Acer Swift 7
Slim, light and beautiful, but the trackpad and powersaving processor hold it back from greatness
SCORE PRICE £1,249 (£1,499 inc VAT) from uk-store.acer.com
The 14in laptop doesn’t get any slimmer, lighter or lovelier than the Acer Swift 7. Weighing in at just 1.2kg, it’s actually lighter than most of the 13.3in models on test, while the 8.9mm thin chassis is a wonder of engineering; it’s slimmer than some recent tablets. Although it feels like it might blow away in a stiff breeze, the aluminium unibody construction is perfectly robust, while Acer earns extra points for bundling a sleeve.
The hinge doesn’t allow you to fold the screen flat against the back and use it like a tablet, but it will sit flat against the desktop, which can be handy if you want to make full use of its touchscreen. The design leaves barely any room for ports, though, with just two USB-C, a 3.5mm audio socket and a nano-SIM slot for the built-in LTE modem. However, Acer gets past this by bundling a USB-C breakout box, complete with a USB-C port, USB 3.1 Type-A port and an HDMI out. It’s a neat solution we would be tempted to leave plugged in to a desktop setup.
On a laptop this svelte, the screen seems enormous and the quality is hard to fault. While a maximum brightness of 285cd/m2 means that it’s better suited to indoor use than outside, the average Delta E is just 2.14, while the sRGB coverage of 97% is fantastic. On the other hand, the audio is paper-thin and borderline unlistenable at high volumes, but what can you expect when the chassis is this small?
In fact, the Swift 7 is nearly the single most desirable laptop in this test, with a brilliant ten-hour battery life to boot. So what’s holding it back from greatness and five stars? First is the keyboard which, understandably, doesn’t have much travel, feeling weirdly light in comparison to the Microsoft Surface or the HP Spectre. Worse, the trackpad has no buttons whatsoever – not even integral buttons – which means that you end up having to use the touchscreen every time you need to move a window or drag and drop. Finally, performance is compromised by the weedy Core i7-7Y75 processor. Don’t be fooled by the i7 nomenclature; this low-power processor makes the Swift 7 the slowest laptops in this month’s test. None of these issues are disastrous, but they spoil it as a do-it-all device.