Acer Swift 16 AI Review

Introduction

The Acer Swift 16 AI aims to provide a welcome competitor to the burgeoning sector of well-meaning, large-screen ultrabooks we’ve seen recently. 

The likes of the Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024) and MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) have wowed in recent times with ample power and excellent efficiency, although come with quite a high cost at £1500/$1500+.

The Swift 16 AI clocks in at a more reasonable £1199.99/$1199.99, which is solid value for a laptop with a mid-range Intel Core Ultra 5 chip, solid battery life and a huge 16-inch 3K OLED screen.

I’ve been testing Acer’s latest large-screen laptop for the last few weeks to see how well it performs. Let’s take a closer look.

Design and Keyboard

• Lightweight and portable for a larger laptop
• Competent, varied port selection
• Tactile keyboard, but a smaller trackpad

The Swift 16 AI supersizes the smaller 14-inch model, which I already liked a lot because of its stylish and sturdy metal chassis and competent port selection. It’s much the same story immediately with this slender metal chassis of the 16-inch model, with no real flex or issues with build quality.

The 1.53kg weight makes this one of the lighter 16-inch laptops I’ve tested too, meaning it’s easy to bung into a rucksack or carry around on its own without feeling as if you’re lugging anything. On taking it on a recent work trip to London, I didn’t necessarily notice it was in my bag.

Against the slew of recent smaller laptops I’ve used, the Swift 16 AI’s port selection is refreshingly useful. The left side houses a full-size HDMI port, a USB-A and a pair of USB4-capable Type-C ports, while on the right, you get a headphone jack and a further USB-A.

With more space to work with, the fact that this laptop comes with a nearly full-size keyboard isn’t all that surprising.

The tray fits in a function row, arrow keys and a number pad. The latter is squished on the right-hand side, making it feel like a bit of an afterthought. It’s a tactile keyboard to use for banging out a lot of words at once, although I wasn’t necessarily the biggest fan of the smaller number pad.

It is backlit with a reasonably bright white underglow that aids this laptop’s suitability for after-dark working.

By contrast, the trackpad feels as if it’s on the smaller side for a 16-inch laptop; even the smaller HP Omnibook Ultra Flip 14 has a trackpad that’s almost double the size. It’s still accurate and responsive – I’d have just liked something a bit bigger.

Display and Sound

• Big and brilliant OLED panel
• Virtually perfect colours, blacks and contrast
• Speakers leave a lot to be desired

Where the Swift 16 AI certainly shines for its price tag is with its large, high-res OLED display; this is a 16-inch 2.8K (2880×1800) screen that offers excellent detail across a big area, while also coming with a 120Hz refresh rate for smoother motion.

Being an OLED, we’re getting deep blacks and fantastic contrast for some sublime dynamic range, as measured with my colorimeter – my 0.01 measured black level and 28810:1 contrast ratio prove that to no end.

Colour accuracy is also typically brilliant, with perfect 100% coverage of both sRGB and DCI-P3 spaces, as well as 94% Adobe RGB. This proves the Swift 16 AI’s suitability for both productivity and more colour-sensitive, specialist tasks, such as photo or video editing.

The 394.6 nits of peak SDR brightness I measured make this laptop suitable for both indoor and outdoor working, and lead to a generally punchy panel. Acer also says this panel has DisplayHDR True Black 500 certification for vibrant images and deeper blacks in supported content.

The only downside to this section are the downwards-firing speakers which lack any real substance or extension to them against more premium competitors, or even a more affordable set of dedicated speakers or headphones. You’ll be much better off with those.

Performance

• Solid performance from Core Ultra 5 chip
• Beefier integrated graphics than the competition
• Decent RAM and storage combo

This Swift 16 AI comes with a modest mid-range power station with one of Intel’s Core Ultra 5 226V chips inside. It’s an eight-core (split between 4 Performance and 4 Low Power Efficiency cores) and eight-thread processor that can boost up to 4.5GHz for some reasonably potent performance.

As one of Intel’s newer Core Ultra 200V chips, its single core performance in the likes of Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 sits well with the more powerful chips in the lineup, and therefore against laptops that cost a fair bit more than this does.

With fewer cores and threads than some of the beefier chips in Intel’s lineup of Lunar Lake laptop chips, though, it’s only natural that its potency is reduced in multi-threaded tasks. Make no mistake, it’s still solid for its class, though with some good benchmark scores.

Its high score in the PCMark 10 test also proves its excellent suitability for productivity tasks such as web browsing, word processing and conferencing. That score matches laptops that are a fair bit more expensive than the Swift 16 AI, so I have to commend Acer for that.

This mid-range chip also benefits from Intel’s Arc 130V iGPU for some decent performance from the integrated graphics that puts similarly priced Snapdragon X-powered devices such as the Asus Zenbook A14 into the shade. This makes the Swift 16 AI increasingly suited to more than just productivity tasks, with its beefier integrated graphics helping for more intensive tasks such as video editing and some lighter gaming.

The 16GB of RAM supplied with my sample is enough for some multitasking and more intensive tasks, while the 512GB SSD feels a little stingy when a lot of the competition is moving up to 1TB for even more space. Nonetheless, it’s a reasonably fast SSD too, with measured reads and writes of 4796.17MB/s and 3504.39MB/s respectively.

Software

• Windows 11 installed
• Lots of Acer-specific apps 
• Copilot+ PC functionality is also here

The Swift 16 AI comes running proper Windows 11, although is plagued with some unnecessary apps or shortcuts, such as a taskbar one for Booking.com, oddly. 

There are more Acer-specific apps than anything else, such as Acer Jumpstart, which provides a link to the brand’s website, and AcerSense, which gives you access to check your system’s vitals and change settings around such as power modes and such.

Elsewhere, this is also a Copilot+ PC and has enough AI power to warrant the inclusion of Microsoft’s tools. Chief among these is the addition of the Copilot assistant that you can ask questions and to undertake tasks, if you so wish.

In addition, there is also generative AI functionality baked into the Photos and Paint apps, if you want it. The most useful set of AI tools with the Omnibook X 14 is the Windows Studio effects for the webcam, which provides convenient means of auto framing, background blur and even for making sure you maintain eye contact.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 14 hours 45 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting between one and two working days

From its solid 70Whr capacity cell, Acer is quoting the Swift 16 AI to last for up to 20 hours on a charge, which would firmly put it within the best laptops I’ve tested in recent times. 

In the PCMark10 battery test with brightness at the requisite 150 nits, this big-screen laptop and its efficient Lunar Lake chip posted a respectable 14 hours and 43 minutes. This means you should be able to get easily between one and two working days away from the mains, thanks to a result that’s reasonably competitive against even dearer large-screen models such as the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) and Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360.

It also comes with the seemingly standard-issue 65W USB-C charger, which offered quite brisk charging speeds, taking the Swift 16 AI to 50% from zero in just 38 minutes. A full charge took 95 minutes, which is a decent if unremarkable result.

Should you buy it?