Acer Swift Go 16 Review

Acer came in hot with the Swift Go 14, and now laptop shoppers who want something a bit bigger can step up to the Acer Swift Go 16 (starts at $799.99; $1,199.99 as tested). The larger model hits the same notes we loved in the original, with solid productivity performance and a high-res OLED display that can't be beat for the price. It gives the LG Gram Pro 17 and the Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 a run for the money by undercutting them in price significantly. Unfortunately, the desktop replacement also has the same flaws we noted in the Swift Go 14, notably a clumsy keyboard that will drive writers crazy. Still, it's well worth a look.

A Simple But Effective Design

Like many of Acer's recent notebooks, the Swift Go 16 is a simple metal slab. It's dull to look at, with large swaths of flat aluminum stretching across almost every surface. But while it looks plain as potatoes, impressive quality hides below the surface.

To begin with, the chassis feels particularly sturdy, though it's relatively light for a 16-inch laptop at 3.64 pounds. Even though it's fairly thin for a full-size notebook, the lower frame doesn't flex much under pressure. The lid and screen only flex a little when twisted.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Acer finds room for a decent array of ports. The Swift Go's right side offers a USB 3.2 Type-A port, a microSD card reader, an audio jack, and a Kensington security lock slot. The left flank puts forward a second USB-A port, an HDMI 2.1 monitor port, and two Thunderbolt 4/USB4 ports. The latter also accommodate the AC adapter's USB-C connector, which makes it somewhat unfortunate that they're both on the same side.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The spacious 16-inch display with 16:10 aspect ratio is the Acer's main attraction. The surrounding bezels aren't record-breakingly thin, but they easily fade out of view. Base models have a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel IPS panel with 60Hz refresh rate, but our top-of-the-line Swift Go 16 boasts a 3,200-by-2,000-pixel OLED screen with 120Hz refresh.

Fitting that screen requires a bit of space, but Acer manages to keep things pretty trim. The company says the Swift Go 16 measures 0.59 by 14 by 9.6 inches, though I measured its thickness at 0.75 inch with digital calipers. The Dell Inspiron 16 Plus is a near match at 0.75 by 14 by 9.9 inches but a portly 4.5 pounds, while Samsung's Galaxy Book3 Pro 360, a 16-inch convertible, is 0.5 by 14 by 9.9 inches and 3.6 pounds.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

While we've been impressed by recent Acer laptops, the company's keyboards remain a sour point. From its cheap to premium models, the company often uses the same keyboard style with slightly wiggly, convex keycaps, as well as opting for a common but no less annoying layout of the cursor arrow keys in a row (with half-size up and down arrows) instead of an inverted T. While the inclusion of a numeric keypad is a plus, the Swift Go 16's squeezes in tightly, with narrow keycaps and its math-operation keys slotted in above the numbers.

Acer is, however, making a push for some better features, including a webcam that offers 1440p resolution instead of the lowball 720p that many laptops settle for (or the 1080p that more premium models often offer). Its images look sharp and hold up well even in sub-optimal lighting conditions. The camera doesn't support Windows Hello face recognition, but a fingerprint scanner built into the power button at the top right of the keyboard lets you log in without typing passwords. The Swift Go 16 also wins points for capable wireless connectivity, with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

You'll find a pair of stereo speakers on the bottom of the laptop near the front corners. They're nothing to write home about, however; the audio might have been better if Acer had used some of the ample space around the keyboard for upward-firing speakers instead.

As mentioned, the Swift Go 16 starts at $799.99 on Acer's website. That configuration nets you a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel non-touch display, an Intel Core i5-1335U processor, 8GB of memory, a 512GB solid-state drive, and Windows 11 Home. Oddly, the website lists two $1,199.99 models, each with a Core i7-13700H CPU, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and the 3,200-by-2,000-pixel OLED panel. Ostensibly, one has the microSD card slot and the other doesn't, though Acer sent us the one that doesn't and it most certainly did.

Using the Acer Swift Go 16

The big Acer is largely pleasant to use, though the flimsy-feeling keyboard makes it hard to find comfortable finger placement at any given moment. I've adapted somewhat to Acer keyboards after testing several of the company's laptops, so I managed 110 words per minute with 97% accuracy in Monkeytype(Opens in a new window), but editing is tedious because of how often I have to shift my hands around the keyboard to try to keep my fingers on the correct keys. The small cursor arrows, the tiny Delete key, and the tightly spaced number pad slow me down. Basic backlighting keeps the keyboard usable at night.

On a happier note, the touchpad is plenty spacious, though it doesn't take up as much space as it could. I almost never ran into issues of it picking up my palm when typing, and it defaults to registering taps as simple left-clicks, only registering a right-click from a two-finger tap or full press near the right edge. This might seem minor, but since its placement puts my right hand centered over the right half of the touchpad, I generally start mousing around in that area. As a result, many of my taps might have registered as right-clicks if Acer hadn't been smart about this detail.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The display is the true star on this model, with the OLED panel offering sky-high contrast and vibrant, immaculate color about as good as you can find on an affordable laptop. Its 120Hz refresh rate keeps motion exceptionally smooth, which is a nice step up from the 60Hz OLED screen of the Acer Swift Edge 16. The high resolution is a good match for the large size, displaying plenty of information in crisp fashion. The screen is even bright enough for outdoor use, though the glossy panel will require some careful positioning to avoid glare.

