The only thing better than this Acer laptop’s OLED screen? Its battery

Given the large footprint, I was surprised how thin and light the Acer Swift 16 AI is. It’s always a balancing act with larger laptops, but Acer threaded the needle fairly well here. The machine is barely half an inch thick, and the entire chassis is aluminum. However, the metal body isn’t very thick. There are places like around the fan grilles where you can see the frame flexing a bit too much, but the build quality is noticeably improved versus the smaller Acer Swift 14 AI.

When closed, the Acer Swift 16 AI looks elegant in an industrial way. The flat black lid is free of branding, save for a small acer logo and the AI “dots” badge in opposite corners. The edge of the machine is flat where the ports are, but it tapers along the rest of the body, making it easy to pick up this sizeable laptop. It’s not too hard to wrestle into a bag, though, weighing in at 3.37 pounds. That’s a bit less than the average 16-inch laptop.

The hinge on this machine feels appropriate for its $1,200 price point. The laptop stays closed securely, but it only takes one hand to open the screen, which swings smoothly into place. There’s a small lip around the camera that helps open the laptop, too.

The rear edge of the display frame has feet that boost the rear of the laptop a few millimeters, giving it a slight incline that makes typing more comfortable. The camera lacks a privacy shutter, which I’d like to see at this price. The 1440p webcam supports Windows Hello biometric login, and the video quality is good but not better than the 1080p cameras on most laptops.

The Acer Swift 16 AI has a good selection of ports, including two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4, as well as two legacy USB-A ports. There’s also a full-sized HDMI port and a headphone jack. I don’t love that both USB-C ports are on the left side, meaning the charging cable has to be on that side. The right side has just one USB-A and the headphone jack.

Acer Swift 16 AI: Display and speakers

IDG / Ryan Whitwam

The Acer Swift 16 AI looks great, but it’s not quite the showstopper it could be. The 2880×1800 resolution is very sharp at normal viewing distances, and the touch response is fast and precise. It also supports an optional 120Hz refresh rate if you want smoother animations at the expense of battery life.

As an OLED, the colors are gorgeous if slightly unrealistic. You can also enable HDR content on this display, but it might not pop quite like you expect. The brightness tops out at 340 nits, which is a bit on the low side for HDR. It is, however, a good bit brighter than the LCDs and IPS screens you normally see at this price. The brightness is good enough for use in all indoor settings, but the highly reflective screen makes outdoor use questionable.

The speakers are on the underside near the front, a common location for speakers on notebooks. They sound good at low and mid volume levels, but there’s distortion and very little bass when you crank it up. They’re very average for a laptop in 2025 in spite of the DTS audio certification.

IDG / Ryan Whitwam

The quality of Acer laptop keyboards varies hugely across its product line. In the case of the Acer Swift 16 AI the typing experience is overall very good. The keys are stable, quiet, and quite tactile. The power button is in the far upper right corner, and despite the lack of any visual identification, it’s also a fingerprint sensor. It’s very accurate but sluggish like all Windows Hello biometrics.

Most of the important keys are a good size, but I don’t care for having the up and down arrows crammed into a single key unit. There is a full number pad on this machine, but it’s quite squished. These keys are only about 75 percent as wide as the alphas, which makes it hard to rely on muscle memory to enter numbers on the pad. It’s still better to have it than not, given the ample surface area of this laptop.

The trackpad doesn’t take full advantage of all that room. It’s a bit on the small side, though it is sturdy and accurate. The overall feel of the trackpad, as well as the click mechanism, are a big step up from the Arm-based Acer Swift 14 AI, which felt quite off to me.

The trackpad has the same light-up AI logo in the corner as the company’s other AI-branded laptops. It blinks when you access AI features. It’s totally unnecessary, but you can turn it off in the Acer settings.

Acer Swift 16 AI: Performance

Acer loads its PCs with more software than most PC vendors—that has the potential to be good, but it’s mostly bad. There’s the McAfee suite, a few settings apps, a photo editor, a collection of third-party games, and several custom AI tools. It will take a bit to clear away the bloatware, but even Acer’s software won’t get much use.

On one hand, I applaud Acer for actually bundling AI tools on its AI laptops. On the other, they don’t work very well. Apps like Acer Assist and VisionArt load an AI model locally to provide a chatbot and background generation, respectively. The model is about 5GB gigabytes in size, so it’ll leave you with very little free memory on this 16GB system.

