ACER SWIFT 7 (2019) REVIEW
Pros
The ultimate thin-and-light PCThunderbolt ports, plus a hub, solve expansion concernsDramatically lighter than older modelCons
Awkwardly-placed, awful webcamIt gets quite hot in places while under loadTablet performance in a notebook form factorOur Verdict
Acer’s updated Swift 7 (July 2019) is the ultimate thin-and-light PC, a 14-inch máy vi tính that solves the problems of its predecessors. Performance, though, is still mediocre.
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The Acer Swift 7 (July 2019) is about as thin as the Google px 3 điện thoại thông minh (right).
Positioned correctly, with its four rubber feet flat against a desk, I noticed no flex in the Swift 7’s keyboard. Acer engineered the Swift 7 using a combination of magnesium-lithium và magnesium-aluminum alloys, which contributes lớn its lightness without detracting from its structural integrity. I sometimes work with a laptop perched on a keyboard drawer, however, which has a small ridge at the end. There, I noticed some flex when resting a hand on the palm rest. In general, however, I found nothing to complain about in the Swift 7’s construction.
Acer even slimmed down the display, which reclines lớn a comfortable 45 lớn 50 degrees off the horizontal.
The left side of the Acer Swift 7 (July 2019) chassis doesn’t have much more than a tai nghe jack and power button. The webcam also pops up, above.
Unlike last year’s model, Acer’s latest Swift 7 does away with the WWAN slot. Instead, there are merely a pair of Thunderbolt-capable USB-C ports. While I think an always-connected PC represents the future of laptops, I’m willing to lớn give Acer a pass—helped by the fact that the company includes a USB-C hub inside the box. The hub is nothing fancy—one USB Type-A port, HDMI, and a USB-C nguồn pass-through—but it does allow legacy devices to be connected.
Though the keyboard appears largely unchaged from the earlier Swift 7’s, the July 2019 mã sản phẩm is easier lớn type upon, and Acer solved its touchpad issues.
One of the few oddities about the keyboard, however, is that Acer reserves the function keys for the top row—and that’s all they do. Supplementary functions, like the ability lớn turn off the touchpad or turn the backlighting off & on, are reserved for the second row. (Off và on are the only two options for backlighting, unfortunately.) note that the function underneath the “W” key, which looks like the letter “Z” raised lớn the Zth power, is actually the sleep function. Arrow keys are reserved for the small cross lớn the lower right, which also controls the screen brightness and volume.
The latest Swift 7 now includes a clickable precision touchpad, unlike the truly horrendous touchpad of a generation ago. Acer extended the trackpad across a sizeable portion of the keyboard—it’s nearly 6 inches wide! The touchpad is clickable up lớn just about a finger’s-breadth of space on the top—average khổng lồ even slightly better than the competition.
Just next lớn the keyboard rests the fingerprint scanner, embedded in the nguồn button. More máy vi tính makers are choosing this approach, which provides a convenient, natural landing pad for biometric logins. Though the chất lượng of a fingerprint scanner usually degrades somewhat over time, as gunk builds up on the sensor, the relatively new Swift 7 worked just fine to log me in quickly và accurately over the week or so I tested it.
Speakers, camera suffer from the ‘thin is in’ approach
Speaker quality still suffers from the Swift 7’s ultraportability, however. Acer’s previous Swift suffered from woefully underpowered equipment, though the inclusion of Dolby Audio helped mitigate the overall experience. Dolby doesn’t appear on the latest Swift 7. With the current model, the volume has seemingly improved lớn merely average. Music still sounds flat & lacks punch, though the midrange-to-higher kết thúc is pleasant enough. Plug in headphones, though—and you should; don’t bother otherwise—and the sound builds in terms of volume & tone.
Acer doesn’t really try that hard with audio enhancement, as the bare-bones Acer TrueHarmony controls are buried within the Realtek Audio Console tiện ích in the Windows 10 Settings. TrueHarmony appears lớn perform some stereo widening and possibly some audio adjustments, but it’s truly wasted on the speakers. On headphones, the experience is pleasing enough.
Unfortunately, however, not all of the Swift 7’s changes were positive ones. The Swift 7 doesn’t include a Windows Hello-enabled webcam—honestly, it barely provides a webcam at all. For a design like the Swift 7, Acer clearly chose to lớn bury the 720p, SHDR webcam inside a popup slot at the đứng đầu left of the keyboard rather than embed it in the đứng đầu display bezel, robbing the display of additional pixels.
