Acer Swift 16 AI Review: The Perfect Midrange Entertainment Laptop but for 1 Flaw

7.5/ 10
SCORE

Acer Swift 16 AI

Pros

OLED display is big, bright, vivid and crisp
Thin and light for its size
Good balance of performance and battery life

Cons

Terrible audio output
Narrow number pad probably not all that useful
AI logo on touchpad is gimmicky

With a roomy OLED display powered by the latest Intel silicon, the Acer Swift 16 AI is a great midpriced 16-inch Copilot Plus PC laptop. It weighs less than 3.5 pounds and is barely more than half an inch thick, making it very portable for its size — it’s one of the few 16-inch laptops I wouldn’t mind commuting with on a daily basis. The Intel Lunar Lake CPU offers a nice balance of good overall performance and long battery life, giving this machine even greater appeal as a big-screen laptop that doesn’t need to stay anchored to a desk or near a power outlet. And you get all this for the reasonable price of $1,200.

Where the Swift 16 AI falls short is with 3D graphics performance and audio output. The Intel Arc 140V graphics offer decent muscle for an integrated GPU, but graphics pros eyeing the 16-inch OLED display for content creation will probably want to spend more for a model such as the Acer Swift X 16 or HP Spectre x360 16 that features dedicated Nvidia RTX graphics.

Considering the Swift 16 AI’s price, it’s understandable to find an integrated GPU. But what I wish Acer had included is a quad-speaker setup. That isn’t too much to ask from a $1,200 laptop. And after listening to the terrible output of the Swift 16 AI’s stereo speakers, I’m practically begging for two more speakers for fuller sound. The meager audio ruins the Swift 16 AI’s appeal as an entertainment laptop, which is too bad, because the OLED display is gorgeous for watching shows and movies when you aren’t using it for school or work tasks.

Acer Swift 16 AI (SF16-51T)

Price as reviewed	$1,200
Display size/resolution	16-inch 2,880×1,800 OLED touch, 120Hz refresh rate
CPU	Intel Core Ultra 256V
Memory	16GB LPDDR5-8533
Graphics	Intel Arc 140V
Storage	1TB SSD
Ports	USB-C Thunderbolt 4 (x2), USB-A 3.2 (x2), HDMI 2.1, combo audio
Networking	Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4
Operating system	Windows 11 Home
Weight	3.4 pounds (1.5 kilograms)

There’s one model (SF16-51T) in the Acer Swift 16 AI series. It’s available at Best Buy for $1,200 and features a Core Ultra 256V CPU from Intel’s Lunar Lake family along with 16GB of RAM, integrated Intel Arc 140V graphics and a 1TB SSD. The 16-inch display is an OLED panel with a 2,880×1,800-pixel resolution, 120Hz refresh rate and touch support. The thin-and-light design and modern Intel Core Ultra processor qualify it as a Copilot Plus PC.

There’s also the 14-inch Acer Swift 14 AI, which I also reviewed and found to have disappointing speakers.

For our international readers, there are two models of the Swift 16 AI, at £1,200 and £1,500 in the UK. The Swift 16 AI wasn’t available in Australia at the time of this review, but two 14-inch versions are for sale, starting at AU$2,199.

Acer Swift 16 AI Intel stickers — Matt Elliott/CNET

Acer Swift 16 AI performance

The Swift 16 AI’s Core Ultra 256V processor is a member of Intel’s second-gen Core Ultra family of AI chips developed under the name Lunar Lake. To underscore the CPU’s AI capabilities, Acer went ahead and slapped an “AI” suffix to the laptop’s name, in case you aren’t familiar with Microsoft’s Copilot Plus branding that’s meant to signify a laptop’s ability for local AI processing. And with the Core Ultra 256V’s neural processing unit (NPU) capable of 47 trillion operations per second (TOPS), it’s comfortably above Microsoft’s threshold of 40 TOPS to be labeled as a Copilot Plus PC.

