With a vivid OLED display and all-day battery, Acer’s Swift 16 AI delivers the sweet spot of premium features and reasonable price point.
Acer Swift 16 AI
The Acer Swift 16 AI is regularly priced at $1,250.
Its 16-inch OLED display, well-designed lightweight form, and marathon battery work together to create a laptop that feels more premium than its price would suggest.
Its speakers, however, leave much to be desired, and it has its fair share of bloatware.
Acer’s Swift 16 AI is a thin and light laptop with a gorgeous OLED display, nice full-sized keyboard, and Intel Core Ultra 7 or 9 “Lunar Lake” processor starting at $1,200: a competitive price for a device that feels more premium than you’d expect.
I’ve been commuting with the Swift 16 AI for the past month, and it’s become a surprise favorite of the year. It stands out as a great-value ultraportable that’s as versatile as it is capable and has fantastic battery life.
The Acer Swift 16 AI features a minimalist build, with an all-over, metallic matte black coating that looks a lot like the LG Gram Pro 16. Its full-sized keyboard and generous selection of I/O make it practical for a variety of uses. All in all, it’s rather non-descript (in a good way) with one subtle Acer logo to identify it. Acer Swift 16 AI
With a 16-inch OLED display and ultrathin form factor, this laptop feels more premium than its price would suggest.
The configuration I tested had an Intel Core Ultra 7 256V, 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and a 1TB SSD — a flexible loadout that can do a little bit of everything. It’s particularly well-suited as a work device with Wi-Fi 7 and a responsive, very comfortable keyboard with a slight upward tilt thanks to Acer’s hinge design.
I was happy to see that both USB-C ports support Thunderbolt 4, which is great for folks who want their external monitors. Otherwise, you also get an HDMI port that supports up to 8K resolution. The webcam is also surprisingly good, with 1440p resolution for a crisp image during video calls.
Acer’s Aspire 14 AI (left) and Swift 16 AI (right).
The glossy, 3K OLED display at 120Hz is one of the laptop’s strongest features. It’s a crisp and vibrant image that looks fantastic whether you’re gaming, editing video, or just working in productivity software. Despite its very thin clamshell design, I experienced very little screen wobble — one of the first things I look for when I see a display this thin.
You can also get some surprisingly good gaming performance out of this laptop with the Intel Arc GPU, as long as you’re not pushing the limits on top-tier titles.
