Acer Swift 7
Acer boasts that its Swift 7 is the “world’s thinnest notebook PC.” While technically true, that marketing angle sells only one aspect of the machine—and it’s not the most important one.
PC vendors love to sell the idea of thin, and for good reason. Thin implies light, portable, and attractive. But a notebook can end up spreading outward (making it larger and more difficult to pack) or sacrificing performance in the quest to be the thinnest. The Acer Swift 7 does both.
So while this $1,100 13-inch notebook (available at Amazon) is slender and quiet, it’s bigger and slower than similarly priced ultrabooks. Rivals like the barely thicker HP Spectre 13.3 and smaller-but-heftier Dell XPS 13 easily outpace the Swift 7. The Swift 7 sits right at the top of Acer’s new lineup, and according to the firm it is the first laptop in the world to measure in with a thickness of less than 1cm.
The Swift range also includes the 1, 3 and 5 models and is a move away from Acer’s older Aspire branding. Acer has trimmed just enough fat off the 13.3-inch Swift 7 to bring the thickness in at 9.98mm. It weighs 1.1kg, putting it in the same weight category as the HP Spectre, but just a little heavier than the 970g MacBook.
These features are sure to make the Swift 7 feel worthy of its name. But at $1,099, this laptop enters a notoriously competitive market where the slightest misstep can hurt a device’s fortunes. Should you put Acer’s flagship on your shopping list this holiday season?
The Acer Swift 7’s top feature is 9.98mm thickness. That’s even slimmer than the 12-inch MacBook or the HP Spectre.
Take the Acer Swift 7 out of its box and it feels like a conventional laptop, though. It’s slim and light, but doesn’t try to reinvent the laptop in the way the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 did.
There’s nothing wrong with that, particularly if you want something familiar to use daily, but the Swift 7 also doesn’t have the ultra-compact style of the Dell XPS 13. There’s some space around the keyboard and ‘spare’ screen surround that makes its width and height conventional.
The Acer Swift 7 has an all-aluminium frame, with a black finish on the lid and underside and a much more striking gold inside. As the colour is relatively punchy we would have appreciated a more sober silver or black option, but it still appears tasteful. There are no brushed or textured touches to push it over the edge.
For a laptop this thin, the Swift 7 also feels reassuringly solid. The keyboard doesn’t flex when you press on it and there’s only a slight bending of the frame when you (inadvisedly) hold it by the very edge of the frame.
There are a few little touches that make the design seem slightly less immaculate than a MacBook, such as the way you can tilt the screen so far back the front starts to lift up. However, this may be preferable to the rather limited hinge movement of the HP Spectre.
The panel's vibrancy comes from its impressive 105 percent color reproduction on the sRGB gamut, which was better than the ultraportable average of 95 percent as well as the Dell XPS 13 (94 percent) and the Spectre (100 percent). But the Asus ZenBook 3 was just a bit better, at 111 percent.
The Chiclet-style keyboard feels responsive and satisfying when touch-typing, providing adequate key travel and a discrete sensation when you press down. It does lack crispness in its feedback, but the sensation is more soft than mushy. That said, for my personal taste, I prefer the Spectre 13.3’s keyboard, which has a similar layout but with a firmer key press when typing.
The trackpad is extremely wide, providing ample room to move your digits around. However, it does make it a little harder to activate Windows 10 gestures that require you to swipe onto the touchpad from the sides. The pad itself is Microsoft Precision Trackpad-certified, and throughout testing it proved responsive and reliable.
It can be frustratingly sensitive on default settings, though, and traditional right-clicking doesn’t always register. You can adapt to both situations by fiddling with settings and using a double-finger tap, but it’s still a little annoying.
The best manage to separate out bass notes and give them more weight, and have smoother-sounding treble. However, the Acer Swift 7 sounds good enough to make the speakers usable rather than a high-price embarrassment.
The Acer Swift 7 is very HP Spectre-like in its connections, though. There are two USB-C ports and a headphone jack. Like many recent style laptops, there’s no memory card slot, no HDMI and no full-size USBs. One of these USB-Cs is also used by the power plug, leaving just the one free while charging.
We’re starting to see lots of USB-C connection hubs pop-up, so you might want to get hold of one for home use. Photographers and hardcore users should also check out the Dell XPS 13, though. It has an SD card slot and a full-size USB, meaning you won’t need to remember to take accessories around with you.