The model output is also extremely slow, and I wasn’t impressed with the chatbot’s capabilities or the lack of options in the wallpaper app. It’s also odd that these tools don’t use the Lunar Lake chip’s NPU—all the AI work is done on the GPU. Acer says it is planning to improve the on-device models soon, which will include support for running them on the NPU.

The general system performance with the Core Ultra 7 is good. While Intel’s latest chips aren’t ideal for heavily multithreaded applications, the GPU is among the best you’ll see short of a dedicated chip. Thermal performance is also good, but Acer’s default power state is a bit slower than competing machines. When in high-performance mode, the laptop does get noticeably louder. It’s whisper-quiet in Normal mode.

To give you a better idea of how the laptop performs, here are our standard benchmark tests.

IDG / Ryan Whitwam

PCMark 10 is designed to test a machine across a variety of metrics like web browsing, video chat, and photo editing. The Acer Swift 16 AI easily bests Meteor Lake chips here, but its default performance tuning makes it slightly slower than other Lunar Lake-based machines with a score of 6,539. The latest AMD Ryzen chips are also running ahead in this system benchmark.

IDG / Ryan Whitwam

Cinebench is a CPU-focused test that shows how a PC handles heavy but brief multi-core workloads. More CPU cores grant higher scores in Cinebench and cooling doesn’t matter very much. With Intel’s move away from hyperthreading, the Core Ultra 7 doesn’t do as well in this test, bringing up the rear with even the Meteor Lake TravelMate P4 ahead. However, switching to the Acer performance mode boosts the score to about 10,000, which is more in line with competing laptops.

IDG / Ryan Whitwam

The Handbrake test is similar to Cinebench in that it shows how a computer handles multithreaded tasks, but this is a longer-duration test where thermals matter more. While we don’t have any concerns with the laptop’s thermal performance, the eight-core/eight-thread design keeps this machine near the bottom of the heap. Switching to performance mode does shave a few hundred seconds off the encode, but AMD’s AI 300 parts run away with this one.

IDG / Ryan Whitwam

Our main gaming test is 3DMark Time Spy, a graphical benchmark that focuses on GPU performance. This isn’t a gaming computer, but Intel’s latest iGPUs are quite good. Here, the Acer Swift 16 AI is near the top at 3,988, besting even the Ryzen AI 9 with its Radeon GPU. The Acer Swift 16 AI is fast enough to play simple modern games or titles that are a few years old at lower settings.

Acer Swift 16 AI: Battery life

The Acer Swift 16 AI sports a 70Wh battery, which is average for a laptop of this size. It charges over USB-PD via either of the USB-C ports, with a peak speed of 65W. That’s standard for productivity laptops these days. The machine comes with a clunky charger, but we tested more compact third-party options, all of which charged the Acer Swift 16 AI just as well.

IDG / Ryan Whitwam

The Acer Swift 16 AI will last you an entire work day and then some. To quantify that, we ran our standard battery rundown test, which consists of playing a 4K video on a loop at set brightness until the machine dies. The Acer Swift 16 AI lasted 1,053 minutes (about 17.5 hours), which is very competitive. The display was in the default 60Hz mode for this test—switching to 120Hz will reduce battery life.

Acer Swift 16 AI: Conclusion

Like its smaller incarnation, the Acer Swift 16 AI is a competent laptop for all your general computing and productivity needs. Acer is trying as hard as any OEM to justify the AI hype with features like Acer Assist. However, even all this effort does not guarantee a good AI experience. Microsoft’s Copilot+ features are still barely there in Windows 11.

Beyond all the marketing, the Acer Swift 16 AI is fast enough for almost everyone with a Core Ultra 7, but I wish Acer made this laptop in a Core Ultra 9 variant. Even then, the machine’s multithreaded performance would be lacking. If you’re going to be editing video, an AMD-based machine is your best bet right now.

While this laptop shares a lot with the 14-inch Acer AI PC, it looks nicer. The step up to an OLED screen, with its vibrant colors and deep blacks, is appreciated as well. The keyboard is a delight to use, and it’s nice to see a full number pad, even if the keys are a bit cramped.

The $1,200 MSRP feels slightly high for what you get, particularly when machines like the HP Omnibook Ultra regularly sell for around the same price. The Acer Swift 16 AI has dropped below $900 on sale, which is a steal. If you happen to catch it on sale for a few hundred off, this is a great purchase.