Acer Swift Edge 16 Review

Almost no one would call the 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro overweight at 4.8 pounds, but the Acer Swift Edge 16 ($1,499.99 as tested; up to $1,599.99) offers the same size display in just over half the weight—at 2.6 pounds, the Edge qualifies as an ultraportable, weighing less than some laptops with screens 3 inches smaller. While it's not the cheapest slimline you can buy, its handsome OLED display makes it a clear value against rivals like the MacBook Pro or the Dell XPS 15 OLED, especially with the retail discounts often found on Acer notebooks (it's just $999 at Costco as of this writing). Unfortunately, the Swift Edge's performance is underwhelming and its keyboard is downright disappointing, keeping it from the top rank of productivity or content creation laptops.

Swift Edge 16 Configurations and Other Features

You don't have to worry much about finding the right model when shopping for an Acer Swift Edge 16. The laptop basically comes in only one configuration, which includes the OLED screen, an AMD Ryzen 7 6800U processor (CPU), 16GB of LPDDR5 memory (RAM), and a 1TB solid-state drive for $1,499.99. The Acer website lists a model with a slightly faster Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U for $100 more.

While notable in weight, the Acer is a simple slab design-wise. It's not the thinnest around, measuring 0.55 by 14 by 9.5 inches (HWD), but it's certainly competitive thanks to narrow screen bezels all around. With a device this slim and light, sturdiness is a concern. The magnesium alloy chassis gives some structural rigidity to the laptop's base, though you'll definitely feel a bit of flex in the keyboard deck (albeit less than that seen in some larger LG Gram ultralights). The thin lid or display panel is quite flexible, however, and warrants careful treatment.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Packed with pixels (3,840 by 2,400), the 16:10 aspect ratio display is worth protecting. The high pixel count makes for a robust density that all but ensures clarity for even the finest details. The OLED panel carries a DisplayHDR True Black 500 rating, promising peak brightness of more than 500 nits and the pitch blacks and vivid colors of OLED technology. Gamers will be disappointed that the screen's refresh rate is capped at 60Hz (they'll be more disappointed by the AMD Radeon integrated graphics), but it's still a looker.

Beyond the display, the Swift Edge is more or less back to basics. The keyboard is ordinary verging on poor, with the inconsistent wobble and almost domed keycaps I encountered on the budget-priced Acer Aspire 3. This makes typing consistency an issue. The cursor arrow keys, which double as Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down, are packed tightly together. And the power button (which moonlights as a fingerprint reader) is in the top right corner where your fingers expect to find the Delete key—a switcheroo that can make for unfortunate errors. There's two-level white backlighting, but it's not especially pleasing to look at.

Acer provides a 1080p webcam whose images appear reasonably crisp in well-lit rooms, though it doesn't compare with dedicated webcams or smartphones. The camera doesn't offer face recognition for Windows Hello sign-ins, but the fingerprint sensor works quickly.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The Swift Edge 16 has a simple pair of speakers on the bottom at either side. You'll notice a grille above the keyboard that looks like a possible speaker housing, but it's likely just for airflow.

Sixteen-inch laptops are usually desktop replacements rather than ultraportables and have more ports than this Acer. Here you get more ports than something like a MacBook Air, but less than a mainstream notebook or mobile workstation—specifically, two USB 3.2 Type-A ports, one on each side, and two USB4 Type-C ports on the left. Since the AC adapter has a USB-C connector, it's disappointing that Acer didn't put those ports on both sides. The USB4 ports didn't recognize an external Thunderbolt 3 drive that I plugged in.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Other connections include an HDMI monitor port on the left flank and a 3.5mm audio jack on the right. There is no SD or microSD card slot. Wireless links are robust, with Bluetooth 5.2 joined by Wi-Fi 6E.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Using the Swift Edge 16

Because of the slightly shaky keys and domed keycaps, I found it hard to get as comfortable typing on the Edge as I've been on other laptop keyboards. My typing speed didn't break 100 words per minute (wpm) in Monkeytype as it usually does, hitting 96 wpm with 96% accuracy. Text editing is tedious thanks to the small, offset Delete key and the tight cluster of arrow keys. Perhaps worst of all is the tiny left Control key; I found my pinky finger consistently only half-pressing it so the keystroke didn't register. The Swift Edge is nowhere near unusable, but it's definitely slower going than other machines in the category.