With a name like Swift, you might expect the Swift 7 to prioritize performance. That’s not quite the case, as Acer has opted for an Intel Core i5-7Y54 dual-core. This is one of the processors that caused a minor debacle over Intel supposedly confusing consumers by removing the Core M brand from Core i5 and i7.
You probably didn’t hear of that controversy unless you’re a serious geek, and you don’t need to. All you need to understand is this: The Core i5-7Y54 is designed to draw less power than most Core i5 chips, and because of that, it isn’t as quick.
Handbrake was even worse. There, the Swift 7 dragged significantly, requiring over 37 minutes to encode a trailer that lasts just four minutes and 20 seconds to 4K h.265. That’s 15 to 30 percent slower than similarly priced alternatives.
This is not to say the Acer Swift 7 feels slow in general use. Like most modern PCs with a powerful Intel chip, the laptop handles typical use without trouble. Even heavy use of Microsoft Office doesn’t slow it down. But if you intend for your laptop to do serious work, like editing photos or videos, you may be disappointed.
Maybe Acer should rethink this laptop's name. The so-called Swift 7's 256GB SSD duplicated 4.97GB of mixed media files in 44 seconds, for a transfer rate of 115.6 megabytes per second -- missing the 171.2-MBps average. Equipped with PCI-e SSDs, the Spectre (256GB), XPS (256GB) and ZenBook 3 (512GB) hit 196 MBps, 339.3 MBps and 509 MBps, respectively.
The Swift was also sluggish on the OpenOffice Spreadsheet Macro test, taking 4 minutes and 45 seconds to pair 20,000 names and addresses. That time was enough to top the 6:22 category average, but not the ZenBook 3 (3:34), XPS 13 (3:55) or Spectre (3:56).
We’ve seen few of these Core M-style CPUs used in the last 12 months, but it is likely part of the reason why Acer was able to get the Swift 7 quite to thin. It also helps out with battery life.
Playing a 720p video on loop at 120cd/m brightness, the Acer Swift 7 lasts eight hours 40 minutes. While not a class-leading result, it’s a very good given the laptop only has a 2770mAh battery, which equates to around 41Wh in conventional laptop battery terms.
As with the connections, the Swift 7 is a machine made around its top feature, a super-slim frame. If that’s not too much of a draw, the Dell XPS 13 and cheaper Acer S13 last longer thanks to their larger battery units, despite using more power-hungry processors.
Acer’s Swift 7 has a lot of competition, and at $1,100, it’s not a bargain. But the Asus Zenbook 3 is the only competitor in its category that we’d buy instead, and even there, it’s a question of priorities. The Zenbook 3 is smaller, yet faster. But the Acer Swift 7 will keep working after the Zenbook’s battery goes flat.
Whether the Acer Swift 7 is the right laptop for you depends on how much you care about its 10mm thickness. If you don’t mind adding a millimetre or five, you can get laptops with more power and better connectivity for the same price. Hardcore users take note. However, if you like the look and the slim frame means a lot to you, the Swift 7 is a very solid option. A great trackpad and slim-but-decent keyboard make this a very enjoyable laptop, particularly as it can last through a day’s work of light tasks.
Like we said, the Acer Swift 7 is one of the most gorgeous laptops of the year already, but it cuts a few too many corners to offer up a more affordable laptop in vein of the 12-inch MacBook. Some might be inclined to think that, with a better screen, battery, keyboard and storage, that the MacBook is actually worth the $1,299 in comparison, and it’s tough to argue with them.
But, for the right user seeking a MacBook-like experience without paying the hefty premium, they might be able to overlook the warts and enjoy this otherwise beautiful device. Besides, five to six hours battery life is longer than most flights in the US at least.
World's Thinnest Laptop
Acer boasts that its Swift 7 is the “world’s thinnest notebook PC.” While technically true, that marketing angle sells only one aspect of the machine—and it’s not the most important one.
PC vendors love to sell the idea of thin, and for good reason. Thin implies light, portable, and attractive. But a notebook can end up spreading outward (making it larger and more difficult to pack) or sacrificing performance in the quest to be the thinnest. The Acer Swift 7 does both.
The Swift range also includes the 1, 3 and 5 models and is a move away from Acer’s older Aspire branding. Acer has trimmed just enough fat off the 13.3-inch Swift 7 to bring the thickness in at 9.98mm. It weighs 1.1kg, putting it in the same weight category as the HP Spectre, but just a little heavier than the 970g MacBook.