In addition to having a modern NPU to process AI tasks locally to free up CPU and GPU resources, the Core Ultra 256V features eight CPU cores — four performance cores and four efficiency cores. Notably, the Core Ultra 256V lacks Intel’s hyperthreading, meaning you have a total of eight processing threads with the Core Ultra 256V — the same number as the physical cores, and not more. This design choice is meant to make the CPU more efficient, balancing power demands with battery life.

And the Swift 16 AI’s performance can be best described as “balanced.” It did well on our application benchmarks, but its multi-core scores were certainly not as good as its single-core performance, because of its lack of hyperthreading.

With integrated Intel Arc 140V graphics, the Swift 16 AI performed well on the 3DMark Time Spy test, outpacing a pair of laptops with AMD’s integrated Radeon GPU. Still, its score was roughly half that of the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus 7640, which features an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060. You can ignore the performance of Acer’s Snapdragon X-based Swift Go 14 AI on this test because it must run it through emulation since there isn’t a version of the test that runs natively on Arm.

On Procyon’s AI Computer Vision benchmark that measures integer math proficiency for AI workloads, the Swift 16 AI was right in the mix alongside two laptops with the similar Core Ultra 258V chip and models based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processor. More informative than an illuminated logo on the touchpad (more on that later) of the laptop’s ability for local AI processing is looking at its Procyon AI Computer Vision score against that of a laptop with a first-gen Intel Core Ultra processor. We’ve started using this test only recently and have limited numbers for it, but we did run it on the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra, which has a Core Ultra 9 185H CPU. The Swift 16 AI’s score is more than three times higher than the Galaxy Book 4 Ultra’s, showing a large jump in local AI acceleration in one generation of Intel’s mobile chips.

The Swift 16 AI doesn’t offer the extreme runtime of either the Swift 14 AI or Swift Go 14 AI, each of which ran for more than 20 hours on our online streaming battery drain test. But those models feature smaller, lower-resolution IPS displays that consume fewer battery resources than a large, high-res OLED panel. For a 16-inch OLED laptop, the Swift 16 AI delivers great battery life. It ran for 12 hours, 20 minutes on our battery test, making it among the few 16-inch laptops we’ve tested with all-day battery life.

Acer Swift 16 AI turned to show aluminum top cover — Matt Elliott/CNET

Thin-and-light 16-inch laptop

The Swift 16 AI has a streamlined look. The all-aluminum enclosure is all black and very thin and light. I like the simple, straightforward design, and I love the unusual portability it provides for its size. At 3.4 pounds, it’s much lighter than most 16-inch models. The HP Envy x360 16 is one of the few other 16-inch laptops that weigh less than 4 pounds — and it barely comes in under that at 3.9 pounds. Moving up in weight is the HP Spectre x360 16 at 4.3 pounds, the Apple MacBook Pro 16 at 4.8 pounds and the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus 7640 at 4.9 pounds.

The laptop is also incredibly thin, measuring just 0.6-inch thick. And yet the Swift 16 AI doesn’t fall into the thin-laptop trap of feeling flimsy. The aluminum chassis is rigid with only a minor amount of flex.

Acer Swift 16 AI touchpad with AI activity indicator — Matt Elliott/CNET

The only design flourish you’ll find on the Swift 16 AI are two vague AI logos — one in the corner of the top cover and the other on the touchpad. The painted logo on the touchpad is what Acer calls an “AI Activity Indicator.” It illuminates in a short pattern when the NPU is engaged with AI tasks — as a clumsy reminder that you’re using a modern laptop equipped with a modern AI processor. I’d rather not have this distraction right in front of me on the laptop, and thankfully you can disable the lighting effect in the AcerSense app.

Not surprisingly on such a thin laptop, the keys have little travel. However, the keyboard doesn’t feel mushy, with firm, springy feedback. And they are very quiet when pressed. Overall, I really enjoyed the typing experience on the Swift 16 AI. But if I could change one thing about it, I’d lose the number pad. It has narrow keys and feels wedged in. I’m not even sure number jockeys would enjoy using it, since the keys are so tightly packed together. The presence of the numpad doesn’t result in a shortened keys on the rest of the keyboard, though the up- and down-arrow keys are only half-height. Perhaps if Acer got rid of the numpad, it would leave room for upward-firing speakers to be added on either side of the keyboard.

