Acer Swift Edge 14 AI review: A proper mobility champ

Acer has renewed its Swift line with a new compact model in the Swift Edge 14 AI, which not only boasts the thinness the Swift line has been known for but also an exceptionally low weight at just 2.18 pounds. Meanwhile, it packs in hardware that’s up to snuff for most workers and a display that looks great for entertainment — sharp OLED for the win — and for work from different environments thanks to a potent matte finish I’d love to see more of. For the right folks, this could be a very strong option.

The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI comes in a small number of configurations. Our test unit came with the specifications above and a $1,499 price tag. Acer also offers a stepped-down model for $1,399 that swaps to an Intel Core Ultra 7 256V and 16GB of memory, which is sacrificing a bit too much just to shave $100 off. Another configuration bumps up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 288V and raises the price to $1,599.

The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI is a surprise. It comes out of the box feeling a little plasticky and cheap, but its chassis is actually a magnesium-aluminum alloy that proves surprisingly sturdy with little flex. In spite of that, it’s incredibly light at just 2.18 pounds — a precise weight I verified with a scale. It’s also fairly thin with the chassis measuring 0.66 inches thick at its thickest point, though its rubber feet bump that up to 0.82 inches.

It comes with an all white design aside from the black bezels around the display, which gets an appealing matte treatment from Corning. The two display hinges are nice and tight, avoiding any wiggling in use. That comes in clutch for touchscreen use, as tapping on the display and swiping around doesn’t see it start to lean away.

The white lid looks nice with little gold accenting, though geometric lines on the lid aren’t quite as engaging as the sort Asus tends to employ. Underneath, the laptop is also simple with two wide rubber feet, a large intake vent, and two small down-firing speaker grilles. The rear edge of the laptop serves as an exhaust.

The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI comes across as fairly simple, and that works for it. It’s delivering on the promise of thin-and-light laptops.

After testing Acer laptops for years now and consistently being disappointed by their keyboards, I have to admit I didn’t have high hopes for the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI. But it seems like Acer may have turned a corner. The key caps seem just a little bit flatter than prior devices, and that makes a world of difference when it comes to staying centered by feel.

Stabilization isn’t impressive, but is sufficient to keep the keys from tilting too much. I found myself much more comfortable typing on this keyboard than just about any other Acer laptop I’ve touched, and I managed a strong 122-word-per-minute typing speed with 122 percent accuracy in Monkeytype — about as fast and accurate as I can get on any given day.

While it’s good to have backlighting on a keyboard, Acer’s implementation isn’t ideal. White keyboards with white backlighting tend to look pretty awful as it turns into a sort of sloppy gray, and the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI is no exception. On top of that, having the backlighting on in a bright room ends up making the keyboard less legible as it reduces the contrast. And Acer opts to turn it on automatically in some cases.

The trackpad is also excellent. It’s sizable, though not monstrously large. It has a smooth and pearly Gorilla Glass surface that’s pleasant to swipe around on. There’s also a little logo in one corner that lights when the computer is doing any AI processing on its NPU.

The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI’s display is perhaps one of the most glorious I’ve seen on a laptop. Anti-glare and matte finishes can be contentious, because they lower the perceived contrast when viewing in extremely dark environments. But everywhere else, I find the lack of a reflected image a huge boon for visual clarity.

The 14-inch panel has a 2880×1800 resolution that makes for very crisp details made all the better by the infinite contrast of OLED. The display has great motion clarity as well from its 120Hz refresh rate. Factor in the wide color gamut, which covers 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color space and reaches 398.3 nits of peak brightness for a full white screen, and you’ve got something special.

The fact that you can enjoy all of that so well with the strong anti-glare properties of the Gorilla Matte Pro surface treatment is just wonderful. Acer even went the extra mile and made it a touchscreen, and it’s very responsive and super-smooth to swipe around on.

Sadly, the speakers on the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI are nothing special. They can put out a good bit of sound, letting you hear them even if you don’t have perfect quiet to listen in. But mids are over-pronounced, leading to a slightly grating sound at high volumes. The speakers also sound a little boxed in, especially at high volumes. For listening to speech, they do the job, but I wouldn’t count on them for music or TV and movies.

The webcam on the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI captures a decent picture. It’s not stunningly sharp, but it at least has a good exposure. Its support of Windows Hello facial recognition makes for quick sign-ons but also comes alongside a very wide field of view for the camera. This makes me appear very small in the video feed it captures unless I have my face within a foot of the lens. It’s possible to crop in, but that would lower the resolution from the already modest 1080p of the full sensor.

Acer’s microphones are disappointing. By default, the system wants to use its AI-enhanced Purified Voice setting, but I found its efforts to cancel out background noise also had a negative impact on actual clarity in what I was saying, sometimes outright cancelling out my voice along with background noise. Disabling the effects resulted in clearer sound, but with more background noise. In either case, my voice wasn’t very full.

In addition to facial recognition, the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI supports fingerprint login with a scanner built into the power button. In testing, this worked quickly, easily, and consistently.

The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI proved strong with its connectivity. It has a respectable array of ports for a thin-and-light, combining two Thunderbolt 4 ports that also handle charging with two USB-A ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, and one audio jack. A microSD slot would have been nice to see. Most of the ports are also on the left side with just one USB-A port and the AUX jack on the right. Splitting up the charging ports to offer one on each side would have been a bonus.

