Acer Swift Edge review: insanely thin, insanely light

At the time of writing, there’s only one configuration of the Swift Edge, available from either Costco or directly from Acer. You’ll pay $1,500 for an AMD Ryzen 7 6800U CPU, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 16-inch 16:10 4K+ OLED display. That’s a distinctly premium price, but it’s justified in part by the incredibly portable design, fast components, and spectacular display.

A 16-inch display demands a high resolution to avoid jagged text and pixelated images. The Swift Edge runs at a productivity-friendly 16:10 aspect ratio to go with a 4K+ (3,840 x 2,400) resolution, and that’s more than sharp enough. Even better, it’s an OLED panel, meaning it’s bright, has incredibly wide colors with very good (but not excellent) accuracy, and its deep contrast provides for inky blacks.

Whether you’re using the laptop for productivity work where you demand sharp, black text or consuming media, you’ll love this display. The Swift Edge isn’t fast enough, as we’ll see, for demanding creators, but if you need to edit a photo in a pinch, then the display will accommodate you.

The audio wasn’t as impressive, with just two downward-firing speakers providing sound that’s suitable for the occasional YouTube video and not much else. Some larger laptops, like the Dell XPS 15 and the MacBook Pro 16, provide much better audio quality.

There’s no doubt that the gorgeous, spacious OLED display begs for demanding creative work. However, the most powerful creative applications make use of discrete GPUs to accelerate a variety of tasks, something that the Swift Edge doesn’t have. Given the thin chassis that already makes it difficult to move lots of air around, it’s impressive that Acer managed to pack in an eight-core/16-thread AMD Ryzen 7 6800U CPU. That’s a low-power CPU (15 watts to 28 watts) aimed at thin and light laptops, so it competes best against Intel 12th-gen CPUs in the same power range. Recently, though, most large laptops (and some smaller ones) use 45-watt Intel 12th-gen chips and so start with an advantage.

Ultimately, you can expect solid productivity performance in CPU-intensive tasks, but you’ll be limited in creative work due to the slower integrated AMD Radeon Graphics. And I saw that productivity performance in our suite of benchmarks. In the table below, which lists results in both balanced and performance modes, I compare the Swift Edge to other large machines without discrete GPUs. Note that the Acer’s performance mode was much slower than its balanced mode, indicating poor tuning or thermal throttling issues caused by opening up the CPU. It’s best to keep it in normal mode.

Intel’s H-series 12th-gen CPUs were faster than the AMD chip, but they’re higher-clocked processors that burn more power. The Swift Edge’s results are competitive enough that the laptop can be depended on to churn through demanding productivity workflows while enjoying longer battery life.

There are likely plenty of people who want a large laptop with a spectacular display for productivity and media consumption, but they don’t want to lug around a bulky, heavy machine. At least, that’s what Acer hopes. For those people, the Swift Edge is a remarkable laptop.

It’s incredibly thin and light, and yet it provides solid productivity performance, good enough battery life, and an awesome visual experience. That justifies the premium price of $1,500, and I’m happy that it doesn’t cross the $2,000 barrier, where it would be too expensive. There aren’t many other laptops like it, so if it fits your performance requirements, there’s little reason not to consider the Swift Edge as your next laptop.

Editors’ Recommendations