Today’s Best Prices: Acer Swift 5 (2022)

$1,499.99

Can a lousy touchpad ruin what is a well-rounded laptop? That’s the big question with the Acer Swift 5, a 14-inch ultraportable with a slim design and high-quality display, modern components powered at the same time. Unfortunately, the touchpad is undersized with a terrible click mechanism that sours the market.

That said, touchpad aside, the Swift 5 has a lot going for it. It packs in a 14-inch display with a high 16:10 ratio inside a slim, all-metal enclosure and weighs less than three pounds. Inside, the system has a 12th-gen Intel Core i7 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and a large 1TB SSD. The laptop provides the strong performance and long battery life that business agents need as well as the high style and portability they want. That’s a touchpad, though.

Specifications

Our Acer Swift 5 test system (model SF514-56T-797T) retails for $1,499.99 direct from Acer and has the following specifications:

• CPU: Intel Core i7-1260P
• Memory: 16GB
• Graphics: Intel Iris Xe
• Storage: 1TB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD
• Display: 14-inch, 2560 × 1600 IPS touch
• Web camera: 1080p
• Connectivity: 2 x USB-C with Thunderbolt 4, 2 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, HDMI 2.1, combo audio jack.
• Networking: Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2
• Biometrics: Fingerprint reader
• Battery capacity: 59.5 Watt-hours
• Dimensions: 12.2 x 8.4 x 0.59 inches
• Measured weight: 2.8 pounds (laptop), 0.4 pounds (AC adapter)
• Price: $1,499.99

High display, terrible touchpad

In addition to the move to 12th-gen Intel Core processors, this updated Swift 5 model also expands the 14-inch display. It’s still a 14-inch panel like previous models, but it trades the widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio for a 16:10 screen. This may not seem like a big deal, but it makes the 14-inch display feel roomier because you have more room from top to bottom. The larger display means you can read more lines of a web page or document or see more rows in an Excel sheet without scrolling.

GIR / Matthew Elliott

Along with the new aspect ratio comes a jump in resolution. Previous versions provided standard full HD resolution, but this new Swift 5 has a resolution of 2560 x 1600 which results in an extremely sharp picture. It is also very bright. Acer rates the panel at 425 nits, and my test showed more brightness than that at just over 500 nits. While the Swift 5 isn’t a 2-in-1 convertible, the display does have touch support, which you might appreciate after using the touchpad.

Okay, let’s talk about the touchpad. For starters, it feels a little cramped. Due to the compact design of the laptop, Acer could not make it too big, but there is some room above the touchpad and a little below it to expand its dimensions. The much bigger flaw, however, is its click mechanism. It is terrible. The touchpad surface feels loose. But it’s not so loose that there’s something wrong with our review unit that it’s unlikely to happen to others. No, the surface is loose when clicked so you have to push through a false click to get the actual click. It’s just a horrible experience. The deep travel with the false click before you get to the actual click makes a simple click feel like a chore. You’ll find that the touch display or external mouse are better input options than the kludgy touchpad.

GIR / Matthew Elliott

There are no such issues with the keyboard. Its keys feel firm and snappy, and there are no shortened keys. The up and down arrow keys are half-height, but that’s not unusual. The rest of the keys are full size and located where you expect them. I was immediately comfortable typing on the Swift 5, but the gold lettering doesn’t provide the best contrast against the dark gray keys. The two-level backlight helps a bit in dark conditions, but the glare of the display against the keys can wash out the lettering and make it hard to see which key is which.

Acer sells two color versions of the Swift 5; the laptop comes in what the company calls Mist Green or Steam Blue. We found the color green, but it’s more like a dark gray than anything else. Only in certain light do you see a hint of green. The edges, Acer logos, and the aforementioned main symbols are gold. Although I wish the main symbols were white for better contrast, I like the gold accents elsewhere. The color contrast and the contrast in the finishes look good. The green/grey surfaces have a matte finish and the gold accents are more reflective. It adds up to a sharp-looking laptop and one that stands out from the gray-and-chrome pack without looking garish.

GIR / Matthew Elliott

The aluminum chassis feels sturdy. There is no flex in the cover or keyboard deck and only a small amount of flex on the bottom panel. The Swift 5 feels rugged enough to withstand the rigors of everyday business travel.

The Swift 5 weighs 2.8 pounds, making it extremely portable but far from the lightest 14-inch ultraportable. The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 also has a 14-inch 16:10 screen and weighs almost half a pound less at 2.4 pounds. And the previous Swift 5 with the older 14-inch 16:9 display only weighs 2.3 pounds.

