Acer Swift 14 AI review: All in on AI

Most self-respecting tech reviewers will tell you that specs and features never tell the whole story of a device. The bleeding edge processors, highest-resolution displays, and buzzworthy features rarely give you a full indication of what the device is like to use every day.

I think that’s probably the best way to describe the Acer Swift 14 AI. It doesn’t have the highest specs, it has a basic display, and it’s full of AI features (it’s even in the name), but as a complete package, it’s a pretty solid laptop. It’s one of my favorite laptops of 2024.

Sadly, it doesn’t avoid the issues we’re seeing from Intel’s newest Core Ultra processors – the Ultra 7-258V in this case – but that’s mostly Intel’s fault anyway. Acer did the best with what they have and, honestly, I think they did a pretty swell job.

About this review: Acer provided us with a Swift 14 AI laptop for this review. It had no input in this article and did not see its contents before publishing.

Price, availability, and specs

A lot of machine for not a lot of dough

At the time of writing this, Acer has only one configuration available for purchase, either directly from Acer or from Micro Center. But I’m actually okay with that because the specs they’re offering are, for the most part, good enough that I don’t necessarily feel like I need to upgrade.

The Swift 14 AI comes with the 2nd generation Core Ultra 7-258V with its eight cores split evenly between performance and efficiency cores. This is one of the newest Lunar Lake series chips and this processor only allows for up to 32GB RAM, which is thankfully how much Acer gives you here.

These are paired with 1TB of storage, Intel’s integrated Arc graphics, and a 14-inch 1920 x 1200 touch display with 60Hz refresh rate. All of that will set you back $1,249 at Micro Center (at the time of writing) which is a decent price in my opinion. The non-sale price directly from Acer is only fifty dollars more at $1,299.

Design and ports

Everything you need in a modern ultrabook

I really like the design of the Swift 14 AI. For starters, while the Steam Blue color doesn’t quite match the blue depicted on Acer’s website, it still looks great and it’s better than just another black clamshell. They’ve copied the small camera protrusion at the top of the display from Lenovo, but the tapered edges along the bottom make it feel even slimmer than it already is. On the corner of the lid is a little pattern shape that denotes it as one of Acer’s AI PCs.

On the left side, there’s a full-sized HDMI 2.1 port, one of the two 3.2 Gen 1 USB-A ports, and both Thunderbolt 4 ports. On the right side is the other USB-A port, and this one supports power off charging so you can top up your phone without having to power on the computer. Next to that is a 3.5 mm audio jack.

The Swift 14 AI is almost entirely aluminum, including on the palm rest, which really helps it feel like a premium device, and also keeps your wrists cool while typing. Plus, it helps keep the weight down to under three pounds. I’m impressed with how good it looks and feels all around.

Display, webcam, and audio

Gotta compromise somewhere

There is only one display option available for the Swift 14 AI and that’s a WUXGA 1920 x 1200 LCD touch panel. To be honest, it’s really not all that bad, it’s actually much better than the same type of display on the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i, but I still wish there was an option to upgrade it. It’s stuck at 60Hz, and while the colors looked okay (Acer claims it meets 100% sRGB), it only gets to 400 nits of brightness and the low resolution is certainly noticeable.

I do understand Acer was trying to hit a certain price point, and that’s completely fine, but that display is just par for the course these days and I’m confident that many people, myself included, would pay a bit more for a better option if given the chance. Ironically, the Snapdragon-powered version of this laptop comes with a 14.5" 2560 x 1600 120Hz WQXGA display for $200 less, so I really don't understand Acer's decision here.

What’s even more baffling is that Acer went with what they claim is a QHD 1440p webcam in the Swift 14 AI. So technically, the display can’t even show your face at the full resolution of the webcam. I get that you’re not staring at yourself while on camera most of the time, but why put a camera in a laptop with a higher resolution than the display?

That being said, the webcam itself is good. Again, I couldn’t really tell if it was actually 1440p or not, but I’ll take their word for it. When I had my face in full screen, it didn’t look any better than any other webcam I’ve used, but that’s where AI comes in.

Acer built two AI features for video calls to help enhance your video and audio quality. To be honest, I couldn’t tell much of a difference in the audio quality with it enabled, but the video enhancements did seem to work, sort of. Now, they didn’t suddenly turn me into a Hollywood movie star, but turning on Super Sharp did seem to noticeably clean up the image. Oddly, the other feature, Portrait Refinement, didn’t work at all and even made me blurrier. Yay for AI.

An interesting feature of the webcam is what Acer calls User Sensing. Basically, it will use your camera to detect if you’re near the computer or not. If you walk away, it will automatically lock the screen and wake it up when you come back. This is just a bit too creepy for me, and it’s a little too aggressive about how quickly it does this, but it does work sometimes. I can see how this would be useful in some cases, but I promptly turned this feature off after my testing.

