Think an ultraportable laptop has to have a 13.3- or 14-inch screen? Acer's Swift Edge 16 ($1,299.99 as tested) not only has a 16-inch display, but it's an OLED panel with such brilliant colors that you won't want to look away. It's just half an inch thin, yet its magnesium-aluminum chassis earns high marks for sturdiness. The Swift Edge 16 doesn't match the long battery life of the 15.6-inch LG Gram SuperSlim, but the Acer is considerably more affordable despite a sharper display and more ports. It's a first-rate choice if you want a big screen on the go.
Design: 16 Inches Under 3 Pounds
This Swift Edge 16 is a redesigned model not to be confused with the same-named Acer we reviewed in March 2023. Nor should you mistake it for one of the other Swift laptops in Acer's lineup, such as the similar-looking Swift Go 16—which costs less but uses Intel rather than AMD silicon and is about a pound heavier—or the thicker, higher-performance Swift X 16.
Our test unit (model SFE16-43-R98R) is a Best Buy exclusive with an eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 7840U processor, AMD Radeon integrated graphics, 16GB of memory, and a 1TB NVMe solid-state drive. The combination is ideal for everyday productivity and light content creation. The laptop's storage is upgradeable but its soldered LPDDR5 memory is not.
We're happy when a 14-inch laptop comes in under the three-pound ultraportable limit, so the Swift Edge 16's weight of 2.73 pounds is remarkable. It almost makes the 15-inch Apple MacBook Air and the Dell XPS 15 look portly at 3.3 and 4.2 pounds respectively. The LG Gram SuperSlim is even lighter at 2.18 pounds, but you'll pay for the privilege.
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At 0.5 by 14.8 by 9.7 inches (HWD), this Acer is about as trim as a 16-inch laptop can be. I thought its thinness would put it at risk of being flimsy, but its magnesium-aluminum shell showed no lack of strength, refusing to flex when I picked it up by a corner (inadvisable with any laptop) or pressed firmly on the lid and palm rest.
Visually, alas, the Swift Edge 16 is a bit of a bore. There are logos scattered about—Acer branding on the lid and below the screen, Swift lettering below the keyboard, a DTS logo above it, and enough stickers on the palm rest to make you feel like you're using a floor model—but the notebook is otherwise an Olivine Black slab that doesn't stir the imagination.
Display: Bring on the Color
Screen quality is half the battle for any laptop, and the new Swift Edge 16 knocks it out of the park. Its OLED technology produces such vivid color that you'll reminisce about the last time you window-shopped high-end TVs. Acer's rated brightness of 400 nits isn't as high as some elite IPS panels', but OLED displays don't need as many nits to stand out because of their exceptional black levels, which I thoroughly appreciated rewatching The Dark Knight.
The screen's 16:10 aspect ratio and 3,200-by-2,000-pixel resolution offers finer detail and more vertical screen space than the 16:9 ratio and full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) display of the Gram SuperSlim. The Swift Edge screen also has a 120Hz refresh rate, double the usual 60Hz, for extra-smooth scrolling and enjoyment of fast-moving video or animation. I wish the display offered touch support, but that would have likely made the laptop thicker. I also noted the glossy surface tended to get dusty.
Using the Acer Swift Edge 16: Not Too Thin for Ports
The Swift Edge 16 isn't one of those ultraportables (looking at you, Dell and Apple) that restricts you to only USB-C ports. On its left flank are a pair of Type-C USB4 ports, an HDMI 2.1 monitor port, and a 5Gbps USB 3.2 Type-A port. To the right, you'll find a microSD card reader, an audio jack, and another USB-A 3.2 port. The AC adapter plugs into either USB4 port. Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 handle wireless connections.
Security features include a Noble Wedge lock slot on the right edge and a Windows Hello fingerprint reader built into the power button. The webcam centered above the screen doesn't offer IR face recognition and lacks a sliding privacy shutter or kill switch, though its 2,560-by-1,440-pixel resolution creates sharp images. The AI engine in the Ryzen 7 CPU enables video background effects such as portrait blur that aren't available from 13th Generation Intel Core CPUs.
