Acer Swift 7

It’s the world’s thinnest laptop, but can it stand up to its slightly thicker competitors where it counts?

Taiwanese PC-maker Acer revealed a couple of rather attractive portable sister PCs at the end of last year — a laptop and a 2-in-1. We looked at the latter — the Spin 7 — in our January issue (see page 34) and this Swift is basically cut from the same cloth — albeit to a much slimmer form. This is officially the world’s thinnest laptop, squeezing in at just 9.98mm thick and weighing 1.12kg. But is the attraction just physical?

There’s a Core i7 chip powering the show, combined with a 13.3-inch LED-backit 1080p display, 256GB SSD and 8GB of memory. And despite those satisfying specs, it comes in at just $1,700 — a lowerthan-average price for a premium ultrabook, which in Australia has crept up to around the $2,000 mark. Also gratifying is that all the internal hardware is passively cooled, so there are no fans and it operates completely silently.

While the trackpad is almost comically wide, it’s pleasingly sharp and responsive, and the chiclet keyboard performs well, although it isn’t backlit — the body is presumably too thin to fit the mechanism as well as an LED.

As with all these superslim laptops, the ports they can fit in are limited, however. Here, that means you get just two USB 3.1 Type-C sockets at the back of the right edge — one of which doubles as the charging port — plus a 3.5mm headset I/O. Acer has thrown a small dongle in the box that’ll adapt one of those Type-C ports to the more traditional Type-A, so you can whip that out when needed.

On the surface then, that all sounds like a laptop that makes few compromises, but there has been at least a little bit of sacrifice of function to accomodate form. This isn’t as good as Dell’s XPS 13 in terms of battery life or horsepower, for example — although in fairness, the Dell is twice as thick and an extra 160g or so heavier. And while the Swift doesn’t match the XPS’s class-leading battery life of up to 7 hours, it still manages an acceptable 4–5 hours in the same mixedtask home/office workloads, and is a bit under 6 hours for watching 1080p movies.

Something we’ve pointed out before, but that’s worth reiterating, is that Intel’s rebranded its low-power ‘Core M’ chips with this seventh-generation Core (aka Kaby Lake) chips. That means that, despite the name, the Core i7 used here isn’t really the same as what you’ll find in, say, ASUS’s ZenBook 3 or the Dell XPS 13 — the giveaway is the ‘Y’ in its model identifier (i7-7Y75), meaning it’s frugal in terms of power use, but it also runs at a lower clock speed and can’t reach the same performance levels as its ‘standard’ mobile Core i7 counterparts. How much of an impact that actually makes will depend on your computing needs.

The Swift mainly falls over when it comes to tasks like video encoding, highres multimedia work and heavy multitasking. That said, if you’re just surfing the web, working with documents and watching videos or doing a little light gaming, then the Swift holds up proficiently.

So while this isn’t an ultrabook for everyone, for most it should suit perfectly fine. Definitely one worth considering if you’re looking for an uber-thin laptop that still delivers the goods.