The speakers are nothing exciting. They work, but the laws of physics make it nearly impossible to build truly great speakers in a thin and light laptop. They don’t get quite loud enough for me, I kept wanting to turn up the volume on my video calls, and there’s barely any low-end support for music and streaming. They’re respectable, but nothing exciting.

Keyboard and touchpad

This is how you do it

As a writer and a fully remote worker, a laptop’s keyboard is a make-or-break feature for me. Luckily, the keyboard on the Acer Swift 14 AI is top notch. At first, it felt a bit shallow, and I was nervous that I wouldn’t like it. Boy was I wrong.

I’m oddly sort of obsessed with the keyboard on the Swift 14 AI, and I don’t know why. It’s great. I can’t really say it’s hands-down the best laptop keyboard I’ve ever used, and I’m not at all saying it can replace my dedicated external keyboard, but Acer definitely got something right here. The material on the keycaps and the depth of key travel just feels great.

That’s not to say it’s perfect, however. The fingerprint sensor embedded in the power button is a bit finicky and, much like HP did on the ZBook Studio G11, the right control key is replaced with a dedicated Copilot key. I didn’t like it on the ZBook, and I don’t like it here. Frankly, even if Copilot becomes genuinely useful one day, I still don’t want it replacing anything on my keyboard. The backlight also doesn't get quite as bright as I'd like. It's perfectly fine, but I'm a cave person so sometimes I need it a tad brighter.

Acer has also included a dedicated key on the function row to launch their Acer Sense software. It’s the same computer management software that nearly every OEM ships with their laptops, but it’s strange that they made a dedicated hardware key for it.

The touchpad is just as good as the keyboard for me. It’s made with Corning Gorilla Glass and is just as smooth as you’d expect from a good glass touchpad. In the top right corner is a similar icon to the one on the lid, except this one lights up. It only does so when AI features are being used, and I appreciate that they make it clear when AI features are in use (you can also turn this off in the settings, which I also appreciate). Although I’d much rather just not have the AI features at all, at least they aren’t trying to hide them.

Performance and battery life

A tale of two computers

The single available configuration of the Swift 14 AI offers a Core Ultra 7-258V, 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and integrated Intel Arc graphics. That’s a decent spec sheet for a mid-range laptop in 2024, at least for a Windows machine.

Intel’s 2nd generation Ultra processors promise big efficiency gains alongside solid performance and the results are, shall we say, mixed. As you can see from the benchmark results below, the Swift 14 AI delivered some pretty respectable numbers.

However, these results were all taken while plugged in to power. When unplugged, it’s a very different story. PC Mark 10 returned a measly 4,236 and the single core Geekbench 6 score was literally less than half at 1,112. The multi core score wasn’t as bad but still not great at 7,707. The single core score was the same story on Cinebench 2024, returning again less than half the score at 54. These scores were all taken with the battery above 50% and in Acer's Performance mode (Balance mode in Windows).

Some of this can no doubt be attributed to the hit-or-miss design of the Core Ultra 7, but it’s still surprising to see that much of a difference between the scores. I thought the differences in scores on the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 were bad, but this is the biggest difference I’ve ever seen in my testing.

In real world usage, the Swift 14 AI performed quite well in everything I threw at it. It rendered a nine minute, 1080p video in DaVinci Resolve in just under two minutes, and most games I tried were quite playable. There were some dropped frames occasionally, but nothing that kept me from enjoying a little downtime.

As hit-or-miss as the performance is, the efficiency gains are kinda bonkers. The PC Mark 10 Modern Office battery test (designed to test battery life under a simulated typical daily work usage) clocked in at 22 hours and 40 seconds of battery life before dying. This makes it the longest-lasting Windows machine I’ve ever used, by a long shot. Acer's claim of multi-day battery life is not too far off.

Should you buy the Swift 14 AI?

You should buy it if:

• You want an affordable way to get a second gen Ultra processor
• You need something powerful and portable
• You want to try out the AI features

You shouldn’t buy it if:

• You need a 2-in-1
• You want any other specs than what’s available

I think my colleague Sherri Smith said it best in her review of the Acer Swift Go 16: “Never sleep on Acer [because] its laptops will surprise you every time.” That’s exactly how I feel coming away from my time with the Acer Swift 14 AI. I certainly wasn’t expecting to like it as much as I did.

If the name didn’t give it away, Acer is going all in on AI along with Microsoft, by adding in extra features and even an indicator light to let you know when you’re using AI. I wouldn’t say Acer’s AI features are as helpful as what HP seems to be working on, but at least they’re trying something beyond just repackaging ChatGPT. And, to their credit, they didn’t even bundle in their dedicated AI chat program, Acer Assist, with the Swift 14 AI (likely because Microsoft put a hard stop on that).

Aside from all the AI fuss, the Swift 14 AI is still a really nice laptop. It works hard and plays hard, all without breaking the bank in the process.