I enjoyed typing on the Swift Edge 16, managing a solid 103 words per minute with 98% accuracy in the 10FastFingers online test. The keys have comfortable travel and two levels of white backlighting. That said, the nonstandard arrangement and undersized keys of the numeric keypad are letdowns. I also sorely missed standalone or dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys and lamented the cursor-arrow-key cluster, which squeezes half-height up and down arrows between full-size left and right.
Sound quality isn't the Acer's best asset; everything I played sounded tinny. Bass was almost nonexistent in Rob Thomas' "Something to Be," while Betty Who's "Dreaming About You" had little sense of soundstage. The music equalizer preset in the provided DTS app helps clarity but can only do so much with such limited speakers.
Acer backs the Swift Edge 16 with a one-year warranty. Windows 11 Home is standard, as are many unwanted trial apps and gimmicky games. There are several Acer utilities, the most important being Care Center for access to support and system updates. The Swift's heat generation and cooling-fan noise are minimal; I only heard the fans ramp up while running our strenuous benchmark tests and the chassis never got more than lukewarm.
Testing the Acer Swift Edge 16: 8-Core AMD Power
To recap, our Best Buy configuration of the Swift Edge 16—$1,299.99, though it briefly dropped to $1,049.99 during the review period—combines an eight-core Ryzen 7 7840U CPU (3.3GHz base clock, up to 5.1GHz boost), AMD Radeon integrated graphics, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. A padded carrying sleeve is an unexpected bonus. For our benchmark charts, we compared it to the LG Gram SuperSlim, which Best Buy had on sale for $1,499.99 (down from $1,799.99) but whose OLED screen stops at full HD resolution.
We also threw in the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 convertible (since the OLED-screened XPS 15 was in a higher league price-wise) and two 14-inch ultraportables, the economical Asus Zenbook 14 OLED and our business-oriented Editors' Choice award winner the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11. You can see the contenders' basic specs in the table below.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.
Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
In the main PCMark test, the Swift Edge 16 soared above the 4,000 points we consider a sign of competent performance in apps like Word and Excel. It also aced the storage test by a wide margin over the other units, as well as scoring highly in Cinebench and HandBrake. Like several other systems we've tested recently, it balked at our automated Adobe Photoshop benchmark, though I was able to run the app by itself.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
We test laptop graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
The Swift Edge 16 generally led the pack in these tests, but you shouldn't expect to play the latest games on it or any laptop with integrated graphics without taking advantage of a streaming service like GeForce Now. In fact, given its 120Hz display, the Acer should be a decent game-streaming laptop.
Battery and Display Tests
We test laptops' and tablets' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
There's no glossing over the Swift Edge 16 having the shortest battery life in this group; it fell short of the 10-hour mark and got nowhere near the LG's or Inspiron's runtime. That said, it's hardly unusable away from AC outlets, and its screen is bright enough that you might stretch things by settling for less than the 50% brightness we use.
Speakign of which, the Acer slam-dunked our screen quality tests, with nearly full coverage of all three color gamuts and brightness exceeding its advertised 400 nits. The LG's display is slightly brighter, but the Acer offers higher resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate, so there's no doubt which screen we prefer.
Verdict: Big Screen With Maximum Go
Designing a big-screened laptop that's extremely thin and light is a challenge, but Acer has mastered it with the latest Swift Edge 16. Its magnesium-aluminum construction keeps it strong while keeping it under three pounds. To be sure, almost any 14-inch laptop will be more portable due to its smaller size, but the appeal of a larger display without extra weight or thickness is undeniable. As mentioned, the 15.6-inch LG Gram SuperSlim outlasts this Acer's battery life, but the Swift Edge 16 is by no means useless away from home and counters with a better screen, a lower price, and even a free carrying sleeve. For big-screen portability, the Swift Edge 16 is hard to beat.
The Acer Swift Edge 16's ultraportable design and OLED screen delight, and though its battery life is shorter than the LG Gram SuperSlim's, it's much less expensive.
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