Acer Swift 7 Design
Take the Acer Swift 7 out of its box and it feels like a conventional laptop, though. It’s slim and light, but doesn’t try to reinvent the laptop in the way the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 did.
There’s nothing wrong with that, particularly if you want something familiar to use daily, but the Swift 7 also doesn’t have the ultra-compact style of the Dell XPS 13. There’s some space around the keyboard and ‘spare’ screen surround that makes its width and height conventional.
Again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A solid footprint lets you use the Acer Swift 7 on your knees without it feeling precarious and that 10mm thickness makes the laptop easy to stash in a rucksack or bag. It weighs just 1.16kg too.
The Acer Swift 7 has an all-aluminium frame, with a black finish on the lid and underside and a much more striking gold inside. As the colour is relatively punchy we would have appreciated a more sober silver or black option, but it still appears tasteful. There are no brushed or textured touches to push it over the edge.
For a laptop this thin, the Swift 7 also feels reassuringly solid. The keyboard doesn’t flex when you press on it and there’s only a slight bending of the frame when you (inadvisedly) hold it by the very edge of the frame.
There are a few little touches that make the design seem slightly less immaculate than a MacBook, such as the way you can tilt the screen so far back the front starts to lift up. However, this may be preferable to the rather limited hinge movement of the HP Spectre.
Acer Swift 7 Display
Colors on the Swift 7's 13.3-inch, 1920 x 1080 display are almost as vivid as the notebook's interior. Actor Trevante Rhodes' deep-brown skin glowed almost as much as his gold necklace and grill in the HD trailer for Moonlight. Details were sharp enough that I could see the links in his Miami Cuban chain as well as a few blemishes on his cheek.
The panel's vibrancy comes from its impressive 105 percent color reproduction on the sRGB gamut, which was better than the ultraportable average of 95 percent as well as the Dell XPS 13 (94 percent) and the Spectre (100 percent). But the Asus ZenBook 3 was just a bit better, at 111 percent.
The 13.3-inch display is a non-touch IPS panel with a native resolution of 1920x1080 and a Gorilla Glass 4 layer. Images look sharp and crisp, and aside from the general complaints I have about glossy or glass screens, the Swift 7’s is pleasant to use. Just be aware that you’ll encounter some glare.
Unfortunately, the Swift 7's accuracy leaves much to be desired, as its panel registered a Delta-E of 4.5 (0 is ideal), which is worse than the 2.1 average. The Spectre and ZenBook 3 fared much better, at 1.2 and 1.1, respectively, but the XPS 13 was the most accurate, at 0.76.
When we tested the display's brightness, the Swift 7 averaged 319 nits, topping the 301-nit category average. The Spectre produced a dazzling 359 nits, while the ZenBook 3 and XPS 13 got 309 nits and 302 nits, respectively.
Unfortunately, the Swift 7's accuracy leaves much to be desired, as its panel registered a Delta-E of 4.5 (0 is ideal), which is worse than the 2.1 average. The Spectre and ZenBook 3 fared much better, at 1.2 and 1.1, respectively, but the XPS 13 was the most accurate, at 0.76.
When we tested the display's brightness, the Swift 7 averaged 319 nits, topping the 301-nit category average. The Spectre produced a dazzling 359 nits, while the ZenBook 3 and XPS 13 got 309 nits and 302 nits, respectively.
Acer Swift 7 Keyboard and Trackpad
The trackpad is extremely wide, providing ample room to move your digits around. However, it does make it a little harder to activate Windows 10 gestures that require you to swipe onto the touchpad from the sides. The pad itself is Microsoft Precision Trackpad-certified, and throughout testing it proved responsive and reliable.
It can be frustratingly sensitive on default settings, though, and traditional right-clicking doesn’t always register. You can adapt to both situations by fiddling with settings and using a double-finger tap, but it’s still a little annoying.
Acer Swift 7 Speakers
Speaker quality is roughly similar to the better super-slim laptops. It’s fairly loud and there’s enough bulk to the sound to avoid sounding thin or weak.
The best manage to separate out bass notes and give them more weight, and have smoother-sounding treble. However, the Acer Swift 7 sounds good enough to make the speakers usable rather than a high-price embarrassment.
Distortion is the problem. At moderate volume the speakers sound surprisingly crisp. Pump up the jam, though, and they can’t keep up. The result is static-filled, unpleasant sound. At times, even dialogue can become hard to understand when the speakers are turned up to maximum.
