What's one way to charge more than $1,000 for a laptop in this day and age? Slap an "AI" sticker on it. Acer is not the only offender -- looking at you, Microsoft, forcing your Copilot key onto keyboards -- but the company has enthusiastically boarded the bandwagon with the Swift 14 AI AMD (starts at $1,199.99; $1,299.99 as tested), a notebook with a squiggly symbol on the touchpad that lights up when you use an AI app. Artificial hoopla aside, the Swift is a capable ultraportable laptop. However, it fails to unseat the Editors' Choice-award-winning Asus Zenbook 14 OLED Touch (UM3406), which isn't as fast but has a superior screen and costs hundreds less.
Configurations and Design: Covering All the CPU Bases
The Swift 14 AI AMD -- you'll find Intel and Arm versions, too -- starts at $1,199.99 with 16GB of RAM, which is on sale for $999 at the time of publishing. However, this test unit (model SF14-61T-R3U1) doubles the memory for an extra $100. It also carries a 10-core AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 processor with Radeon 880M integrated graphics, a 1TB NVMe solid-state drive, and a 14-inch, 1,920-by-1,200-pixel IPS touch screen.
The system's web page on Acer.com trumpets two non-touch display options with higher 3K resolution -- one IPS with a 120Hz refresh rate and one OLED with 90Hz -- but Acer disappointingly confirms they're not available in the U.S.
On the positive side, the Swift lands right on our ultraportable weight line at 3.0 pounds, compared with 3.47 pounds for the HP OmniBook Ultra 14. Measuring 0.74 by 12.3 by 8.8 inches, it's a fraction trimmer than that laptop as well. Its anodized aluminum chassis has passed MIL-STD 810H tests for sturdiness, but you'll still feel a bit of flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck.
Slim bezels surround the screen, which opens 180 degrees and has a top lip to ease one-handed opening. The 1440p webcam centered above has a sliding privacy shutter and IR face recognition, joining a fingerprint reader embedded in the power button to give you two ways to skip passwords with Windows Hello.
The laptop's left side holds two USB4 Type-C ports, either suitable for the AC adapter, along with an always-on USB 3.2 Type-A port and an HDMI monitor port. Another USB-A port joins an audio jack at the right. Along with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth, this is a satisfactory array of connections. However, I would be happier with USB-C ports on both sides (so the AC adapter cord can't interfere with external mouse users) and an option for mobile broadband.
Using the Acer Swift 14 AI AMD: Ai-Yi-Yi, It's AI
Along with the usual shortcuts for screen brightness, audio volume, and airplane mode, the top row has a key to launch AcerSense, a utility that combines system info and updates, diagnostics, power/cooling settings, and three Windows Store apps. These are LiveArt, which creates AI-filtered stickers from your photos; AlterView, which provides adjustable animated wallpapers; and GIMP, the robust but less consumer-friendly rival to Adobe Photoshop.
A feature called Acer User Sensing taps the IR webcam to log you in when you approach and dim the screen or lock the system when you move away, as well as nagging you to take regular screen breaks and not get too close to the display. Acer QuickPanel pops up during video calls to provide AI-enhanced PurifiedView image and PurifiedVoice audio enhancements. And as always with Acer PCs, you'll see a few bloatware ads for things like the Forge of Empires game.
PurifiedView mostly duplicates Windows Camera's recently added auto framing, background blur, and video fine-tuning for the webcam. The camera captures images that are brighter and sharper than average, with quadruple the resolution of cheapo 720p cams. Sound from the bottom-mounted speakers is moderately loud but somewhat scratchy and hollow; you'll hear little bass, but you can make out overlapping tracks. DTS:X Ultra software offers music, movie, gaming, and other audio presets (my ears couldn't detect much difference) plus an equalizer.
The keyboard commits two common laptop sins: teaming the cursor arrow and Fn keys instead of providing dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys and arranging those arrows in a clumsy row (with half-size up and down stacked between full-size left and right) instead of an inverted T. Its typing feel is decidedly shallow and flat, uncomfortable for long sessions. The sizable, buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly and takes medium pressure for a comfortable click.
I could wish for higher resolution, but the 16:10-aspect-ratio touch screen is sufficiently bright, with clean instead of dingy white backgrounds and broad viewing angles. Its colors don't pop like poster paints but are rich and well-saturated, with decent contrast. The screen's finer details are crisp, and you'll see no pixelation around the edges of letters.
Testing the Acer Swift 14 AI AMD: Near the Head of the Class
You'll find no shortage of other 14-inch ultraportables to compare the Swift AI 14 with -- or wanna-be ultraportables, I should say -- since several edge over our three-pound limit. The Dell XPS 14 and Asus Zenbook S 14 have Intel Core Ultra 7 power. So does our test unit's more costly cousin, the Acer Swift X 14, whose Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 instead of integrated graphics makes it the champion of our GPU benchmarks. The HP OmniBook Ultra 14 has an AMD Ryzen AI 9 processor like our Acer's.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, tests a system in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput.
Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive. Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video editing tool HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image editing prowess with a variety of automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25.
Compared with larger desktop replacement notebooks, the ultraportable performance baseline is usually decent workflow with everyday apps like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace -- say, 4,000 to 5,000 points in PCMark 10's main event. The Swift 14 AI AMD raises the bar, joining HP's OmniBook (which has a slightly higher-rated Ryzen AI chip) in crushing our processing tests. It's certainly suitable for content creation as well as routine productivity.
Graphics Tests
We challenge laptops' graphics with a quartet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. A fifth test, Solar Bay, emphasizes ray-tracing performance.
AMD's integrated graphics were not quite a match for Intel's, which in turn were no match for the Dell's entry-level discrete GPU, let alone the two-steps-higher RTX 4070 inside the Swift X. Most ultraportables are fine for solitaire games and video streaming, not playing the latest fast-twitch titles.
Battery and Display Tests
We test each laptop's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 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.
To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and 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 peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
The Acer AI AMD did about as well as an IPS- rather than OLED-screened slimline can in these tests, combining lengthy battery life and screen brightness with decent color reproduction. However, I still wish Acer would sell the 3K OLED display as an option here in the States.
Verdict: Embrace the Hype?
We have a perhaps stereotypical view of most Acer customers as non-tech-expert consumers rather than power users, so we're not surprised the Swift 14 AI AMD does everything but put a cereal- or detergent-style "Now with AI!" decal on the box. Those looking inside the box, however, will find exceptional processing power and webcam quality. The stiff, flat keyboard dampens the experience, and other 14-inch ultraportables, like the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED Touch, include prettier OLED screens, but this Acer should satisfy many.