Acer Swift Edge 14 AI Review

Introduction

The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI is their attempt at a featherweight ultrabook that oozes class and style.

With its sub-1kg weight, stylish white chassis and a dazzling 14-inch 2880×1800 120Hz OLED screen plus potent Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor and all-day battery life, it seems like Acer is doing everything in its power to take it to the Asus Zenbook A14 and Asus Zenbook S14 OLED models.

The £1399 price tag doesn’t seem wholly unreasonable for the style and substance on offer, and puts it in the middle of those two Asus choices. I’ve been giving the Swift Edge 14 AI a run out over the last couple of weeks to see if it’s one of the best ultrabooks we’ve tested.

Design and Keyboard

• Immensely lightweight and stylish
• Marvellous port selection
• Snappy keyboard and smaller trackpad

The Swift Edge 14 AI certainly oozes class and style with its white chassis comprised of a magnesium-aluminium alloy designed to provide durability and keep weight down. There’s even a little gold element on the lid if you want even more of a premium nod. It’s a lovely laptop to hold and look at, thanks to its smooth finish and durable frame, plus a lay-flat hinge allows for easy collaborative work.

It tips the scales at just 990g, making it especially featherweight for a laptop at any size. Sure, it’s ten entire grams heavier than the Zenbook A14, but I’d be splitting hairs if it said it matters. The fact is that this Acer candidate is very light, and easily one of the most portable laptops you can buy. I barely noticed I had it in my bag.

A sub 10mm thickness usually indicates a meagre port selection, as has traditionally been the case when manufacturers have slimmed down products in the past. However, the Swift Edge 14 AI doesn’t sacrifice on ports in the slightest, with a pair of USB4-capable Type-C ports, a USB-A and full-size HDMI on the left side, plus a further USB-A and headphone jack on the right.

Due to the smaller chassis, the 65 percent keyboard inside the Swift Edge 14 AI wasn’t a surprise, but it nonetheless impresses with a tactile and snappy keypress over a decent travel. The keycaps are well-spaced across the deck, too, plus the white backlighting is pleasantly sharp.

I do think the trackpad here could have been a little bigger in a vertical sense, as Acer has opted for more of a rectangular shape. It is nonetheless slick and accurate with a nice dampened feel.

Display and Speakers

• High-res OLED screen
• Lovely blacks and contrast
• Middling speakers

Acer hasn’t left the Swift Edge 14 AI hanging with a meagre display against its rivals, with it actually beating the panel on the Zenbook A14 in a couple of key metrics. With a 2880×1800 resolution, it’s more detailed than Asus’ panel, while it also has a 120Hz refresh rate against the Zenbook A14’s standard-issue 60Hz option for a zippier and more responsive feel.

I should also say this is a matted OLED screen, so it comes with the usual benefits that you’d expect, with deep blacks and lovely dynamic range. My colorimeter measured 0.01 for black level and 27800:1 for contrast, providing a generally lovely experience.

Colour accuracy is also a strong point, with 100% coverage of both the sRGB and DCI-P3 spaces, plus 92% Adobe RGB, proving the impeccable suitability of the Swift Edge 14 AI’s screen for both productivity and more creative, colour-sensitive workloads.

380.7 nits of peak brightness make this screen okay for both indoor and outdoor work, and provides decent overall punch. It’s in line with a lot of other OLED laptop screens in this regard.

The Swift Edge 14 AI’s speakers are just okay, though. We’ve got a solid mid-range and good volume, but that’s about it. They can sound a little thin at times, owing to a lack of bass and treble.

Performance

• Tried-and-tested Intel Lunar Lake processor
• Beefy iGPU against Snapdragon alternatives
• Capacious SSD, but a little on the slow side

Inside the Swift Edge 14 AI, we’ve got the same processor as a lot of other modern ultrabooks with the eight-core and eight-thread Intel Core Ultra 7 258V paired with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.

The scores this Acer laptop achieved in both the Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 tests are in the ballpark for the processor inside, matching well against key rivals. That means strong single-core performance and decent, if a little disappointing, multi-threaded scores, owing to the lack of hyperthreading against AMD’s crop of modern laptop chips.

Both the PCMark 10 and 3DMark Time Spy scores were excellent, too, proving the suitability of the Swift Edge 14 AI for productivity tasks and how powerful the Arc 140V integrated graphics are. The score it garnered here is several times that of the Adreno iGPU inside the Snapdragon X chips, making this Acer option a much better choice if you’re undertaking heavier workloads, such as photo or video editing or even a spot of gaming after work. 

We’ve also got double the RAM capacity against the Zenbook A14, with 32GB on offer, and a 1TB SSD for storing stuff on. If there’s one chink in this laptop’s performance, it’s the speed of the SSD. The 4803.75MB/s reads and 3910.54MB/s writes are okay, if quite unremarkable against lots of other laptops with faster speeds.

Software

• Clean-ish Windows 11 install
• Minimal Acer-specific apps
• Copilot+ PC functionality is present

The Swift Edge 14 AI features a reasonably clean Windows 11 install, with little in the way of what might be classed as bloatware or unwanted, such as a trial of McAfee and NordVPN pre-installed and shortcuts to Booking.com and Dropbox in the taskbar by default.

There are some Acer-specific apps, such as 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 different power modes and battery charging settings. Nothing too untoward.

There is also enough AI horsepower from the Core Ultra 7 258V chip inside to mark this laptop as a Copilot+ PC, providing access to Microsoft’s AI functionality for generative powers and filters in the Photos and Paint app, as well as the clever Windows Studio webcam effects for background blurring, auto framing and maintaining eye contact. Microsoft’s controversial Recall feature is also finally here, although in a preview state.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 15 hours 56 minutes
• Capable of lasting for two working days

Acer has bundled the Swift Edge 14 AI with a modest 65Wh battery inside. That’s perfectly fine, especially for a laptop that’s this slim and lightweight, plus with the efficiency of the Lunar Lake chip inside, I had high hopes for its endurance. Acer itself quotes up to 21 hours of endurance on a charge, which would make this one of the best laptops we’ve tested for battery life.

In dialling the brightness down to the requisite 150 nits and letting the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery test run, this laptop lasted for 15 hours and 56 minutes. That makes two working days out of it possible, and puts it in the ballpark for a modern ultrabook with excellent endurance. Granted, there are options that’ll last longer, including the Zenbook A14, which beats the Swift Edge 14 AI by nearly five hours on a charge.

The charging speeds out of the 65W power adapter are average for a laptop of its class, with it taking 35 minutes to take it from zero to 50%, while a full charge took closer to 80 minutes.

Should you buy it?

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