Acer Swift 7 Ports
We’re starting to see lots of USB-C connection hubs pop-up, so you might want to get hold of one for home use. Photographers and hardcore users should also check out the Dell XPS 13, though. It has an SD card slot and a full-size USB, meaning you won’t need to remember to take accessories around with you.
Acer Swift 7 Webcam
The integrated 1280 x 720 webcam captures grainy images and stills that are kind of color accurate. The camera managed to show a little of the purple in my hair. However, the gold stripes in my black shirt looked blurry and washed out.
The integrated 1280 x 720 webcam captures grainy images and stills that are kind of color accurate. The camera managed to show a little of the purple in my hair. However, the gold stripes in my black shirt looked blurry and washed out.
Acer Swift 7 PERFORMANCE
With a name like Swift, you might expect the Swift 7 to prioritize performance. That’s not quite the case, as Acer has opted for an Intel Core i5-7Y54 dual-core. This is one of the processors that caused a minor debacle over Intel supposedly confusing consumers by removing the Core M brand from Core i5 and i7.
You probably didn’t hear of that controversy unless you’re a serious geek, and you don’t need to. All you need to understand is this: The Core i5-7Y54 is designed to draw less power than most Core i5 chips, and because of that, it isn’t as quick.
The story here is clear, and not favorable for the Swift 7. It came behind all other systems we compared it to in Geekbench 3 multi-core, and it was second to last in the Geekbench 3 single-core benchmark.
Handbrake was even worse. There, the Swift 7 dragged significantly, requiring over 37 minutes to encode a trailer that lasts just four minutes and 20 seconds to 4K h.265. That’s 15 to 30 percent slower than similarly priced alternatives.
This is not to say the Acer Swift 7 feels slow in general use. Like most modern PCs with a powerful Intel chip, the laptop handles typical use without trouble. Even heavy use of Microsoft Office doesn’t slow it down. But if you intend for your laptop to do serious work, like editing photos or videos, you may be disappointed.
The Swift was also sluggish on the OpenOffice Spreadsheet Macro test, taking 4 minutes and 45 seconds to pair 20,000 names and addresses. That time was enough to top the 6:22 category average, but not the ZenBook 3 (3:34), XPS 13 (3:55) or Spectre (3:56).
Acer Swift 7 Battery
Playing a 720p video on loop at 120cd/m brightness, the Acer Swift 7 lasts eight hours 40 minutes. While not a class-leading result, it’s a very good given the laptop only has a 2770mAh battery, which equates to around 41Wh in conventional laptop battery terms.
As with the connections, the Swift 7 is a machine made around its top feature, a super-slim frame. If that’s not too much of a draw, the Dell XPS 13 and cheaper Acer S13 last longer thanks to their larger battery units, despite using more power-hungry processors.
Should you buy One?
Yes, if you care about portability. Battery life puts the Swift 7 on the podium. It lasts longer than its peers, often beating them by over an hour. That is no doubt due to the Core i5-7Y54 processor that so badly hurts its performance. It’s disappointing that the Swift 7 isn’t quicker, but at least users gain something in exchange.
This is also a pleasant laptop to use. It has a nice display, a good keyboard, and a big touchpad. It doesn’t destroy its competitors in any of those areas, but it’s certainly better than average. That’s important. The Asus Zenbook 3, for example, is smaller and more attractive. But its keyboard can take some getting used to, and it has only one USB Type-C port.
This is also a pleasant laptop to use. It has a nice display, a good keyboard, and a big touchpad. It doesn’t destroy its competitors in any of those areas, but it’s certainly better than average. That’s important. The Asus Zenbook 3, for example, is smaller and more attractive. But its keyboard can take some getting used to, and it has only one USB Type-C port.
Acer’s Swift 7 has a lot of competition, and at $1,100, it’s not a bargain. But the Asus Zenbook 3 is the only competitor in its category that we’d buy instead, and even there, it’s a question of priorities. The Zenbook 3 is smaller, yet faster. But the Acer Swift 7 will keep working after the Zenbook’s battery goes flat.
Conclusion
But, for the right user seeking a MacBook-like experience without paying the hefty premium, they might be able to overlook the warts and enjoy this otherwise beautiful device. Besides, five to six hours battery life is longer than most flights in the US at least.
Comments
Post a Comment
LEAVE A COMMMENT