer took a page out of Dell’s book for this and as aesthetically pleasing as it looks, my experience with it is far from efficient.
The internal specifications are nothing to scoff at either. Beneath the hood, the Swift Air 16 plays house to an AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 APU, up to 32GB LPDDR5-6400 RAM, up to 1TB PCIe 4.0 storage, and a 16-inch 3K resolution AMOLED dislay with 120Hz refresh rate and a peak brightness of 400 bits and 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut. Sadly, its Wi-Fi 6E but honestly, I highly doubt you’re going to be complaining about the speeds you get – if you’re speeds are crappy, then you need to blame your service provider, not your Wi-Fi module.
At the time of writing, Acer did not specify when or if the Swift Air 16 will be making its way to our shores, nor did it provide pricing, global or local.