Acer Swift 16 AI keyboard with numpad — Matt Elliott/CNET

The only speakers found on the Swift 16 AI are a pair of underpowered, downward-firing speakers. Their sound is underwhelming even for a set of standard laptop speakers. Music playback is definitely off the table — you’ll need to use headphones or an external speaker or enjoy the silence — and the sound is so bad that it detracts from enjoying movies and shows that look great on the big OLED panel. A quad-speaker array ought to be paired with such a great display. It costs more, but the HP Spectre x360 16 is the superior entertainment laptop, with its 16-inch OLED display and quad speakers.

The Swift 16 AI’s display is big, fast and crisp. It’s a 16-inch, 16:10 OLED panel with a smooth 120Hz refresh rate and 2,880×1,800-pixel resolution. (What some vendors call 2.8K, Acer rounds up, and the company refers to the display as having a 3K resolution.) Text and images look incredible, to the point that I wouldn’t want to pay the battery-life penalty for an even higher-res 4K display. Colors look bright and vivid, and as you can expect from an OLED, the contrast is stellar, with deep black levels. One nitpick: The screen finish is pretty glossy, and I found myself battling some reflections on occasion.

16-inch OLED display on the Acer Swift 16 AI — Matt Elliott/CNET

On my display tests with a Spyder X Elite colorimeter, the Swift 16 AI excelled. It covered 100% of the sRGB and P3 spaces and 93% of AdobeRGB. I measured a peak brightness of 405 nits, which is quite bright for a laptop OLED panel. All in all, the display is fantastic, especially for the price.

The 1440p webcam produces a clean, well-balanced picture. You get some but not all of the Windows Studio Effects. Given that the laptop has the latest Intel AI processor, I expected to have access to all of these AI-assisted effects — you get the automatic framing, eye contact and background effects, but not portrait light or creative filters. The camera has an IR sensor for using facial recognition for Windows Hello logins, and the power button also doubles as a fingerprint reader to add a second secure biometric login option.

Ports on left side of the Acer Swift 16 AI include two Thunderbolt 4 — Matt Elliott/CNET

The external connections cover the basics, with two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 and two USB-A ports, and an HDMI port. An SD card slot didn’t make the cut, which might be disappointing for people looking to use the Swift 16 AI for some light content creation.

Is the Acer Swift 16 AI a good laptop?

The Swift 16 is overqualified as a productivity machine and lacking as an entertainment laptop due mainly to its subpar speakers (though the integrated graphics mean it’s not an option for high-performance gaming, either). It’s best for people looking for a big-screen OLED laptop who don’t want to sacrifice portability or affordability. If you’re shopping for a 16-inch entertainment laptop, I’d point you toward the pricier HP Spectre x360 16, which delivers on both sides of the AV equation, with much better audio output from its quad speakers to go with its great 16-inch OLED display.

The review process for laptops, desktops, tablets and other computerlike devices consists of two parts: performance testing under controlled conditions in the CNET Labs and extensive hands-on use by our expert reviewers. This includes evaluating a device’s aesthetics, ergonomics and features. A final review verdict is a combination of both objective and subjective judgments.

The list of benchmarking software we use changes over time as the devices we test evolve. The most important core tests we’re currently running on every compatible computer include Primate Labs Geekbench 6, Cinebench R23, PCMark 10 and 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra.

A more detailed description of each benchmark and how we use it can be found on our How We Test Computers page.

Geekbench 6 CPU (multi-core)

Dell Inspiron 16 Plus 7640 12388Acer Swift Go 14 AI (SFG14-01-X006) 11490HP Spectre x360 16 11459Acer Swift 16 AI (SF16-51T) 10993HP Envy x360 16 10941Acer Swift 14 AI (SF14-51T-75AF) 10918Lenovo Yoga 7 16 9507