Acer Swift Edge 16 review: light but too breezy

When I reviewed the Acer Swift Edge 16 in 2023, I gave it a high score for being a thin and light 16-inch laptop with a large display for multitasking. I overlooked its poor battery life and other flaws because I thought it provided other features that mattered more, along with a reasonable price.

Today, though, there’s less excuse for a laptop that won’t make it until lunchtime — especially when laptops running Windows on Arm on Qualcomm’s latest chipset last for more than a full day. Although reasonably affordable, the Swift Edge 16 isn’t nearly as competitive in 2024.

Specs and configurations

Acer offers just one configuration of the Swift Edge 16, at $1,300 for an AMD Ryzen 7 8840U chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 16.0-inch 3.2K OLED display.

That’s a fair price for a well-equipped 16-inch laptop, with a caveat — most 16-inch laptops are aimed at creators and are more powerfully configured. The Swift Edge 16 is aimed strictly at productivity users, lowering what’s a competitive price. The most relevant competition is the LG Gram 16 2-in-1, which is also a very thin and light 16-inch machine with an OLED display — but it runs $1,800 for a similar configuration. And the Apple MacBook Air 15 is also in the mix, with a slightly smaller display and a price that ranges from $1,299 for a configuration with just 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, to $1,899 for a similar config, and then $2,499 for 24GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD.

In one very important aspect, those two laptops are superior machines. So, the Swift Edge 16 is priced right, but at a cost. I wish Acer offered some cheaper configurations to get the price under $1,000.

Design

You’ll find 16-inch laptops primarily in one of two designs: creativity workstations and thin-and-light productivity machines. The former, which includes laptops like the Asus ProArt P16, Apple MacBook Pro 16, and Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16, have high-powered CPUs and GPUs and heavier chassis. They also tend to be a lot more expensive. The second category, which describes the Swift Edge 16, has lower-powered CPUs, integrated graphics, and a thin and light chassis that are aimed at portability. Their 16-inch displays are meant for multitasking and media consumption, and other examples include the LG Gram 16 2-in-1 and MacBook Air 15.

The Swift Edge 16 isn’t the absolute thinnest example I’ve reviewed, but it’s pretty close at between 0.51 and 0.60 inches. The Gram 16 is just 0.51 inches thick and the MacBook Air 15 is an incredible 0.45 inches. Even the MacBook Pro 16 is just 0.66 inches. However, the Acer is incredibly light at 2.71 pounds, compared to the Gram 16 at 3.08 pounds, the MacBook Air 15 at 3.3 pounds, and the MacBook Pro 16 at 4.8 pounds. The Swift Edge 16 lighter than many 14-inch laptops, and even the MacBook Air 13 is around the same weight. Acer built a laptop that’s very easy to carry around.

As with many of the lightest laptops, the Swift Edge 16 is constructed of magnesium alloy, in this case magnesium-aluminum alloy. That material is very strong even while being so lightweight, but it’s more flexible than aluminum alone. The Swift Edge 16 has a bendable lid and a chassis and keyboard deck that depresses a lot more than usual under light pressure.

That’s also somewhat true of the LG Gram 16 2-in-1, while the others I’ve mentioned have a much more rigid feel. It doesn’t mean the Swift Edge 16 isn’t well-built, but if you like laptops with denser and more solid builds, it might disappoint. I’ll note that my review unit had a slight wobble when lying flat on a desk; that’s likely a defect, but it’s never good to see.

Aesthetically, the Swift Edge is a fairly bland all-black chassis with pedestrian lines and edges. It’s not unattractive, but it also does nothing to stand out.

Keyboard and touchpad

The keyboard is a standard island version, with good spacing and large enough keycaps. The switches are light and snappy, and I was up to speed quickly enough. It’s rare that I come across a keyboard that I like as much as the MacBook’s Magic Keyboard, and this one doesn’t, either. But it’s more than good enough.

The touchpad is smaller than it could be, leaving plenty of available space on the palm rest. And, it’s a pretty typical mechanical version — good enough, but not nearly as good as the better haptic touchpads. That’s OK, though, at this laptop’s price. It will take more time for haptic touchpads to be standard on all but premium laptops.

Webcam and connectivity

The Swift Edge 16 has a solid connection of ports, with a mix of USB4 (similar in performance and functionality to Intel’s Thunderbolt 4 standard) and legacy ports. The only disappointment is the microSD card reader versus a full-size reader, but some recent 16-inch laptops have no SD card reader at all. Wireless connectivity is fullly up-to-date with Wi-Fi 7.

