The Acer Swift 14 AI Is Powerful, but Loud and Ugly

First impressions

At first glance, the Swift 14 AI is exactly what you'd expect from a new ultraportable. It's slim, light, and silver all over, weighing in at 3.0 pounds and measuring 12.3 x 8.8 x 0.74 inches. There's nothing remarkable about the chassis on first examination, though I was happy to see that it comes packed in an eco-friendly box.

Credit: Alan Bradley

But while the exterior is unremarkable, the interior is genuinely disappointing. Flip open the lid and you'll immediately notice the cheap-looking plastic bezel surrounding the display, oversized camera strip along the top, and the bizarre AI indicator logo on the trackpad, which lights up when certain AI features are active. I understand that AI features are at the center of the marketing for the Swift 14, but this feels like overkill, and is a net negative aesthetically.

The keyboard is also something of a letdown. The way it's centered above a large trackpad with empty space to either side feels a bit cramped, even for an ultraportable, and the keys themselves lack much in the way of tactile feedback. It's just not a particularly comfortable layout if you're going to be working for any length of time. On the upside, that camera strip on the top bezel houses a high-quality, 1440p webcam, a delight for WFH-types that take a lot of calls and virtual meetings.

AI features, or the lack thereof

There's an emerging (and wholly unsurprising) trend in laptop marketing, especially in the ultraportable space, of pushing AI as a core feature. As the name suggests, the Swift 14 AI is wholly embracing that trend, but unfortunately, the feature set doesn't live up to the marketing.

Like other Copilot+ PCs, this laptop comes with all the common Windows AI features that are available on nearly any PC with a competent CPU/GPU/NPU these days. This means you'll be able to opt into Recall, which captures activity on your PC as you use it and allows you to jump back in time to see what you were doing on prior sessions, as well as other features like Image Creator (previously Cocreator in Paint), which utilizes AI to transform text prompts into images in conjunction with your own art.

But there's also Acer-specific AI functions, many of which live in AcerSense, a settings and diagnostic suite which has its own dedicated key in the upper right part of the keyboard. Prominently, there's PurifiedView and PurifiedVoice, which add AI-enhancements to video and audio during calls or recordings. These include things like noise reduction and automatically framing the camera on you, though many of them mimic existing Windows features.

AcerSense also links out to Acer Assist, which is a local AI chatbot that doesn't require an internet connection, though bizarrely, it's not preinstalled and instead requires you to download it from the Microsoft Store. Of course, without an internet connection, its utility is mostly limited to local tasks like configuring the laptop, though it does have a limited knowledge database for more general queries.

There's also Acer User Sensing, which largely apes a lot of the features included with Windows Hello and Windows Presence Sensing. It can log you in when you get close to the laptop or automatically lock the laptop when you're out of sight, for instance, though it does have a few interesting wrinkles of its own. Multi-screen assistance will follow your head movement to gauge which screen you're looking at, and position the mouse cursor accordingly. It's about as janky as it sounds, though it largely works as advertised; it's just odd for me to have cursor movement tied to anything other than direct mouse input.

The overall sense of the AI features available in the Swift are that they're either novelties, half-baked, or both. Some of them provide a small amount of utility, but none of them qualify as the kind of headlining feature that justify including "AI" in the name of your laptop.

A touchscreen display, for better or worse

The Swift 14 AI is built around an HDR enabled, 1,920 x 1,200 IPS touchscreen display rated for 450 nits of brightness, topping out at a 60Hz refresh rate. While that resolution is suitable for a 14-inch display, it's far from the most vibrant screen in an ultraportable, but it does have touch input. Personally, I would've happily traded the touchscreen functionality for a more attractive screen, especially one that isn't surrounded by an unappealing black plastic bezel, which alongside the panel, gives the entire machine a slightly less-than-premium feel.

