Acer Swift 16 AI Review: We expected boring. We got brilliance.

When we first unboxed the Acer Swift 16 AI, we were ready for one of the most boring laptop reviews of the year. Just another black, unremarkable Windows machine with a generic name. But after a few days of testing, something unexpected happened: this laptop started to impress us. With a stunning OLED screen, ridiculously long battery life, and solid real-world performance, it slowly turned into one of our favorite recommendations in 2025. Here’s why.

Display, speakers & media

The 16-inch OLED display is a standout with a sharp 2880 x 1800 resolution, 120Hz refresh rate and vivid colors. It’s 500 nits of brightness are plenty for indoor use. The only time it feels dim is when you’re fighting the sun.

Still, there’s a couple of issues. Acer’s glossy coating on the display makes it super reflective. When using this laptop indoors on a sunny day, we had to close the curtains just to avoid being blinded by a random sunbeam. Darker scenes also transform the display into a mirror, ruining immersion. And HDR only works when you’re in the performance power profile.

But overall, it’s a beautiful panel that beats any LCD, unless you’re super sensitive to glare. Our review unit doesn‘t have a touchscreen but you can get one, if you like.

Sadly, the wonderful display is paired with a terrible speaker system. There’s just no excuse for bad sound on such a large laptop. During music playback, there’s basically zero audible bass. The volume doesn’t get very loud, but the sound is still painful to listen to. We really hope Acer steps their game up here.

Read: Top Best Tablets with OLED Display

Design

The Swift 16 weighs just 1,46kg, metal body and all. It’s impressive how Acer made such a large, lightweight laptop without sacrificing battery life. The Macbook Pro M4 16’, for example, weighs more than 2 kilos with almost the same dimensions.

One thing we really love about this laptop is its unassuming design. On the backside, there’s nothing aside from an Acer logo and some dots that represent its AI capabilities. Open it up, and it’s still pretty simple. There’s a very standard looking keyboard, a trackpad with an AI logo and little else. The trackpad logo lights up when you’re using Windows AI features, which we find a bit corny but isn’t too big of a deal. 

Unfortunately, the only color option is black, which looks plasticky at a glance but feels premium thanks to the aluminium chassis.

A webcam notch slightly sticks out, which also helps you open the lid with one hand. Still, we’d prefer a sturdier hinge. There’s some screen wobble when typing, which is especially annoying because of the reflective display.

Acer gives us a decent ports selection with an HDMI 2.1 port, 2 USB 3.1 type A ports and 2 Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports. There’s also a 3.5mm audio jack. A single type A port and the audio jack sit on the right side of the laptop, with the rest placed on the left. Unfortunately, there’s no SD card reader.

Battery Life

Acer claims 29 hours of battery life. Under the right conditions, that’s surprisingly realistic. During our YouTube video playback test, where we play an HD YouTube video at max brightness until the laptop runs out of charge, the Swift 16 lasts 18,2 hours. This is the longest battery life we’ve seen on a laptop so far. We are able to get 2 or even 3 days of light use out of the Swift 16 without a recharge.

The long battery life shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. This laptop has a large 70Wh battery which charges with up to 65 Watts. It also has an OLED display and Intel’s new efficient chipset. It’s really great to see a Windows laptop do so well in our battery test, and we hope that Acer keeps prioritising battery life in their future products. 

Performance

Usually, performance is where super thin and light Windows laptops meet their demise. But this time around it’s a little bit different thanks to Intel’s Core Ultra 200 series laptop chips. 

The Core Ultra 5 226V in our device draws just 17 Watts. This puts it in the same playing field as Apple M series processors and the recent Snapdragon CPUs for Windows laptops in terms of power draw. 

The Swift 16 AI can also be configured with an Ultra 7 or Ultra 9 CPU, which will perform better but also cost more. Those also come pre-equipped with 32GB RAM, which might be important since there’s no way for users to upgrade the memory by themselves. Our 226V has 16GB of RAM and a 512GB M.2 NVME SSD. It’s also possible to get this laptop with a 1TB SSD for just a bit more.

