Acer Swift 7
The case for this is thin
Wafer-thin laptop keeps low profile
There are slim laptops, and then there’s the Swift 7 (specifically, the SF714-51T), which is just under 9mm thick. That’s the sort of figure you’d normally find in the specs of a phone or tablet. It’s slightly deeper at the back, but it really is extraordinarily thin.
Thanks to an aluminium chassis and Gorilla Glass screen, it feels surprisingly sturdy. The webcam is fitted into a rather wide panel below the screen, so it stares up your nose. The keyboard is backlit and very usable, despite a few squeezed keys and no Caps Lock light. There’s also a good-sized touchpad, but this is let down by a double-tap right-click mechanism that constantly tripped us up. The Full HD touchscreen showed 92 per cent of SRGB colours with good accuracy and adequate brightness, and it’s a full 14 inches across the diagonal, noticeably bigger than 13in rivals.
What they couldn’t find room for was a fan, and consequently the Swift 7 is limited to a low-power i7 processor from Intel’s 2016 range. It’s slower than recent i3 systems, and although basic Windows 10 tasks work fine, opening more than three programs or four windows will start to make it stutter. At least it doesn’t draw much power, but nor is there much room for battery cells, and our videoplayback test barely reached eight hours.
Given that it has a touchscreen and is exceptionally slim and light, it would have been ideal if the Swift 7 had let you fold the keyboard all the way round to use it in Windows 10’s tablet mode. It doesn’t: the hinge holds the screen at any angle back to flat, parallel with the keys, but no further. On the plus side, 4G is built in (you’ll need a mobile tariff if you want to use it beyond the trial month), as is a fingerprint reader, which we found a bit awkward.
At its original price of £1,499, we’d have dismissed the Swift 7 as too limited. Discounted to under a grand, it’s worth a look. Don’t be tempted if you use your laptop regularly for anything more demanding than Word, email and casual web browsing – the i7 processor really isn’t up to it. If your needs are modest, though, it’s a very elegant machine.
Elegant and ultra-ultraslim, but struggles doing more than the bare minimum