Acer Readies One of the First Laptops to Support Wi-Fi 7

If you’re an early adopter of Wi-Fi 7, Acer is preparing to launch one of the first laptops that’ll support the new wireless technology. 

The PC maker today announced a refreshed Acer Swift Edge 16 laptop, codename SFE16-43, that’s designed to support Wi-Fi 7, which promises to theoretically hit speeds of up to 40Gbps. 

However, the Swift Edge 16 will only offer speeds up to 5.8Gbps with low latency at 2 milliseconds. The disparity is because the tech industry is still finalizing the Wi-Fi 7 standard and developing the components to support it. Still, Acer’s new laptop should provide a huge speed boost when compared to real-world tests using Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6E, which can hit around 1Gbps or higher, depending on the conditions. 

(Credit: Acer)

But if you buy the Acer laptop, you’ll need to invest in a Wi-Fi 7 router and subscribe to a home internet plan that can reach at least 5Gbps. The Swift Edge 16 is slated to go on sale in North America in July starting at $1,299. 

The other standout feature of the Swift Edge 16 is that it comes with AMD’s newly announced Ryzen 7040 U series processors, which are designed to take on Intel's “Raptor Lake” and Apple's M2 chips.

The 16-inch Windows 11 laptop from Acer also includes a 3,200-by-2,000-pixel OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate. For graphics, it'll rely on either an AMD Radeon 780M or 760M GPU.

(Credit: Acer)

Acer designed the Swift Edge 16 to be thin and light, weighing only 2.73 pounds. The hardware has also been encased in a magnesium alloy chassis. Other features include a 1440p web camera, a microSD card reader, two USB4 ports, and a fingerprint reader on the power button. Full specs can be found below.  

Users can expect up to 8.5 hours of battery life over the Swift Edge 16. Stay tuned for our review. Surprisingly, the refreshed product arrives only a few months after Acer released an earlier version of the Swift Edge 16 that contains an older AMD chip, along with a 3,840-by-2,400-pixel screen. So we’re curious to see the differences.

(Credit: Acer)