(Credit: Rene Ramos)
To be sure, at most trade shows, hulky gaming or power-user laptops laden with bling tend to grab the headlines. Indeed, look at the flagships from all the major players. Just about everyone has an 18-inch gaming machine (MSI Raider 18, Alienware 18 Area-51), mobile workstation (Dell Pro Max 18), or both in their lines.
But what about 18-inchers for the rest of us, who don’t play PC games or do CAD on the road?
Acer showed PCMag a whole heap of new laptops at a preview event it arranged in New York before Computex 2026: gaming machines, extreme ultralights, and even a nifty new 2-in-1. Surprisingly, the one that jazzed me the most may be the humblest: an 18-inch productivity machine for everyday users.
The Aspire 18 AI doesn’t stand out much among mainstream laptops for anything but its immense screen, but my, what a big one it is. I checked out that machine alongside a bunch of other Acer units detailed in this and two other articles linked above. Also here: a portable Aspire for content creators, and a slick "Swift Spin" 2-in-1 that’ll make you choose between Arm and x86.
Acer Aspire 18 AI: A Rare Gigantic-Screen Productivity Laptop
First, some background on 18-inch screens: When it comes to large panels, display manufacturers seem to prefer 16-inch and 18-inch screens lately, at the expense of old standards like 15-inch, 15.3-inch, 15.6-inch, 17-inch, and 17.3-inch ones. It should be no surprise, then, that we see 18-inchers start to appear in the niche previously occupied by the 17-inchers. Regardless, 17-inch everyday-compute laptops have always been rare birds, and so far, 18-inchers even more so. Too big for easy commuting or campus-schlepping, the 17-incher was always meant to be a couch-surfing machine or a laptop that would mostly stay put, for folks with aging eyes who still wanted something nominally mobile, and not a desktop or an AIO PC.
The 18-incher so far has followed the same trajectory as a niche machine; indeed, the main competition I see at the moment for the Aspire 18 AI is Asus’ similar VivoBook 18. Still, this Aspire has its own charms. Aspire is Acer’s line for budget and mainstream machines, and the spec list here backs that up. It’s hard to deny that the screen is massive, an 18-inch WUXGA (1,920-by-1,200-pixel) panel that looked visible enough in the natural outdoor light where I demoed it. Everything else is pretty down to earth.
(Credit: Rene Ramos)An 18-incher is big enough for effective multi-window multitasking if you position two windows side by side, without having to resort to a portable monitor connected via USB. I could see that here, though perhaps I might have wished for a slightly sharper resolution. I wouldn’t say 1200p looked coarse, but it will limit your comfortable multi-windowing a bit. Two side-by-side windows will likely be the ideal max. (After all, 1080p or 1200p looks fine on desktop monitors up to 24-inch or 25-inch.)
This particular screen can achieve an impressive 400 nits of brightness, and it has a 165Hz refresh rate; both are above-par specs for a productivity-oriented machine. In my brief time with the Aspire 18 AI, the panel looked fair under outdoor lighting (albeit not direct sunlight) and had fine off-angle visibility.
(Credit: Rene Ramos)An 18-incher, as you’d expect, will have a full-size keyboard layout, incorporating ample key spacing and a full numeric keypad. My brief time typing on the Aspire 18 AI left me with the impression of an unremarkable but perfectly competent typing feel. What really left an impression was the touchpad. Cue up the Star Wars quote from the Rebellion’s first look at the Death Star: “Look at the size of that thing!” (Mousing around on this touchpad felt fine. I’ll have to hope that the palm rejection works well, in practice, as that is a lot of pad real estate to reject.)
(Credit: Rene Ramos)As for the innards, the Aspire 18 AI will have up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 386H processor with Intel integrated graphics inside. I was hoping to see an option for Intel’s Core Ultra X7 or X9 Panther Lake processors, which would get you those chips’ excellent Arc B390 integrated graphics. However, the Aspire, in keeping with its more modest market target, seems to be available only with Intel’s kicked-down integrated GPU. Acer claims up to 22 hours of battery life.
