(Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
Don't miss out on our latest stories. Add PCMag as a preferred source on Google.
BERLIN—Among Acer’s announcements at its IFA press conference on Wednesday, one stood out for how easy it is to pick up.
The Swift Air 16 weighs just under 2.2 pounds—under 1 kilogram—despite having a 16-inch, 1,920-by-1,200 IPS display. Upgrading that screen to a 2,880-by-1,800 AMOLED display ups the weight to all of 2.38 pounds, or 1.1kg.
Picking up the IPS models on display in Acer’s hands-on area invited questions along the lines of, “Did they forget to put a computer inside this?” Even compared with other ultralight laptops: Apple’s ultraportable MacBook Air weighs 2.7 pounds with a 13.3-inch display, while the current, 16-inch 2-in-1 model in LG’s Gram series of ultralight laptops (which debuted in 2015 with a 13-inch model that weighed just under a kilogram) weighs 3.08 pounds.
With a starting price of €999 in Europe, the Swift Air 16 will be close to the MacBook Air’s price and considerably less than LG’s Gram lineup when it goes on sale in November.
The problem for US shoppers looking for a laptop that will leave the smallest possible dent in their shoulders: Acer hasn’t announced a US price or ship date yet.
Eric Ackerson, Acer’s director of product marketing, suggested that this gap in availability should be fixed soon. He said a US price “should roughly translate” to the price in euros (which would mean about $1,100). But he also said Acer needs to see how shipments of this can sync up with retail-marketing schedules that generally don’t involve debuting a new computer that late in the holiday shopping season.
Analyst Avi Greengart, president of Techsponential, agreed about the trickiness of retail timing but pointed to another possible source of uncertainty: “US tariffs change weekly and have hit countries all over the place.”
Inspecting the two models set out for journalists to try, the Swift Air 16 revealed few of the compromises that have shown up in recent entries in this category.
It has a comprehensive set of ports, in contrast to pared-down models like the Asus ProArt PZ13 or Dell’s XPS (now Dell Premium) lineup: On the left, the Swift Air includes two USB-C ports, one USB-A port, and an HDMI 1.4 port, while on the right, a headphone jack ensures dongle-free listening with older headphones.
There's Wi-Fi 6E, not the newer Wi-Fi 7, and the Swift Air supports Bluetooth 5.4, also one version behind in that standard. Those version gaps aren’t worth worrying about.
The Swift Air offers three versions of AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 series introduced at CES in January, qualifying it as a Copilot+ PC capable of running Microsoft’s on-device AI, and three versions of AMD’s Radeon integrated graphics chipset. Memory tops out at 32GB and SSD storage at 1TB.
LG says the Swift Air can run “up to 13 hours” on a charge, which is not great for laptops.
The laptop is wide enough to accommodate a numeric keypad to the right of the keyboard. But there’s no fingerprint sensor for Windows Hello authentication. Your one biometric login option is the camera above the screen.
Which brings up the biggest compromise of this system: the lack of a touch screen, an unflattering contrast to so many Windows laptops these days.
One part of Acer’s exhibit offered another reason not to buy: a better model waiting in the wings. On Wednesday, the company also introduced the upcoming Swift 16 AI, which will include Intel’s upcoming, more powerful Panther Lake processor when it ships next year and will weigh under a kilogram. But with the two Swift 16 AI display units confined inside clear enclosures, a hands-on assessment will also have to wait.