Acer Swift 14 AI Review: Thoughtful Improvements with an “Ultra” Catch

It’s been a while since we reviewed an Acer laptop, and the Swift lineup sure does have appeal. That said, Acer launched their new Acer Swift 14 AI, and I must say, releasing an Intel Core Ultra Series 2 under the RM 5000 price point is shocking. Are you making any compromises, or is this the best-value laptop with the latest hardware? Let’s find out in this Acer Swift 14 AI review.

Acer Swift 14 AI Review

Design and Build gets a Facelift

Keeping things light has been the Acer Swift lineup’s philosophy for years and I am glad it stays. The Acer Swift 14 AI gets that part right. Coming in at 1.2kg, you are looking at a pretty light and nimble laptop built from the ground up. The materials they have opted for, which are aluminium with diamond-cut trims on the edges of the display, give the laptop the premium look that it deserves. One thing I am not really a fan of: it’s the way it feels in person. We have seen laptops in this weight class to feel whole in every way possible. But the Swift 14 AI lacks that. It gets oddly hilarious that this laptop has MIL-STD810H certification. But hey, if it does live up to that – I guess that works.

As for the design, you do see Acer going back to playing things safe and giving some facelift to certain areas of the laptop. For one, the laptop still looks angular and edgy, which I prefer over the Aspire’s pebble-like appearance. On the back of the laptop, they have repositioned the Acer logo to their favourite corner and on the other end, you see this “dots-and-lines” symbol. Don’t worry, it’s not some Illuminati logo, it’s their AI logo – which I will talk about in a bit.

As you open the lid, you do notice the protruded camera notch, which also helps in opening the laptop easier – thoughtful. The keyboard gets a new typeface, their new Acer Loco font, an angular sunken-in keyboard layout and the god-awful amount of stickers around the keyboard. If this was my laptop, the first thing I’d do is peel all of it and keep the Intel logo. It cheapens the experience but in case you didn’t know, these stickers are the reason why the laptop is cheaper because it’s “Ad”. Overall, it’s a pretty neat laptop. I love the colour so much.

The OLED Display is Pretty Neat

The Acer Swift 14 AI gets a 14” 1920×1200 60Hz OLED display. In this class of laptops with the specifications you see here, it’s enough honestly. Keeping it at WUXGA because it’s a 16:10 aspect ratio, is a good thing – as it does give a much better battery longevity. We are typing this review with a 32% battery at a café with no charger with us. I have the picture to prove it. With that said, the OLED display is nice to look at and I am so glad they opted in for it.

Watching shows or movies on Netflix or Prime Video, looking at colour-accurate content such as photos and such – this display excels in offering a true black experience with no complaints. The only gripe I have is that, for some weird reason, this display reflects a lot of light and shadow as compared to other OLED panels we have tried on laptops. Regardless of that, I can’t wait for the day laptop manufacturers in general opt in for the anti-reflective coating like the ones on LG display despite being glossy – it’s really good.

Matte OLED displays are pretty much pointless as you will lose the “vividness” of the display, and that’s why all OLED displays tend to be glossy. It’s a matter of the quality and the manufacturer they opt for – which is apparent in this laptop. But again colour-wise, you are not losing out at all. The display does have a brightness-boost mode when you are outdoors – similar to how it works on Smartphones – which is a good thing to have.

Intel Core Ultra Series 2 Performance

Intel Core Ultra Series 1 performance blew us off because it was so good and we were excited for the Series 2. But our excitement came to an immediate halt after our experience here with the Acer Swift 14 AI. But before we proceed any further, here’s the specification of the laptop we have at hand:

• Intel Core Ultra 7 Series 2 258V
• Intel Arc 140V Integrated Graphics
• 32GB LPDDR5X RAM with 1TB PCIe Gen 4 M.2 SSD

If you want a slightly less powerful Ultra 5, Acer Malaysia does offer that variant. Anyway, we did our usual benchmarking to see how well the Intel Core Ultra 7 Series 2 holds up and with the specification above, you are looking at a capable powerhouse for productivity and even light gaming. Our 3DMARK and PCMARK scores look alright, and you do see nice numbers, but it’s not quite an improvement, especially when the Series 1 Ultra 7 provided better numbers and compared to Series 1 Ultra 5, the difference is about 15-17%. Usually, benchmark scores for Laptops do show what the laptop is capable of at its peak.

