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Acer’s Swift 16 AI

The glossy, 3K OLED display at 120Hz is one of the laptop’s strongest features. It’s a crisp and vibrant image that looks fantastic whether you’re gaming, editing video, or just working in productivity software. Despite its very thin clamshell design, I experienced very little screen wobble — one of the first things I look for when I see a display this thin. 

You can also get some surprisingly good gaming performance out of this laptop with the Intel Arc GPU, as long as you’re not pushing the limits on top-tier titles. I ran a handful of my usual Steam titles, and although it’s not a gaming laptop, it feels competitive and responsive, only stuttering with texture shaders turned up to max. 

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The only thing is that the display is incredibly glossy — we’re talking near-mirror status. You will need to adjust it if you’re in an office or somewhere with overhead lighting, something I found myself doing rather frequently. If you’re sitting with your back to a bright window, it becomes borderline unusable. 

Ultimately, the Acer Swift 16 AI’s strengths outweigh its drawbacks. When it comes to everyday use, the performance is there, and as a portable 16-inch laptop, it’s well-designed and easy to commute with. 

The battery is also a banger. The laptop has a very thin form factor, but still manages to fit in a large 20Wh battery with a 65-watt charge. Depending on how you use it, you can get multiple days of use on one charge, and it ranks up there with other efficient devices I’ve tested this year such as the Asus Zenbook A14, Microsoft’s Surface Laptop, and the Dell XPS 13 with the Snapdragon X Elite chip. 

During our standard video playback test, I got nearly 18 hours of video playback on one charge. When it comes to using this laptop for work, you’ll easily last through the work day and into the next, unless you’re pushing it with more demanding workloads. Like all of the other Lunar Lake-powered devices I’ve tested this year, power drain drops to a trickle when it’s not in use. 

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The Intel Core Ultra 7 chip generates little to no heat during everyday use, but pushing it with heavier task loads and plugging in the charger will result in temperature increases. 

Notably, the charging process seems to be hotter during the first 30 minutes, or below 30%, then tapers down to a much cooler temperature at higher battery percentages. Also, when you start or stop charging, the laptop emits a chirp. All that said, it charges very fast and can approach 100% in about an hour in Balanced Mode. 

Beyond gaming, this laptop makes for a competent laptop for creatives with its fast refresh rate and lovely display. The 16GB of RAM might limit high-end workloads with large video files or 4K rendering, but it’s otherwise a joy to work on.

Comparing this laptop to some peers, we see very close (with one identical) benchmarking scores to Dell’s XPS 13 with the same Intel Core Ultra 7 “Lunar Lake” chip. 

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The Acer Swift 16 AI