The system can handle fast wireless connections as well with Intel Killer 1750i Wi-Fi 7. It proved fast and stable in my testing. The Bluetooth 5.4 is a little letdown, as Bluetooth 6.0 has already landed, but even without it, the Bluetooth connected easily and remained stable when paired with headphones in testing.

The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI may not be a high-performance machine, but with its Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, it’s no slouch. That chip is powering a lot of thin-and-light laptops, combining responsive speeds and strong efficiency.

It offers a level of performance that’s ample for basic office tasks, as we see it hit a solid score in the holistic PCMark 10 benchmark. Not only does it perform well for browsing, video calls, writing, and spreadsheet work, but thanks to its Intel Arc graphics, it also gets along modestly in content creation workloads — though it isn’t scratching at the capabilities of high-performance workstation.

One area that holds the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI back from more demanding workloads is its cooling. Being thin and light comes with trade-offs. There’s less room for air to flow effectively, and cooling hardware also adds a lot of weight. Some laptops will let their fans kick up a racket to try staying cool, but the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI opts for quieter operation.

The result is that in longer, heavy workloads like our Handbrake encoding test, the system can struggle. It took over half an hour to perform this test while the 2.9-pound Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition running on the same CPU managed it in just over 22 minutes.

Meanwhile, AMD’s hardware in the HP OmniBook 7 Aero actually proved even more stout despite also being in a light setup at 2.2 pounds, with the OmniBook hitting under 20 minutes by a hair. MSI offered the lightest laptop of the bunch, but its performance also lagged behind the pack.

Cinebench can show us a bit more about the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI’s overall CPU performance. As we saw in Handbrake, heat is an issue for sustained performance in the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI. It lagged behind in Cinebench R24, which is also a longer test. But when running shorter, bursty workloads like Cinebench R23 and R15, the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI roughly tied with the Lenovo Yoga 9i. Still, neither were a match for the HP system’s faster CPU.

So while the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI may not power through heavy tasks well, it can remain responsive and tackle light tasks quickly. That goes double for single-threaded workloads, where its Cinebench scores actually tended to lead the pack, even beating the AMD and Qualcomm machines.

While the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI may not have been a frontrunner for CPU performance, the Intel Arc 140V graphics on the chip is a little secret weapon for the system. Where graphical horsepower is concerned, it turns the tides on AMD’s integrated Radeon graphics (at least until AMD starts bringing its Radeon 8060S graphics to laptops). In 3DMark’s Time Spy test, we see the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI tied with the Lenovo system and both well ahead of the HP OmniBook 7 Aero.

That repeats in 3DMark Night Raid as well, and those wins come in large part thanks to huge leads in the Graphics subtests, though they also lead in the CPU sub-tests likely thanks to their stronger single-core performance. Even the MSI Summit 13 AI+ Evo pulls ahead of the OmniBook, though not by as much. This also showcases a perk of the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI over some of the Qualcomm-powered thin-and-lights that it runs against: compatibility.

The Asus ZenBook A14 is a reasonably strong machine, but when it has to emulate x86 programs — as in this 3DMark test — it can fall way behind native hardware from Intel and AMD.

Battery life can just about make or break a thin-and-light laptop. When they sacrifice performance, they need to make up for it in efficiency. And the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI just about nails it. In our 4K video playback test, which runs the laptop in airplane mode with the display set to 250-260 nits, the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI lasted just shy of 18 and a half hours. While that may not be as impressive as some of the other systems, all of which broke the 21-hour mark (except the OmniBoo, which barely broke 10 hours thanks in part to its much smaller battery).

That said, the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI still deserves credit. It runs a sharper display than the MSI and Asus laptops and has a smaller battery than everything but the HP system. Our test also allows for the systems to dim their displays when they reach a low enough charge to enable Battery Saver mode, but the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI only dimmed its display to 48 percent brightness, which still sees it produce a comfortably bright 178 nits that is easily viewable with the matte display finish.

More typical office and casual use saw no less impressive battery life. The system was typically on track for anywhere from nine to 14 hours of runtime. Three straight hours of active use only drained the battery by 32 percent.

Another session of intermittent use that included watching a whole movie, some browsing, and a lot of idling with the screen on saw the laptop lose just 57 percent charge over the course of eight hours and 15 minutes. All of this was with the display still set to its 250-260 nit level, which is more than bright enough for indoor use thanks to the display’s strong anti-glare effect. And all of that was with the display running at 120Hz. More energy savings can be had by dialing that down to 60Hz.

The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI doesn’t knock it out of the park at every turn, but if you’re looking for a lightweight, reasonably speedy machine that’s ready to run all day and look lovely doing it, the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI is a homerun.

The display is a special highlight for combining excellent visual quality with a rarely used matte finish that may have a minor impact on brilliance but has a huge impact on how easy it is to see the display in more conditions. Even the keyboard finally shifts away, however subtly, the slightly concave-feeling keys Acer has packed in in the past. All this comes together to make the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI a brilliant little partner for working and entertainment on the move, just bring your own headphones.