As a pandemic age gimmick, having an antimicrobial coating is an interesting extra.
If you head to the Acer Swift 5 product page, it looks like the standard pitch for an Intel Evo laptop: Light, thin, and solid battery life. The page even boasts an Nvidia discrete GPU that the Swift 5 series doesn’t have. But scroll down, and under the fold lies a feature that seems to be made for a planet battling a pandemic — an antimicrobial solution. The short version is the laptop has a silver ion coating on the chassis and screen, which is claimed to reduce the amount of bacteria on the laptop’s surfaces. „For displays as well as touchpads, by incorporating silver ions (Ag+) as the antimicrobial agent into Corning Gorilla Glass, the glass surface can stay cleaner longer and less susceptible to odor-causing bacteria,“ Acer said. „This is done via trace amounts of silver ions leaching to the glass surface to eliminate the surface bacteria while still offering other benefits such as improved durability and improved scratch resistance.“ That all sounds good, but does it actually help? „The antimicrobial protection is limited to the touch surface. All antimicrobial solutions including Antimicrobial Corning Gorilla Glass do not claim to protect users or provide any direct or implied health-‚benefit‘,“ a footnote says. That would appear to be a no then, which is probably for the best because testing microbes per square millimetre is not a measurement I am prepared to take.
