Acer Swift Edge (2023) review

The Acer Swift Edge is a high-end laptop made to balance portability and display size. It weighs less than 1.2kg but has a 16in screen, considerably larger than most ultraportable laptops.  

These kind of specs aren’t really possible with conventional laptop design, pushing Acer to look for every opportunity to shave off a few grams.  

The end result: Acer’s Swift Edge is a powerful laptop that will suit people who travel a lot for work. But there are a few issues in the build and design which means the Swift Edge doesn’t quite hit the heights of the LG Gram series, which originally put this style of laptop in the spotlight.  

Design & Build

• Super-light magnesium aluminium alloy frame 
• Relatively poor panel rigidity 
• Sober, plain-looking design 

The Swift Edge is exceptionally light considering it has a 16in screen. 1.17kg would be considered light for a 13in laptop, let alone one this big.

How Acer achieves this is by using a lot of the same techniques and compromises as the LG Gram 16 – the laptop that the Swift Edge is clearly gunning for. It may have aspirations to woo some people away from a MacBook Air, too.

The Acer Swift Edge’s body panels are made from magnesium alloy, and judging by how the Edge feels, they are quite thin. Every part of this laptop flexes a little bit, including the keyboard base where it starts to impact use. 

Losing this much weight, then, certainly involves compromises. Are they worth it? If you travel all the time, sure. If the Acer Swift Edge will stay on your desk at home or in the office 90% of the time, not so much.  

While we’re not worried about the Edge’s longevity, there’s a certain hollowness to the typing we don’t love. And it’s not evident in rivals that aren’t the product of an obsession with weight loss.  

The Acer Swift Edge is also a fairly plain-looking laptop. It has a raised plastic screen bezel – the screen’s front layer is also plastic, in part because glass would add too much weight. The focus here is on portability and, at 13mm thick, the Edge slips into carry-on luggage after airport security as if it were an oversized iPad.

Keyboard and touchpad

• Shallow keyboard feels a little vague 
• Plastic touchpad is a disappointment 
• Basic 2-level white key backlight

There’s a certain ‘hollowness’ to the feel of typing on the Swift Edge, because the key stroke force reverberates around the frame. Keys are also shallow, and the action is fast and light, not meaty and substantial like a desktop keyboard.

Of course, no laptop keyboard can match a desktop, but here the typing experience here is ok at best. There is at least a two-level backlight.  

There’s more strange stuff in the touchpad. This is a plastic pad, which is bizarre given the Acer Swift Edge’s cost. Once you get to around $1000 / £1000 you can usually expect a smooth glass pad.  

While the Acer Swift Edge’s touchpad surface feels ok it does have a bit of plastic squeakiness that textured glass avoids. Click depth varies quite dramatically based on where you press on the pad. While that’s normal for a mechanical clicker, it’s more noticeable than usual on the Swift Edge.

Put simply, the touchpad feels like it belongs on a cheaper laptop and if it’s plastic just to shave off a few grams, it really wasn’t worth it.

What is good is the fingerprint sensor built into the power button. This means you can log into Windows without entering a PIN or password. It works reliably, too.  

Screen 

• High colour depth 
• 4K resolution looks sharp 
• Glossy plastic surface 

The Acer Swift Edge has a high-end display, but that may not be immediately apparent because it has a plastic finish. Modern eyeballs are used to seeing reflective glass displays, which have a certain quality the Edge lacks.   

However, our colorimeter quickly exposed the reality of the situation. The Acer Swift Edge’s contrast is predictably awesome as this is an OLED panel which means emissive pixels. Colour depth is fantastic and, crucially, Acer hasn’t given the Edge a comically oversaturated default presentation.  

Sadly, there are no baked-in colour profiles – the rival Samsung Galaxy Book 360 3 has modes to adhere more closesly to standards like sRGB, DCI P3 and Adobe RGB.

Acer says this is a DIsplayHDR500 screen, meaning it should be able to reach 500 nits brightness. However, we could only tease 400 nits out of it – the highest brightness may be reserved for HDR content. It’s bright enough to make outdoors use feasible but, because it’s glossy and reflective, it’s not as easy to see under those conditions as an anti-reflective matt one.   

Sharpness is excellent thanks to the 16:10 3840 x 2400 pixel resolution.  

There are a few little limited elements, though. The screen can tilt back by around 130 degrees only, and it isn’t a touchscreen. You won’t be able to use any sort of stylus with this laptop either. Plus, it’s a 60Hz screen, not a high refresh rate one.