(Credit: Rene Ramos)In all, this should be a formidable competitor to the Vivobook 18, and I hope it spurs more mainstream, popularly priced giants. It’s a market traditionally underserved, and as my eyes age, I see the appeal of machines like this more and more. I hope the Aspire 18 AI succeeds and enables a generation to proudly boost the size of their icons and fonts and enjoy relief from the squint that too many smaller machines mandate. Pricing will come later this year.
Acer Aspire X 16 AI: A Portable Content Creator
Another not-business-as-usual Aspire that Acer showed off is the Aspire X 16 AI. Designed for creative workflows on a budget, this is a premium thin-and-light laptop that indeed features Intel chips up to the Core Ultra X9 that I mentioned above. Those chips pack the desirable, potent Intel Arc B390 graphics.
(Credit: Rene Ramos)Behind the GPU, the 3K OLED panel is clearly the centerpiece here. The 16-inch screen is dubbed with the esoteric acronym "WQXGA+" (that’s 2,880 by 1,800 pixels) and is notably more upscale than the one on the Aspire 18 AI above. Acer rates the panel for 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, and it's TrueBlack HDR 500 certified. If you’re aiming to show off a portfolio of content directly to a client in-person, this screen is a fitting medium for that kind of thing. An undeniably vibrant screen, it popped with color and was a clear contrast to the more ordinary panels on the other Aspire above and the Swift Spin below.
(Credit: Rene Ramos)Why is this an Aspire, when Aspires tend to be mainstream or budget models? The “X” signifies a premium-class configuration here, as is typical for Acer. The company designed this laptop as a more accessible content creator machine than models from dedicated creator lines like Asus’ ProArt or Acer’s now-defunct ConceptD. The fact that no discrete GPU is included is one likely cost-saver.
(Credit: Rene Ramos)That’s not to say you won't find some premium touches here. The panel and integrated GPU are clearly two, in their own ways; another is the networking solution. Video editors and other creators dealing with big files may appreciate that Acer incorporates both Intel Killer Wi-Fi 6E and hardwired Ethernet in this machine; the two connections (wireless and wired) can "bind" together via channel bonding for rapidly moving massive project files.
(Credit: Rene Ramos)How appealing the Aspire X 16 AI will be will hinge on the price. Like with the other Computex laptops Acer teased, no pricing was shared yet.
Acer Swift Spin 14 AI: Two Flavors of 2-in-1
The last machine Acer showed off was the Swift Spin 14 AI. I remarked that I didn’t think I’d heard that particular combination of Acer lines (Swift and Spin) together before, and I was right. (We’ve definitely seen Aspire Spins before, for one.) Here, those brands signify “ultraportable” (Swift) combined with “360-degree convertible” (Spin).
(Credit: Rene Ramos)This 14-incher will come in two distinct flavors, defined by the CPU family. A silver-white model will run on Intel Core Ultra Series 3 silicon. Alternatively, a cobalt-blue model will feature the Snapdragon X2 Elite or X2 Plus. (The X2 family is the new Snapdragon for laptops, with an 80 TOPS NPU up and down the line.)
(Credit: Rene Ramos)Like any other rotating 2-in-1, the Swift Spin has a 360-degree hinge that allows the laptop to rotate among clamshell mode, an A-frame mode, a screen-out/keyboard-down presentation mode, or tablet mode. Sketching and note-taking features are an emphasis here, too. Both models come with a Wacom AES 2.0-compliant pen. Notably, the Qualcomm version features a built-in "garage" slot to dock and charge the stylus, while the Intel version’s stylus must lie loose. An Acer rep noted that the internals of the Intel design didn’t afford enough space to accommodate a stylus garage.
(Credit: Rene Ramos)The actual screen is IPS-only, but it looked attractive enough in our brief time with it. The WUXGA panel has a 120Hz peak refresh rate and, as you’d expect in all models given it’s a 2-in-1, is a touch screen.
(Credit: Rene Ramos)Expect the Swift Spin and the other two laptops to start to appear in the US in late summer. As noted, pricing was not yet shared. We expect to see most, if not all, of these models come through PC Labs as 2026 goes on.
(Credit: Rene Ramos)