This is what the Webcam sees: giant fingers, a mouth, và whatever you spilled on your shirt at lunch.
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While it’s never totally clear which apps Microsoft includes as part of Windows, & which are placed there by the OEM, the Swift 7 likely offers more than you’d reasonably need: Amazon, Booking.com, the two Candy Crush games, eBay, Evernote, Firefox, Hearts Deluxe, và Spades, lớn name just a few. In total, I counted 23 additional apps that aren’t part of Windows proper, includingtwo apps to tải về more apps (App Explorer và the Acer Collection S). Acer also includes basic versions of of CyberLink’s PhotoDirector, PowerDirector, & Stagelight, a music creator. All three have the very basic functions unlocked & require a subscription to access the rest.
Acer also includes GoTrust ID, an tiện ích that allows you to pair your phone và PC, và use a công nghệ bluetooth connection to your phone as verification. In my testing, GoTrust asked me lớn tap the space bar to track down my phone, then took several seconds to complete the process. I could have logged in several times over via the fingerprint reader instead.
Performance: This isn’t why you buy the Swift 7
Because the Swift 7 is fanless, you don’t have khổng lồ worry about any fan hâm mộ noise interrupting your flow. Acer says athermal pad with copper-graphite composite distributes heat from the motherboard throughout the chassis to improve temperature uniformity. I was somewhat surprised at howmuch heat it dissipates, though. While letting a video-on-demand briefing stew within Microsoft Edge, the Swift 7 grew quite hot on the underside, và unpleasantly hot on the top, especially the top right corner, as seen below.
The Acer Swift 7 (July 2019) improves over the earlier model, though not by that much.
PCMark 8’s Work kiểm tra suite emphasizes office apps, such as word processing và spreadsheet work, while the home and Creative tests push harder into applications like web browsing & photo editing.Light gaming is also tested, though the separate 3DMark demo (discussed below) provides greater insight into how well the Swift 7 will perform.
In the PCMark tests, which lean more heavily into multimedia applications, the Swift 7 suffers.
PCMark 10 reproduces some of the same tests within PCMark 8, though with a greater emphasis on performance. There’s only a single test, which measures video call performance, photo editing using GIMP, gaming, & even metrics lượt thích app startup times. At the end PCMark produces a single overall benchmark score, which we use khổng lồ compare lớn similar machines: 2978, which is most directly comparable lớn the HP Spectre x2, a 2017 tablet.
From there, we move on khổng lồ two simulated benchmarks: the venerable Cinebench, as well as the open-source HandBrake tool. Cinebench, developed by Maxon, renders a simulated image using all of the cores và threads available on the processor itself: just two cores & four threads, unfortunately. However, because the thử nghiệm is so widely used, there’s an enormous database of comparable scores. We demo using Cinebench R15 và the newer R20, which introduces a more complex & lifelike image that requires longer khổng lồ render. The message on both tests, though, is that the Swift 7 is not optimized for performance.
We didn’t expect that the latest Swift 7 would generate the worst result. But with the amount of heat that the Swift 7 pumps out, it’s possible that thermal throttling could hamstring the July 2019 edition further. Nevertheless, the message is a consistent one: This isn’t a performance machine.
From there, we move lớn 3DMark, which measures 3 chiều performance. Granted, we don’t expect much here inside of a tablet.
Achieving more than 9 hours of battery life is pretty good for such a thin & light machine as the Swift 7 (July 2019).
Conclusion: How much does a light PC matter?
The Swift 7 reigns supreme as the ultimate thin-and-light PC. Its performance may be modest, và its heat đầu ra slightly worrisome. The webcam is one of the worst we’ve used. The LG Gram, another ultralight PC, heartily outperforms it—but the Gram weighs 2.5 pounds, and the Swift 7 weighs just 1.84 pounds.
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Buying the Swift 7 requires buying into the Swift 7. Do you commute daily by foot, or simply prefer a máy tính that can slip into a backpack or (maybe) a purse, without extra weight? do you mind working wirelessly? We’d recommend the Swift 7, especially after it solved its shortcomings from a year ago. But if extreme thin-and-light isn’t your goal, you can find less radical models that may be more satisfying overall.
