Acer Swift 7 Review: Thinnest Laptop Yet

Most of us are pretty familiar with Acer Swift series, their super ultra thin laptop. Back in August, they unveiled the world’s thinnest Laptop ever – that’s the Acer Swift 7. Thanks to Acer Malaysia, they sent us their Swift 7 to take a closer look at it. After using it for two weeks, its time for us to share our final verdict in this Acer Swift 7 Review.

Design and Build Quality

1/8

I have to really give this to Acer because the Acer Swift 7 has the most sleekest and the thinnest laptop I’ve ever held in my hands. The way it sits at your desk looking like a notepad of sorts gives it a stealthy look. The way the hinge were designed to sit flush with the body with no gaps in the middle really made me realize that there’s just so much time and effort went into crafting this piece of laptop. There is a chamfered design on the display’s bezel with a soft touch finish on the lower end of the screen. The laptop has a curved edge on the top – outside that slips into the body where it’s curve too – giving it this polished look. Not to forget, it’s in this gorgeous Black finish – I mean who doesn’t like black?

As for the build quality, by the title of it – you know where I am going with this. The Swift 7 is definitely the thinnest laptop in the world and the thinnest laptop we have reviewed so far. It comes in at a thickness of just 9mm, Width and Depth of 32.8cm and 23.7cm. It weighs in at 1.20 kg making it super light too. You can take a look at it in the above close up shot where we placed it beside the ROG Chimera. Despite how thin the laptop is, the body is solid and nice to the feel. Sure, it does look a bit fragile, which I do agree but when it’s closed, there’s not much of flex or anything. The screen is covered with a Corning Gorilla Glass NBT – which is scratch resistant. Overall, Build Quality and Design – Well done.

I/O & Connectivity

Knowing the fact that the Swift 7 sides more toward the UltraBook category – it has only 4 I/O. On the left, we have a Headphone Jack, 2 x USB C 3.1 Gen1 Ports. On the other side, we have the power button and a SIM Slot. Yes, the Swift 7 has a Micro SIM Slot – which means you can stay connected on the fly. Pretty cool ey? Beside the keyboard, you’ll find a fingerprint sensor as well.

Other than that – in terms of connectivity – the Swift 7 rocks a 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac Wireless. Supports WWAN. As it has SIM card support, the laptop has support for DC-HSPA+, HSPA+, LTE and UMTS.

Specification

Since it’s an Ultrabook, you’d expect some powerful specification under the hood right? Well, not with the Swift 7. As for the Processor, Intel has opted in for an Intel Core i7-7Y75 – an ultra-low powered Kaby Lake Y Series processor. It only has Dual-core clocked in at 1.30GHz. As for the RAM, it comes with 8GB of LPDDR3. Finally, for the storage – we are looking at a 256GB SSD.

Take note, the configuration for the Swift 7 is fixed and you cannot upgrade it no matter what. This is because of the fact that everything is embedded to the mother board. Hence the thin profile finish.

Display

1/2

The Acer Swift 7 packs a 14” FHD IPS Display with LED Backlight. I have to say the display on the Swift 7 is very sharp and nice to look at. In fact, the colors the laptop produced by the laptop sure is nice. The blacks are deep and the tones are near to accurate. Even though you wont be able to do a lot of intensive task on this laptop, watching shows and even using light editing software like Picasa and sorts – did impress me a lot.

The Acer Swift 7 has an interesting feature. It’s the fact that the screen also acts as a touch screen. The display can register up to 10 points – so you can use all your 10 fingers on the screen itself. Manuvering around the OS with the help of touch is fast and snappy. In fact, I like the fact that the display on the Swift 7 has some impressive palm rejection overall. Sadly, the laptop isn’t 360 degrees. So, all you can do is pretty much lay it flat and get some simple stuff done.

Performance

By the looks of the specification, you’d notice – this is not a performance centric laptop with beefy GPU and sorts. We did a simple CPU Benchmark. Under Single Thread – it scored a 256.9 and in Multi Thread – it scored 730.3. It’s definitely isn’t a huge WOW factor but it will give you an idea that you can’t run a GPU intensive application on it. We did a CrystalDiskMark test to see the speed. Under Seq Q32T1 – it scored a Read speed of 1617 MB/s and Write Speed of 814.0 MB/s. You can check out the rest of the scores.

During my time using the laptop – just for productivity – which involves opening up few tabs of chrome, launching Picasa to do some touchup and Write articles and reviews like this one – it handled okay. There were times it stutters a bit because of too much background memory being used but after cleaning up – it went back to normal.

The Swift 7 didn’t heat up. In terms of temperature, the Swift 7 had a minimum temperature of 35 degrees and a maximum of 44 degrees during my time using the laptop. Good thing is that you can’t feel the heat around the keyboard and even the trackpad – which is nice.

Battery Life

One of the interesting aspect of this laptop – it’s the battery life. It has a 2-cell Lithium Polymer Battery with a capacity of 4580 mAh. This combined with the low powered chip offered the best battery life I could ask for. The Acer Swift 7 claims to last for 10 Hours but during my test, I was happy to see that it lasted up to 8 hours.

I didn’t even bring the power brick to charge the laptop up with me all the time and yet, I could still get back home with 20 percent battery and I barely saw the “Low Battery” notification. This definitely, made my whole productivity life easier and worry less to find the nearest power outlet.

Keyboard, Trackpad and Speakers

If there’s one huge hit that takes the laptop down, it’s this. Let’s start off with the keyboard.

The Swift 7 uses a Chiclet Style Keyboard with a key travel of 1.2 – 1.3mm. Typing on the keyboard is nice and since the actuation points are shorter, the keys register pretty quick. But when you look at the keyboard, you’ll notice that the Function Row is missing. Acer removed the whole row and combined with the Number row. The other flaw is the keys. The Delete and Backspace keys are super close to each other and the Caps Lock key is so small that it makes the whole experience disappointing. I did try to get used to the keyboard and after a week later, I got the hang of the other keys but not the Caps Lock.

The Trackpad on the Swift 7 is huge and nice to use. That is – until you try to click left or right. They have removed the L and R click button which is one of the most essential buttons to drag and drop files and so on. This really turned me off and while I was on the move, using the laptop without the L and R click is very hard.

Finally, the speakers. It’s located on the bottom of the keyboard. Placing it on a table gives a muffled listening experience. Which means, you’ll have to place it on an inclined plane to even listen to it. At Maximum volume, the speaker sounds tinny and flat. Not really ideal for watching movies or series with the built in speaker.

Conclusion

Without a doubt, the Acer Swift 7 is one gorgeous laptop on it’s own. It’s super thin and crafted out of the best materials possible to give it a sturdy and solid build. I even loved bringing it around without even worrying about carrying a power brick with me. Productivity on the go is amazing.

But the huge turn off for me is the fact that the Keyboard is missing the Function Rows and the crammed Delete Backspace button and the Caps Lock button is a huge hit. Also, the fact that the trackpad doesn’t click is another letdown when it comes to productivity. It feels like Acer sacrificed a lot just to make the world’s thinnest laptop.

For RM 6799, which is – without a doubt a huge premium to pay for such laptop – my suggestion is to go for the Swift 5 which comes with a i7-8550U at RM 4899 or you could go for other options in the market which has more power and performance for the same price or less. Hopefully, the next Swift 7 fixes some of these problems – at least the keyboard and trackpad.