Performance 

• Good performance 
• Fan noise gets distracting under load 
• Better for gaming than current Intel rivals 

The Acer Swift Edge has an AMD Ryzen 7 6800U processor, 16GB RAM and a 1TB SSD. It’s an excellent spec that offers scope for serious work, video editing and so on.  

Its AMD processor also has an important edge over the rival Intel Core i7-1360p: a faster graphics chipset. The graphics hardware here uses tech similar to that of the Steam Deck, but with more power on tap.  

This means you can play quite a lot of reasonably impressive-looking games, just not at the screen’s native 4K resolution. Our tests show it only draws 24-25W watts of power, below the stated max TDP of 28W, but the Asus ZenBook S13 OLED has the same continuous max power draw, suggesting this is the norm for the chipset. Not that it’s your usual measurement, but the power per gram on offer here is excellent.

Under pressure, the Acer Swift Edge suffers from the same issue as quite a lot of super-thin laptops – the noticeable high-pitched whir of the cooling fan. While the actual noise level is never that high, the character is a bit like that of a tiny jet plane. However, during light work it’s petty much silent.  

Battery life and features 

• Worse-than-claimed battery life 
• Decent 1080p webcam 

The LG Gram range showed us super-low weight does not have to mean super-short battery life. And the Swift Edge has some of the right elements for great stamina too, using an AMD Ryzen processor. These typically lead to longer battery life than an Intel counterpart, and Acer claims 10.5 hours.

The reality, though, left us disappointed. In our office-work test, it lasted seven hours and 40 minutes, not quite managing a full day of work away from the mains. But if you have bad browser tab etiquette, leaving stacks of the things open, or want to do something more challenging than writing documents and having the odd Zoom call, you’ll be reaching for the charger even sooner.

We kept an eye on the battery level while doing daily work on the laptop – mostly writing and researching this review. It lost 16% charge in an hour, suggesting stamina of just six hours and 15 minutes, which isn’t great. 

It’s a mixed bag elsewhere. We were pleasantly surprised by the webcam. Its pinhole lens looks absolutely tiny but this is a 1080p camera, and a pretty good one.  

Speakers aren’t good, though. There’s no bass here, and although clarity and projection are fine, the Edge doesn’t have the chops to make music sound much good. 

Connectivity-wise, the Acer offers almost everything you’d need on the go, bar any form of memory card reader. There are two USB-C ports, although they are 10Gbps USB 3.2 connectors – slower than the Thunderbolt type you would expect from an Intel CPU laptop at this level. You get a full-size HDMI output, a blessing for those times you just need to quickly hook up a TV or monitor. It’s a high bandwidth HDMI 2.1 port, too.  

There are also two traditional USB-A connectors that run at up to 5Gbps.

Price and Availability 

The Acer Swift Edge costs £1499/$1499 and, in the UK at least, there’s no choice of models.

You get an AMD Ryzen 7 6800U CPU, 16GB RAM and a 1TB SSD. These make it a better deal than it may have initially appeared, given the baseline specs for ultrabooks are still 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD.  

The Apple MacBook Pro 16 with as close a spec as possible costs twice as much, which helps to put it into perspective.

Verdict 

The Acer Swift Edge provides excellent performance and screen real estate for its weight, making it one of the best options if you need a laptop that’s as light as possible for travelling but don’t want to compromise on what your laptop can do.  

However, compromises have been made to get to its super-low weight. Typing isn’t a great experience and the use of a plastic touchpad grates at this price. It’s hardly a surprise that the speakers are no real use for music, but the relatively poor battery life could well be a deal-breaker. Obviously, we didn’t test the Swift Edge to destruction, but durability is a concern given how much this laptop flexes.

While Acer has likely achieved its design goals here, the sacrifices made to get there make it hard to recommend the Swift Edge unconditionally.

So if you want to know which laptop you should buy, then take a look at our roundup of the best laptops and also our review of the LG Gram 17 and Huawei MateBook 16s.

Specs

• Model tested
• OS: Windows 11 Home
• Display: 16in 3480 x 2400 60Hz OLED
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 6800U
• Memory: 16GB onboard
• Graphics: AMD Radeon
• Storage: 1TB PCIe NVMe M.s SSD
• Webcam: 1080p
• Connectivity: 2 x USB-C 3.2 Gen 2, HDMI 2.1. 2x USB-A 3.2
• Networking: Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2
• Battery capacity: 54Wh
• Charger: 65W
• Dimensions: 356.7 x 242.3 x 13.95mm
• Weight: 1.17kg
• Warranty: 1yr RTB