Acer’s new Swift 14, which replaces the Swift 5, is the corporate’s MacBook Pro—which is to say, it is a well-built, svelte, slickly designed, all-metal transportable with sufficient energy that can assist you get issues achieved irrespective of the place you might be.

It’s not excellent. Battery life may very well be higher, and there are another choices for particular use instances, however for the value—$1,400 as examined—you would be hard-pressed to beat this bundle as an all-around nice Windows laptop.

Swift Names

Laptop makers appear to have lastly provide you with a standard naming conference, centered across the mannequin title paired with not a random quantity, however the display dimension of the laptop computer. Revolutionary. Genius. Wait till you inform your grandkids it took the business three many years to provide you with that. Thanks to Dell and Apple for main the way in which. Anyway, right here we’re, lastly. The Acer Swift 5 is gone. The Acer Swift 14 is right here (as is the Swift Go, which replaces the Swift 3).

This 12 months the Swift lineup options the Swift Go, which gives an OLED display, the Swift X, which gives a devoted GPU, and the plain Swift, which has a considerably extra premium look, coming in inexperienced or blue with gold accents, however not the OLED display or a devoted GPU.

The Swift 14 appears practically an identical to final 12 months’s Swift 5, with an aluminum and magnesium chassis that has barely any flex to it. Not even when carried it with one hand on the nook, which I do not counsel you make a behavior of, however it’s one thing I do to each laptop computer I take a look at. The good ones, just like the Swift 14, do not flex. My ThinkPad T14 was jealous.

The unit I reviewed had an Intel Core i7 (13700H) processor with Iris Xe Graphics (shared reminiscence), 16 gigabytes of RAM, a 1-terabyte SSD, and a 14-inch IPS WQXGA touchscreen (2,560 x 1,600-pixel decision and a 60-Hz refresh rate). The display is 16:10, which I’ve come to a lot desire to 16:9. That little additional bit is simply … good. There’s additionally a less expensive Swift 14 mannequin that makes use of a 1,920 x 1,200-pixel decision display, which is barely higher than 1080p. All of that is wrapped in a 2.65-pound bundle that is simply 12 inches broad and 0.59 inches thick.

Power at a Price

The largest information within the Swift 14 is the brand new Thirteenth-generation Intel Core H-series processors, that are surprisingly snappy for Evo-certified processors. If you are fascinated with video modifying or mild gaming, the Swift X, with its devoted Nvidia GPU, is the way in which to go. But in my testing, the Swift 14 was loads quick in on a regular basis use, together with internet looking with a disturbing number of tabs open, utilizing chat apps, videoconferencing, and photograph modifying utilizing Darktable—which I ran by way of Windows Subsystem for Linux, and it was nonetheless speedy.