The webcam is reasonably hi-res at QHD (2560 by 1440). It provides good-enough quality. There’s no infrared camera for Windows 11 Hello facial recognition, but the fingerprint reader embedded in the power button works well enough.

Performance

The Swift Edge 16 uses the AMD Ryzen 7 8840U chipset. That’s not AMD’s most recent chipset — currently the very powerful Ryzen AI 300 series, which we reviewed in the Asus ProArt PX13 and ProArt P16. Instead, the Ryzen 8000 series remains the company’s mainstream laptop lineup, and the Ryzen 7 8840U is aimed at thin and light laptops that need fast productivity performance. It’s a 28-watt, 8-core/16-thread chipset that compares most directly to Intel’s Core Ultra 7 155H chipset with 16 cores and 22 threads and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chipset with 12 cores and running on Windows on Arm.

In our standard suite of benchmarks, the Swift Edge 16 was reasonably competitive but fell behind in a few. It did well in the PCMark 10 Complete benchmark that runs a combination of casual, productivity, and creative tasks. The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge 16 running the Snapdragon X Elite was the fastest among this comparison group, but it was also limited in how we could test it given that many benchmarks haven’t been written to run natively on Windows on Arm. The same applies to applications across the board, where the Samsung might run an application in emulation and so likely slower than the others.

Overall, I’d rate the Swift Edge 16 more than fast enough for demanding productivity users. Creators will find the integrated Radeon Graphics 780M to be a limiting factor, as will gamers.

Battery life

AMD chipsets tend to be more efficient than Intel’s, while Qualcomm now rules Windows laptops in terms of battery life. However, Acer put only 54 watt-hours of battery capacity in the Swift Edge 16 to power a 16-inch 3.2K OLED display. That’s just not enough, and somehow this year’s model did worse than last year’s model — which wasn’t great.

In our web browsing test, the Swift Edge 16 lasted just 4.25 hours. By comparison, the LG Gram 16 2-in-1 hit 9.5 hours and, while we haven’t tested the MacBook Air 15 with the M3 chipset, the MacBook Air 13 M3 managed 19.5 hours and the 15-inch model is likely to last longer. In our video looping test, the Swift Edge 16 lasted for 4.5 hours compared to the LG Gram 16 at 12.25 hours and the MacBook Air at 19.5 hours. The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge 16 lasted for 12.5 and 14.5 hours, respectively.

Those aren’t great results. In fact, they’re pretty bad, and some other large-screen laptops do a lot better. Even some very powerful creativity workstations, such as the Asus ProArt P16, last longer. A thin and light productivity laptop that’s unlikely to make it to lunchtime on a charge simply defeats the purpose.

Display and audio

The Swift Edge 16 has a 16.0-inch 3.2K (3200 by 2000) OLED display running at up to 120Hz. That’s plenty sharp, and the refresh rate promises a smooth Windows 11 user interface. Colors are incredibly bright and dynamic out of the box, while there are OLED’s usual inky blacks.

My colorimeter loved this display as well. Brightness was very good at 410 nits, not the best I’ve seen lately but still very high. Colors were wide at 100% of sRGB, 98% of AdobeRGB, and 99% of DCI-P3, and accuracy was incredibly good at a DeltaE of 0.69 (less than 1.0 is considered excellent). Finally, contrast was very high at 14,230:1. That’s not the highest I’ve seen with OLED, but at these levels it’s just a measurement thing. Blacks were essentially perfect.

It’s pretty much true that if a laptop has an OLED display, it will be excellent for productivity users, creators, and media creators. The Swift Edge 16 is no different.

Audio was just OK, with two upward-firing speakers providing good enough audio for the usual system sounds and some like streaming. If you want to watch action movies or listen to music, then you’ll want a good pair of headphones.

There are too many flaws to compete

The Swift Edge 16 is reasonably affordable, and it has a great OLED display. Performance is more than enough for demanding productivity, and it’s very light. It’s a highly portable laptop for productivity users and media consumer who can benefit from a large display.

However, the chassis is a bit too flexible, even for similar laptops with magnesium alloy designs. There’s a cost to being so light. More damning, the laptop gets very poor battery life, especially by the standard of newer Windows laptops that last two or three times as long. It’s amazing what a year can do: there’s just too much competition today to accept the Swift Edge 16’s various compromises.