The touchpad isn't particularly noteworthy, either. It's of only modest size, not nearly as large as the pad Samsung squeezed into its Galaxy Book3 Pro 360. I had no problems with unusual behavior or weak palm rejection, but the touchpad is average at best.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Acer's display is the real star of the show. The large 16:10 panel provided an excellent 4K view of whatever content I pulled up, from HDR videos to large documents and spreadsheets that benefit from all the screen space. The Swift Edge screen is fantastic for work or video viewing, though as mentioned gamers won't get an edge with its lowest-common-denominator refresh rate.

As high-quality as the OLED screen is, you'll want to pair the laptop with a decent set of headphones, because the speakers are drab. They don't pump out booming or loud audio and they skew heavily toward mids, leaving a lot to be desired in the high end and little noticeable bass.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Acer is famously guilty of installing excess preloaded apps and shortcuts, such as ones for Amazon, Booking.com, Forge of Empires, and Instagram, though we've found such pests increasingly common on all sorts of Windows 11 PCs. The Swift Edge 16 is actually on the better end of the bloatware spectrum, with only a few house-brand utilities.

Testing the Acer Swift Edge 16: A Thin-and-Light That's Light on Power

The Swift Edge 16 targets a premium segment of the laptop market, so for our benchmark comparisons we matched it against the premium Dell XPS 15 OLED, featuring a 12th Generation Intel Core i7-12700H CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti discrete graphics processor (GPU). The Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro 360, now in our review pipeline, boasts a new 13th Gen Intel Core i7-1360P chip. Two other contenders are more affordable, in line with Acer's aggressive pricing: the HP Pavilion Plus 14 is a compelling value that has the same CPU as the Dell XPS 15, while the Lenovo Slim 7i Carbon sports an Intel Core i7-1260P. All these systems also include 16GB of RAM.

Productivity Tests

To establish a baseline for real-world productivity performance, we use UL's PCMark 10 to simulate everyday productivity workflows and assess how well a computer handles office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's boot drive. 

Three additional benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

We finish off with a test for content creation and multimedia applications, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop. It uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor and an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

At PCMag, we consider a 4,000-point score in PCMark 10 a sign that a laptop will excel (no pun intended) in routine office work. It's no surprise that all five of these machines cleared that hurdle, with the Acer landing in the middle of the pack. In the other tests, the Swift Edge 16 lagged behind, never terribly off the pace but never near the front and finishing last more than once. This likely comes down to the limited performance headroom of its AMD Ryzen 7 CPU, which often required the cooling fan to kick in. I tested the Edge alongside the Galaxy Book3 Pro 360, and the Samsung needed to run its fans far less frequently.

Graphics Tests

To check a laptop's graphics performance, we run a pair of DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, the relatively low-intensity Night Raid and more demanding Time Spy. We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

The Swift Edge 16 came through surprisingly well, with its AMD Radeon integrated graphics beating its Intel Iris Xe competition, even edging out the 13th Gen Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 (though that machine ran into some errors in one test). Of course, everything is relative; no integrated graphics platform is a match for a game-worthy dedicated GPU like the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti of the Dell, which nearly doubled the results of its rivals in most of these benchmarks. To be sure, the Acer is considerably lighter than the XPS 15.

Battery and Display Tests

To put a laptop's battery to the test, we play a locally stored 720p video (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with the system's display brightness set to 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and 100% brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

While the Swift Edge 16 left something to be desired in performance, it gained back some respect for its battery life, with an 11-hour runtime topping the Pavilion Plus 14 and the Slim 7i Carbon (despite the Lenovo's screen being much dimmer when set to 50% than the Acer's). It's impressive to see a laptop with a 16-inch, high-resolution OLED display last that long, though the Samsung took the cake, lasting almost 17 hours with a comparably bright and colorful OLED screen. The Dell also did well, even though dedicated GPUs tend to hurt laptop battery life.

As far as display quality, the Lenovo's IPS panel predictably fell short of the dazzling OLED displays of the others. The HP won points for the best color coverage at the lowest price. Brightness levels were also respectable across all machines; OLED panels' sky-high contrast means we're satisfied with a bit less than the 400 nits we consider desirable for IPS screens.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Verdict: A Real Lightweight

The Acer Swift Edge 16 is a thin and light marvel, but it's not a perfect machine. Its performance is only middling, while its keyboard, touchpad, and speakers are frankly letdowns for the price. Still, the laptop's screen and light weight are remarkable, so if portability is a priority it may prove a decent value (especially if you can get it for less than the list price). However, too many other laptops are competitive in pricing, performance, and similar display chops—particularly the HP Pavilion Plus 14 and the Dell XPS 15 OLED—the for this Acer to approach Editors' Choice honors.