This is why we use the laptop as our daily driver to see how it rives up in day-to-day use case scenarios. While it does give a decent experience for the most part where you can use the laptop as intended, the Core Ultra Series 2 isn’t the most stable processor. The glitch and the Intel Arc GPU acceleration issues – feel very odd. When you try to multi-task, the glitches are more obvious and tend to struggle to keep up. All this experience is with the laptop is under Performance mode, set in AcerSense.

It appears that the Series 2 brings some instability issues – which is very unusual to begin with. But with the recent track records, I am not surprised. That’s not all because other users around us who are reviewing Series 2 laptops including the same Swift 14 AI have reported similar issues ranging from instabilities to crashing while entering certain areas in games – like Genshin for instance. When the laptop works, it does work – but it starts declining the moment you try to push it.

The Instability Extends into other areas of the laptop

.One of the biggest issues we recently faced with the Acer Swift 14 AI is how it lost the entire ability to connect to the internet out of nowhere and the laptop couldn’t find the hardware at all. This was easily fixed with a restart but this shouldn’t happen. The laptop uses Killer Wi-Fi BE1750i which is pretty good as we have tried the same adapter in other laptops but still, a very odd issue to encounter.

Acer’s Own Take on “AI”

Back to what Acer has equipped this laptop with. One of the biggest, well if not the biggest change happens to be the inclusion of AI-centric features in this laptop. Before we even go any further: the answer is no, Windows is a long way from getting applications that utilize the NPU and at the time of this review, you probably have about 3-to 4 applications that claim to use AI but not quite. To show this, Ace made a smart decision to put this AI indicator on the trackpad.

When it glows once, it means the “AI” features that are being used are cloud-based but when it stays lit up glowing, then it’s the NPU being used.

So far, the only time we saw the NPU being used is when we use Studio Effects for the camera and in CoPilot, it glows once as it is a web-based app anyway. Acer included other applications like GIMP which do have some features that appear to take advantage of the NPU but otherwise, the Acer LiveArt,  User Sensing 2.0 and AlterView are just apps masquerading as “AI”.

Other Notable Improvements

Speaking of improvements, their Acer User Sensing 2.0 is really good. Finally, the laptop can detect my presence wake up, and lock the moment I leave and there are some quirky features like cursor detection if you use a multi-monitor setup where it moves the cursor to the display you are looking at. The Windows Hello with IR works really well if you want a fingerprint scanner, it is in the power button.

The AcerSense application which manages the performance scalability is pretty good and finally, we get a more usable experience. The keyboard and the trackpad seem to be giving the same experience as their predecessors – so, nothing much to rave about there. The port selection on this laptop is solid: HDMI 2.1, USB-A on both sides, and USB-C ports which doubles as charging and Thunderbolt 4.

What Needs Improvement?

Let’s start with the ports: The USB-C ports need repositioning and when kept close, you lose the other USB-C pretty quickly when either ports block the other USB-C. What Dell did with their XPS is exactly what I hope to see in the future – with USB-C on either side.

Secondly, Acer – I hope you are reading this – please for the love of all that’s good and pure, improve your speakers. It’s 2024, and we cannot be living with these inferior tinny speakers that do absolute injustice especially when I am watching it on a nice display on the laptop.

And keeping the laptop affordable is no excuse, especially when we have seen other manufacturers in this same price range equip solid-sounding speakers.

Finally, while this may be a problem for many, unfortunately, this is the biggest reason why the laptop is priced much lower than any contender in this space – The amount of bloatware the laptop has: is without a doubt, concerning. From games we have zero clue about to apps that just “exist” – just make sure to uninstall everything before you proceed any further.

Conclusion

If you forget about the hiccup we ran into, for the asking price of RM 4,999, the Acer Swift 14 AI has a good value proposition going, especially for a laptop with new-generation hardware. The price will attract many users for sure. If you are getting this laptop as an upgrade to your existing laptop, by all means – but I don’t think you should purchase it for the “AI” hype train it’s riding on. Granted, the processor houses an NPU for those processes, but at the moment, minuscule applications take complete advantage of it. In this case, it’s limited to the Webcam and a certain extent, Copilot.

With Windows delaying Recall and other features which are supposed to see the light right now, AI alone isn’t a justifiable reason to purchase a laptop. As a laptop, the Acer Swift 14 AI is getting there in becoming a good laptop but it has a few steps to take to strive for that perfection. If you do think that the variant we reviewed here is a bit pricey, then you can opt for the Ultra 5 variant which is priced at RM 4,399. But I feel Intel Ultra Series 2 needs to be observed because if this is the performance we are signing up for, this is not a great sign and one that doesn’t instil confidence.

For more tech, gaming, and lifestyle content, make sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Better yet, stay tuned to The Adventures of Vesper.