Acer Swift Go 14 AI review: fast, long-lasting, and affordable

There’s only one configuration of the Swift Go 14 AI, and it’s only available at the Acer web store. It lists for $1,000 but is currently on sale for $800, with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 14.5-inch QHD+ IPS display.

The Swift Go 14 AI is essentially a chunkier version of the Swift 14 AI. It’s around the same width and depth in spite of having a larger display at 14.5 inches versus 14.0 inches. But, it’s a bit thicker and heavier. It’s also a more aggressive design, with large vents below the lid that hint at a higher performance laptop. Acer incorporated the same kind of reverse notch that Lenovo uses to keep the top bezel slim while avoiding Apple’s display notch.

The keyboard is just OK. The keycaps are just a tiny bit smaller than I like, while key spacing and the layout is comfortable. The switches are a little spongey, while the Swift 14 AI has snapper switches and the OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 has a much better keyboard.

The touchpad is large enough and its mechanical design works well enough. I do prefer haptic touchpads like the best version on Apple MacBooks, but we’re not quite at a point where sub-$1,000 laptops are equipped with them. Unlike the Swift 14 AI, the Swift Go 14 AI doesn’t have a touch display. That may not matter to that many people. The Swift Go 14 AI touchpad has an LED that lights up when AI features are being used, but I didn’t see it engage during my testing.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 is an 8-core ARM-based chipset that runs at 3.2GHz with a single-core boost to 3.4GHz, compared to the other common chipset, the 12-core Snapdragon X Elite that runs at 3.4GHz with a dual-core boost to 4.0GHz. That makes it slower, but as we’ll see is still quite fast and, in fact, faster than the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V that’s part of the Lunar Lake lineup. The Snapdragon X Plus has an Adreno GPU that runs at 1.7 TFLOPS, a lot slower than the Elite Adreno that’s 3.8 TFLOPS or faster.

The focus of both Qualcomm and Intel lately has been on efficiency. Windows laptops had fallen well behind Apple’s Silicon MacBooks in battery life, and that’s been changing.

The Swift Go 14 AI does very well in both our web browsing and video looping benchmarks, promising multiday battery life unless you’re working the chipset particularly hard. That’s Acer’s second win, as the Swift 14 AI with Intel Lunar Lake also stood out.

The MacBook Air M3 still looks pretty good, but it’s no longer true that you can’t get Windows and good battery life at the same time.

The Swift Go 14 AI has one display option, a 14.5-inch QHD+ (2560 x 1440) IPS display that runs at up to 120Hz. That’s an improvement over the 14.0-inch FHD+ (1920 x 1200) IPS display in the Swift 14 AI that maxes out at 60Hz. Subjectively, I did enjoy the extra sharpness in the Swift Go 14 AI, and colors and brightness were good.

I’ve been commenting lately that displays across the board have gotten a lot better in the last few years. Not only are there more OLED displays available at lower prices but IPS displays have gotten brighter with better contrast and wider, more accurate colors. The Swift Go 14 AI’s panel is in line with that trend. It’s bright at 407 nits, well above our 300-nit standard that we really need to adjust. Contrast is also good at 1,270:1, exceeding our 1,000:1 threshold — every display I’ve reviewed in the last couple of years is higher than that, so it needs adjusting as well. Colors were reasonably wide at 100% of sRGB, 80% of AdobeRGB, and 82% of DCI-P3, and accuracy was good at a DeltaE of 1.61 (less than 2.0 is great for productivity but not optimal for creative applications).

This is a good display with decent sharpness, very good performance, and probably represents a good trade-off between battery life and quality.

The audio isn’t all that great, though. It uses two downward-firing speakers that deliver sound that’s good enough for the occasional YouTube video or video call, but for anything else, a pair of headphones is recommended.

The Swift Go 14 AI isn’t the best-looking laptop around. But it’s attractively priced, especially if you can get it on sale. At just $800, you get a well-built and fully-configured laptop with a very good IPS display.

But perhaps more important, it’s also fast for productivity users and it gets excellent battery life. You’ll want to make sure your apps are supported on Windows on Arm, but that’s less of an issue than it’s been in the past. If you can look past the lackluster design, the Swift Go 14 AI is easy to recommend.