Zoom calls and video conferencing have become a bigger part of working life, and laptop webcams are improving as a result. You can count the Swift 5 among the laptops following this trend, trading in the previously standard 720p camera for a 1080p camera. The Swift 5’s webcam will keep you looking closely at your video conference attendees. The image it produces is noise-free and displays accurate colors and skin tones. One downside to the webcam? There is no privacy shutter.

Unfortunately, the Swift 5 makes no gains with audio output. It has a standard set of stereo speakers that usually produce tinny laptop sound. The speakers might be a bit loud if they were to pop up, but on the Swift 5 they turn down, which doesn’t help their sound.

GIR / Matthew Elliott

GIR / Matthew Elliott

With both USB Type-C and Type-A ports and an HDMI port, the Swift 5 won’t need you to travel with an adapter. It features a pair of USB-C ports and a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports. The Type-A ports are split with one on each side, allowing you to plug your mouse into the side you prefer. The USB-C ports are both located on the left side, which isn’t always the best side if the nearest power outlet is on your right. On the plus side, both USB-C ports offer Thunderbolt 4 support for fast 40Gbps data transfers and DisplayPort connectivity.

Acer Swift 5 performance

Our Acer Swift 5 test system features an Intel Core i7-1260P processor, 16GB of RAM, integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics, and a 1TB SSD. The Core i7-1260P is a member of Intel’s 28-bit Alder Lake-P series of mobile chips. The Core i7-1260P features Intel’s new hybrid architecture with cores of performance and efficiency; it has four performance cores, eight efficiency cores, and a total of 16 processing threads.

To understand the performance of the XPS 15 9520, we compared its benchmark results with those of other ultraportables including the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro 360, which has the same Core i7-1260P chip as the Swift 5. Two computers laptops, the Acer Swift 3X and Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9, feature an 11th-gen Core i7 chip, and the remaining pair in the Dell Inspiron 14 7000 and Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon feature AMD Ryzen 7 5000-series CPUs. All depends on integrated graphics.

Our first benchmark is PCMark 10, which measures performance on everyday computing tasks including office productivity tasks, web browsing and video chats. AMD-based laptops have been at the edge on PCMark for the past year or so, but Intel’s new generation of Core processors have closed the gap. The AMD-based Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon tops this group, but the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro 360 and the Acer Swift 5 are hot on their heels, edging out the AMD-based Dell Inspiron 14 7000 as well. Core i7-based laptops finished at the back of the pack.

GIR / Matthew Elliott

Our HandBrake benchmark tests how well a laptop can handle heavy CPU loads over a long period of time – in this case, transcoding a 30GB MKV file to a format suitable for Android tablets using HandBrake, the free video encoding utility free. The Swift 5 took top honors in our HandBrake test, with the AMD-based systems lagging behind and the two 11th-gen Intel laptops bringing up the rear.

GIR / Matthew Elliott

Next is Cinebench, another CPU-intensive test but one that delivers a complex 2D scene over a short period of time. The Swift 5 proved it’s as good a sprinter as it is a marathoner, finishing first on both the multi-threaded and single-threaded tests.

GIR / Matthew Elliott

GIR / Matthew Elliott

None of the laptops here will be mistaken for a gaming laptop, but it’s notable that the Swift 5 and the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro 360 are at the top of the charts. It represents the progress Intel has made with its integrated GPU with its 12th generation Core processors, further widening the gap between Intel Iris Xe graphics and AMD Radeon integrated graphics.

GIR / Matthew Elliott

To test laptop battery life, we looped a 4K video using Windows 11’s Movies & TV app, with the laptop set to Airplane mode and headphones plugged in. We set the brightness of the screen at a relatively bright 250 nits to 260 nits, which is a good brightness for watching a movie in an office with the lights on. The Swift 5 lasted for 13 hours on the test, which is impressive in itself and even more so when you include its high-resolution display which consumes more battery resources than a Full HD display would.

GIR / Matthew Elliott

Touchpad prevents ​​a stronger recommendation

Between its sleek and sturdy all-metal design, roomy 14-inch display and sub-three-pound weight, strong 12th-gen Core i7-led performance and long battery life, the Acer Swift 5 ultraportable is not without its charms. This is one laptop, however, that you should get your hands on before buying. The touchpad is too small and has one of the worst click mechanisms this reviewer has ever encountered. The false-click-before-you-have-to-click response may not bother you as much as it did me, but the terrible touchpad prevents me from making a strong recommendation. Instead, I would recommend you check it out before you buy it. Because if you like the touchpad (or hate it), there’s a good chance you’ll love the Swift 5.