Let’s talk about that “AI”. Intel includes an NPU in the processor which has enough TOPS to participate in Microsoft’s Copilot+ AI program, not that anyone is buying a laptop for these features. Maybe the neural processor will become more important in the future? Who knows.

Benchmarks help gauge performance. In Geekbench 6, the Acer Swift 16 gets some decent scores all across the board. CPU single core is better than the Geekom GT1 Mega despite the latter using more power. Our multi-core results are slightly less impressive, but still good, just 25% below the 12-core Microsoft Surface Pro 11. And that’s a laptop that costs almost double with all the bells and whistles.

The Arc 130V iGPU in the Ultra 5 here has 7 GPU cores, where higher end models will have 8 cores. We ran a couple graphics tests to see whether that makes a big difference. 

In 3D Mark time spy, the Swift 14 with the Ultra 7 actually gets about a 22% lead on the Swift 16. The margin is smaller in Fire Strike. These tests show that there might be some advantages in getting the Core Ultra 7 model aside from more RAM. Compared to other devices we’ve tested like the Microsoft Surface Pro 11, these scores are still very good. 

Here’s a strange one – unlike other Intel Core Ultra 200 series laptops we’ve tested, this Acer actually gets pretty loud and hot in games and under load. We assume this is because Acer configures the chip with a higher TDP than competitors like Samsung, leading to better performance as well as more heat. When just using the PC normally, you shouldn’t experience anything more than the bottom getting a bit warm.

Gaming

With such great performance in 3D Mark, it’s no surprise that the Swift 16 can handle itself in games. Counter Strike runs great on this laptop, easily hitting 120FPS at low settings with 1200p resolution.

Lighter games like Hades and REPO run perfectly, even at the native resolution. The Swift 16 can handle any esports or indie game with ease at its max refresh rate, but just don’t expect peak performance in AAA games.

Professional applications

Creative work is no problem here. Music production, photo editing with large RAW files, and even basic video editing run smoothly. Just note that the 16GB RAM might be limiting in video editing programs like Premiere Pro. The 32GB version of the laptop is the better pick if you work a lot with video or 3D tasks. 

Keyboard and trackpad

We’re actually super excited to talk about the Swift 16’s keyboard. It’s excellent. With the display open, the laptop is propped up for a slight desktop-style tilt. This makes typing on the Swift 16 way more comfortable. The keys also sink into the very solidly built chassis, providing enough key travel for a satisfying typing feel. There’s a little number pad on the right of the keyboard which is really very small. You’ll have to get used to that.

The trackpad is good. It’s accurate, sensitive and doesn’t collect fingerprints easily. It would be great if it’s just an inch larger. 

Read: Ultimate iPad Buying Guide: ALL iPads Tested

Unfortunate amounts of bloatware

The one really icky thing about all the Acer laptops we’ve tested so far is how bloated their windows installs are. When you launch the device for the first time, not only do you get the usual barrage of Microsoft ads, you also immediately get jumped with a load of Acer’s own software. And that’s not all. McAfee, Booking.com and DropBox come preinstalled and all eagerly bombard you with product placement. At least you can uninstall these programs with some effort.

There’s an interesting, but somewhat annoying feature called “Acer smart user sensing”, which automatically dims the display when it detects you’re not looking at it and brightens it again when you look. For us, this proved to be more distracting than helpful.

Unlock options 

We have a wealth of options to unlock our Acer Swift with. There’s the fingerprint reader on the power button, which works flawlessly, there’s the Windows Hello face-unlock option that also does its job well, and of course you can still unlock your laptop using a password. 

Final verdict

The Acer Swift 16 AI is truly an excellent laptop that has a healthy mix of great hardware and truly amazing pricing. For $1000, you simply won’t find another 16 inch laptop that has nearly the same performance, battery life and general lack of issues. Even the MacBook Air M4 is no match here, seeing that the 15’ variant costs quite a lot more. And the Acer even has a gorgeous OLED display to top it all off. 

There are a few weaknesses, like subpar speakers, louder fans and a bloated windows installation. But these are issues that we can live with, especially when the alternatives are just so much more expensive. We definitely recommend buying the Swift 16 AI if you’re looking for a modern and large windows notebook. 

Read: Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360 review: Is $1.700 worth it for a windows convertible?