Acer Swift Edge 16 review: light but too breezy

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.

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.

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 will run them 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.

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.

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.

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.