Acer Swift 14 AI review: battery life for days

Acer offers two configurations of the Swift 14 AI, both featuring 14.0-inch FHD+ IPS displays. For $1,200, you get an Intel Core Ultra 7 256V, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. For $1,300, there’s a slightly faster Core Ultra 7 258V and 32GB of RAM.

The Swift 14 AI has a typical island keyboard with slightly small keycaps compared to what I’m used to but great spacing and a standard layout. The switches are light and snappy, and I found the keyboard comfortable while I was typing this review. It’s up there with the best, including Apple’s Magic Keyboard and the OmniBook Ultra Flip 14’s excellent version.

The touchpad is reasonably sized, although there’s room on the palm rest for a few more millimeters. It’s mechanical with quiet clicks, but more laptops are including haptic versions that are even quieter and allow clicking along the entire surface. Haptic touchpads, like the excellent versions you’ll find on the OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 and Apple’s entire MacBook lineup, provide more customization options and are just a lot more pleasant to use. One unusual feature is an LED symbol in the upper-right quadrant that lights up when Microsoft Copilot AI features are activated.

The display is touch-enabled, which is a good thing. Overall, input options are fine.

The Intel Lunar Lake line of chipsets is aimed squarely at efficiency, replacing the older Meteor Lake 15-watt Core Ultra S-series chipsets with 17-watt Core Ultra Series 2 chipsets. They’re all 8-core/8-thread parts running at various clock speeds, and they all use the latest Intel Arc integrated graphics. For the Swift 14 AI, that means the Intel Arc 140V that falls somewhere between the previous generation and entry-level discrete graphics.

In our benchmarks, the Swift 14 AI is fast enough but not the fastest in its class. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X chipsets, also aimed at efficiency, are also faster. Apple’s M3 chipset, which will be supplanted by the M4 in the MacBook Air in early 2025, comes in the middle, although its GPU cores are faster than each of the thin-and-light Windows competitors.

The Swift 14 AI is fast enough for demanding productivity users, although gamers and creators will want to look elsewhere.

Intel’s Lunar Lake chipsets are aimed at efficiency much more than performance. As we can see, performance is fine but nothing to write home about. But so far, while Lunar Lake laptops still haven’t been generally as efficient overall as Apple’s MacBook lineup, they’re much better than previous Windows laptops. Poor battery life is no longer a reason to skip Windows.

The Swift 14 AI was a very strong performer even among their immediate Intel competitors, in spite of having a 65 watt-hour battery that’s no larger than some other machines. In fact, outside of our most demanding Cinebench R24 battery test, the Swift 14 AI is basically as efficient as the MacBook Air M3. It’s a very impressive performance that’s likely aided by the FHD+ IPS display as compared to the OLED display in a few comparison machines.

The Swift 14 AI’s 14.0-inch 16:10 IPS display runs at FHD+ (1920 x 1200), which isn’t quite as sharp as I like to see in a display this size. It’s probably OK for most people, and it does add the benefit of being more power-efficient than the higher-res OLED displays on many laptops I’ve reviewed lately. Subjectively, the display was bright and colorful and overall a nice enough IPS display.

My colorimeter found it to be above-average for IPS technology, which is a good thing because that average is a lot better than it was just a few years ago. The display is bright at 408 nits, way above our baseline of 300 nits that needs to be adjusted upward at some point. Contrast is also excellent at 1,340:1, better than our old standard of 1,000:1. Colors are slightly wider than most IPS displays at 100% of sRGB, 81% of AdobeRGB, and 84% of DCI-P3, compared to most IPS panels that come in at around 75% of both AdobeRGB and DCI-P3. Color accuracy is very good at a DeltaE of 1.35 (anything less than 2.0 is great for productivity use).

It’s a good display for most users. It won’t be the best for creative work or HDR video, but for everything else it will be more than suitable.

The audio quality is just OK, with two downward-firing speakers. Sound is loud enough and mids and highs are clear, but bass is lacking. You’ll want a good set of headphones or Bluetooth speakers for music and streaming.

The Swift 14 AI is a well-built and attractive laptop with good enough performance and a reasonable — but not exceptional — price. Its battery life is the standout feature, with efficiency that’s among the best Windows laptops we’ve tested.

However, it owes that battery life at least partially to the IPS display. It’s not a bad screen, but it lacks the sharpness and contrast of modern OLED displays. That’s the one tradeoff to consider, but if battery life is your main concern, the Acer Swift 14 AI is a solid option.