According to Acer's promotional site for the Swift 14 AI, there are SKUs that include either 3K, 120Hz IPS displays or 3K OLED panels at 90Hz. Unfortunately, the company doesn't sell either of those variants in the US. As someone who typically only uses touchscreens with tablets or smartphones, I would've gladly taken the higher-res, faster-refreshing OLED option in lieu of this not-quite 2K option.

High marks for productivity

I put the Swift 14 AI through its paces in a series of CPU benchmarks, primarily Geekbench 6 and Cinebench, which measure both single-core and multi-core performance. Powered by that AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 chip and a generous 32GB of RAM, it scored well against similar ultraportable PC laptops. In fact, it even managed to hold its own against the current king of the ultraportable hill, namely Apple's MacBook Air.

Credit: Alan Bradley

In Geekbench 6, the Swift 14 scored a 14,356 in multi-core performance and 2,832 on single-core tests. For context, that multi-core performance is nearly 4,000 points higher than the competing Asus Zenbook S14's performance (10,730), more than 3,000 points higher than MSI's AI-focused ultraportable (the 13 AI+ EVO, at 11,135), and even edges out the impressive HP OmniBook Ultra 14 (14,267). However, it falls slightly short of the MacBook Air and it's mighty M4 chip, which clocks in at 15,048 points. Single-core performance in Geekbench 6 follows the same trend, with the Swift trouncing the Zenbook and EVO, narrowly defeating the OmniBook, and falling again to the MacBook Air.

Cinebench results were similarly impressive. This benchmark measures CPU (and to a lesser extent GPU) performance by simulating 3D tasks, and the Swift 14 delivered reasonable marks of 897 in multi-core testing and 114 in single-core tests. By comparison, the Qualcomm Snapdragon X powered Asus Zenbook A14 only racked up a 98 in single-core tests and a 447 in multi-core ones. Even the MacBook Air technically performed just slightly worse than the Swift here, with Lifehacker sister site PCMag getting a 168 single-core score and an 849 multi-core score in its tests.

The Swift shone once again while encoding a 4K video to 1080p at 30 FPS. It was able to convert the 12-minute video in a remarkable 4:19, beating the Omnibook's second best time of 4:25 and even besting the MacBook Air, which finished right around the five minute mark. This is more high praise for AMD's processor, as encoding at this level puts a heavy, sustained load on the CPU.

Speaking of loading the CPU, one major downside emerged during productivity testing, both while running benchmarks and in more normal usage. The Swift runs hot, and aggressive fans kick on frequently to compensate. Even during fairly light use, the fans would start blasting at a distractingly loud volume, shunting air out of the big vent on the rear bottom of the machine.

Credit: Alan Bradley

Gaming results you'd expect from an ultraportable

Clearly, no one's buying the Swift 14 AI to use as a gaming laptop, and benchmarks bore out that preconception. That said, it delivered reasonable performance in heavyweight titles and should easily be able to handle less taxing or older games at its native resolution.

I threw the benchmark for Assassin's Creed: Shadows at the Swift, and it was barely able to eke out a 29 FPS average on low settings at the full 1,920 x 1,200 resolution. That said, if you absolutely must sneak in an hour or two of AC: Shadows or other demanding AAA games, a frame rate hovering around 30 is playable (if not ideal).

Results were buoyed a bit by the benchmark for another recent AAA title, namely Black Myth: Wukong. Even on medium settings at 1,920 x 1,200, the Swift was able to manage an average of 36 FPS. Not silky smooth by any stretch of the imagination, and there were some significant dips, but very reasonable for an ultraportable. There's also a generous 1TB SSD, so you'll have the space to stash multiple games at once.

A durable battery

The Swift delivers on its promised power efficiency. In standard testing (a balanced power setting, energy saving and screen dimming disabled, continually streaming Youtube), the Swift survived for 21 hours and 34 minutes on the first rundown and just over 22 hours the second time around. If you're looking for a machine that can easily endure an eight-hour workday of moderate productivity, the Swift 14 is a strong option.

Premium pricing struggling for justification