The Acer Swift Go 16 isn’t exactly a budget machine, but it packs a lot of great features for the price, prime among them a dazzling OLED display. Just don’t expect a ton of life out of the battery.
Sometimes users want a large-screen laptop for the obvious reason: They’re looking for a top-notch display for demanding tasks like video editing and 3D rendering. The market is full of those. But that’s not everybody. Other buyers are more interested in a large display for multitasking and media consumption—and don’t want to lug around a ton of laptop. That’s where Acer’s $1,149.99 Swift Go 16 comes in. It serves up a 16-incher that’s fast enough for productivity work and sports a gorgeous OLED display, but is also reasonably thin and light. This Acer’s not perfect—for one thing, the battery life is subpar—but the price makes it an attractive option. If you’re in the market for an expansive display that’s easy to carry, the Swift Go 16 is worth considering.Configurations: One Model, One Decent Value
The Swift Go 16 comes in only one configuration, at least in its 2025 iteration. I reviewed the SFG16-73-92RC model, which gives you an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H chipset, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 16.0-inch WQXGA+ (2,880-by-1,800-pixel) OLED display.
All that will run you $1,149.99—an attractive price for such a well-configured laptop. Many other machines at the same price offer less RAM, less storage, and an IPS display. The Swift Go 16 isn’t exactly a budget model, but it’s a very reasonable value.Design: Skinny and Subtle for 16
The Swift Go 16 takes a minimalist aesthetic—the laptop fashion du jour—and adds some distinctive flourishes. The lid is decorated with a subtle geometric pattern, for instance, and underneath you’ll see a (mostly) unbroken black colorway. What’s more, the rear chassis edge has a slight angle, and the trailing edge of the display is offset a bit.
As I said, the Swift Go 16 is very thin and light: just 3.31 pounds, which would be reasonably lightweight even for a 14-inch machine, and a trim 0.66 inch thick. The bezels, too, are reasonably thin. Overall, this Swift is built to tote.
The chassis and lid are all aluminum, which gives it a premium feel. On the other hand, the plastic bezels detract from the design, and the machine doesn’t feel quite as sturdy as it looks. I found the lid just a little too bendable, and there’s a tiny bit of give in the keyboard deck, making the Swift feel a little less robust than some other laptops in the same price range. The feel’s not egregious, though, and many people probably won’t even notice.Keyboard, Touchpad, and Webcam: A Subpar Use of Lots of Space
A 16-inch laptop usually gives you a lot of room for a comfortable keyboard deck, but unfortunately, Acer chose to squeeze in a numeric keypad. Number crunchers and gamers will appreciate the feature, but this isn’t a gaming rig, and I’m sure most users would rather have larger keycaps and more generous spacing. Count me among them: To these fingers, the board felt a little cramped, which is a shame because the switches are light and snappy enough.
The frustration continues when you get to the touchpad. It’s smaller than it could be, with too much empty space above and below. While it’s responsive, with quiet, confident button clicks, a haptic-feedback design would have been superior. Beyond that, the pad comes with an intriguing feature: embedded LEDs that respond to whatever you’re doing, such as showing media controls when you’re playing a video. It’s a nice touch that would be a lot more useful were the touchpad a little larger.
The webcam checks in at 1440p, with excellent image quality for videoconferencing. Under the hood, the Swift Go 16’s Neural Processing Unit (NPU) efficiently speeds up AI tasks, and the machine supports Microsoft’s full suite of Copilot+ PC AI features. Acer also includes its AcerSense utility that lets you control various system settings, like performance and the multi-control touchpad.Display and Audio: That OLED, Oh My, Oh My
Here’s where the Swift Go 16 shines. The last few laptops I’ve reviewed had IPS displays, and I was reminded how great OLED looks as soon as I fired up the Swift Go 16. As usual with OLED, the inky blacks and dynamic colors jumped out—aided by support for True Black HDR500—and the WQXGA+ (2,880-by-1,800-pixel) resolution was sharp enough, even at the 16-inch display size. The refresh rate, meanwhile, clocks in at a fast and smooth 120Hz. Simply put, the Swift Go 16 delivers an excellent display for all kinds of work, including creative tasks and media consumption.
The two front-facing speakers weren’t quite as impressive. They dished up sufficient volume for watching YouTube videos and the like, with clear mids and highs. But bass was lacking, and the DTS:X Ultra Audio certification didn’t seem to be all that effective. You’ll want a good pair of headphones for music and streaming.Ports: A Good Spread
The port selection is solid, including two USB Type-Cs with Thunderbolt 4, two USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1s, an HDMI 2.1 connection, and a 3.5mm audio jack. I also appreciated the the microSD card reader, something I’m seeing on fewer laptops lately. My one complaint: You need to use one of the USB-C ports for charging (another feature that’s getting annoyingly common).
The Swift Go 16 also comes with up-to-date Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 connectivity, and thanks to the Intel Killer wireless card, you’ll be able to take advantage of faster connectivity whenever the latest standard becomes more widespread.Performance Testing: Impressive Results (Barring Battery Life)
To see how the Swift Go 16 stacks up against its peers, I selected several laptops with similar components and prices. Two were in Dell’s new Plus lineup, the 16 Plus (an Editors’ Choice winner) and the 16 Plus 2-in-1 ($999.99 as tested), along with the spendy LG Gram Pro 2-in-1 16 ($2,549.99 as tested). I also included the Apple MacBook Air 15-Inch ($1,199 as tested) to pit the Swift Go 16 against Apple’s latest chipset for thin-and-light laptops.Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our primary overall benchmark, UL’s PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC’s storage throughput. Three more tests we rely on are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon’s Cinebench 2024 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs’ Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution. Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Creators utility rates a PC’s image editing prowess with a variety of automated operations in the popular image editor Adobe Photoshop 25.
In each of our benchmarks, the Swift Go 16’s Intel Core Ultra 9 285H—the fastest chipset in Intel’s Core Ultra 2 lineup—led this pack against the laptops with the slower Core Ultra 7. The Swift Go 16 turned in its most impressive performance in our Handbrake test, where it even beat the MacBook Air 15’s swift M4 SoC.Graphics Tests
We challenge each reviewed system’s graphics with a quartet of animations or gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark test suite. The first two, Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K), use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. The other pair, Steel Nomad’s regular (4K) and Light (1440p) subtests, focuses on APIs more commonly used for game development to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. A fifth 3DMark test, Solar Bay, emphasizes ray-tracing performance.
The Swift Go 16’s Intel Arc 140V graphics were faster in most, but not all, of our graphics tests. Note that the latest Intel integrated graphics are more capable than previous generations, but they still fall behind even entry-level discrete graphics. Also, remember that none of these laptops is a gaming machine or suited for demanding creative tasks where the GPU provides most of the performance.Battery Life and Display Tests
We test each laptop’s battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
To gauge display performance, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
The Swift Go 16 is not a monster when it comes to battery life. Its 75-watt-hour battery—not a lot for a laptop with a 16-inch display—lasted just around 9.5 hours and wound up in last place in the comparison group.
However, the display itself turned in a terrific performance. The high-res, high-refresh OLED was very bright at 415 nits at 100% brightness, well above the 300 nits needed to overcome normal ambient lighting. Colors were also very wide, at 100% sRGB, 95% AdobeRGB, and 100% DCI-P3. And of course, black levels were essentially perfect, making this a great display for high dynamic range (HDR) content.