Like the Swift Go 14's, the 16's speakers are not a winning aspect; they don't pump out much volume and have almost zero bass. They'll do for listening to conference calls or presentations in a quiet room, but they'll be lost for music or movie streaming.

Acer hasn't bogged the system down with much extraneous software apart from the usual preloads of Windows 11 Home, Killer Intelligence Center for Wi-Fi management, and Acer Care Center for system info and driver updates. The provided DTS Audio Processing software is essential if you want the onboard speakers to produce sound that isn't incredibly weak.

Testing the Swift Go 16: Big-Screen Battleground

The Acer Swift Go 16 isn't the only snazzy-looking 16-inch laptop with a svelte design that makes the machine feel a bit smaller than it really is. The Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 convertible stands out, with a spiffy AMOLED display and elegant styling, though it costs more ($1,899.99 as tested). The LG Gram Pro 17 is also more expensive ($1,999.99 as tested) but goes even bigger on the display while undercutting the Acer's weight at 3.2 pounds. Like the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus ($1,699.99), it also offers superior gaming chops, with an Nvidia GeForce RTX discrete GPU instead of the Intel processor's integrated graphics.

The last slot in our benchmark chart went to another 16-inch convertible, the Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 Gen 8, which is hefty at 4.5 pounds and limited to a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel display but comes in under the Swift Go 16's price—our review unit was $999.99.

Productivity Tests

We analyze laptops' real-world performance using UL's PCMark 10, which simulates office, online, and creative workflows to assess a system's potential for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also check out the storage using PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's boot drive.

The CPU is singled out in a series of three benchmarks that use 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 Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro 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). Like some other recent systems, the Swift Go 16 balked at running our usual creative and multimedia benchmark, Puget Systems' automated PugetBench extension for Adobe Photoshop.

All these laptops sailed through PCMark 10's productivity benchmark, proving amply qualified if not overkill for everyday apps like Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The Acer and Dell led the way in our CPU tests, offering serious processing power for jobs like video editing (a great match for the Swift Go's dazzling display).

The Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 took the gold medal in PCMark 10's storage test, which is no surprise given that Samsung makes some of the best SSDs on the market. The Inspiron 16 Plus was an underachiever in the benchmark.

Graphics Tests

To assess how well Windows PCs will handle graphically demanding tasks, we run four gaming simulations. Two are DirectX 12 exercises from UL's 3DMark, the relatively low-intensity Night Raid (suited for laptops with integrated graphics) and the tougher Time Spy (a good test for dedicated GPUs). Two are OpenGL benchmarks from the cross-platform test 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 are rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

In a completely unsurprising finish, the LG Gram Pro 17 and Dell Inspiron 16 Plus, with their Nvidia discrete GPUs, raced ahead of the three laptops with integrated graphics. The Dell dominated thanks to its faster GeForce RTX 3050 Ti versus vanilla RTX 3050 silicon. That left the Swift Go 16 (which crashed in GFXBench's Aztec Ruins subtest) in the middle of the pack. It's not a machine you'll want to game on, apart from cloud or casual gaming, or use for workstation-class visual applications, but it's fine for mainstream productivity and media streaming.

Battery and Display Tests

We test laptops' battery life by fully charging the system, turning off Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting, and then running a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with screen brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits.

We also analyze the display using a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and 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 brightness in nits (candelas per square meter) at Windows' 50% and 100% settings.

There's no sugarcoating the bad news—the Swift Go 16 has the shortest battery life in this group by a mile, falling nearly six hours shy of the next contender in this lot, with an unplugged runtime just under 10 hours. Real-world use with the display at half brightness and the 120Hz refresh rate enabled comes closer to six hours.

That's not a deal-breaker, however, because desktop-replacement laptops spend most of their time plugged in instead of sitting on airline tray tables, and because the Acer combines a beefy CPU with a downright dazzling display. OLED screens often bring a tradeoff in battery life, but their gorgeous colors and contrast are almost always worth the tradeoff for creative users who don't need to roam far from AC outlets. The Swift Go 16's screen is phenomenal for an affordable, non-workstation consumer laptop, offering exceptional color coverage and accuracy: I measured an average color dE of 0.9 and a max of 1.77 at peak brightness, and the panel almost perfectly followed a 2.2 Gamma cuve. Its SDR and HDR performance was also great, hitting a 404-nit peak in SDR and a 637-nit peak highlight for a 10% window.

The Acer's only real challenger in this group was the 120Hz AMOLED panel of the Samsung, which has wider bezels and contentious rounded corners but woos creative users with touch capability and stylus input. The LG put up impressive numbers for an IPS panel, while the Yoga 7i 16 showed its economy-model status with low pixel density, low brightness, and meager color coverage. Indeed, the Lenovo probably won our battery rundown precisely because of how dim its screen is at half brightness.

Verdict: A Wonder for the Eyes

The Acer Swift Go 16 isn't a perfect desktop replacement, but it boasts great productivity performance for the price and a simply splendid high-res OLED display. Its good build quality is the icing on the cake. The laptop's main flaw is a clumsy, disappointing keyboard, but it's not the worst I've ever used, and connecting an external keyboard for long typing sessions is a fair tradeoff to get everything else the Swift Go 16 delivers.