Acer Swift 7 Preview – The thinnest 13.3″ notebook ever

If you now look at the laptop range in the Pricewatch, it seems only natural that almost every laptop manufacturer has beautiful, thin, sleek, aluminum models in its line-up. A few years ago it was different. In the end, it was Intel that kicked manufacturers up the ante and raised the bar with the introduction of the ‘ultrabook’ concept. Back then, when we first held models like the Asus Zenbook and Acer Aspire S7, we couldn’t imagine that laptops could ever get even thinner and lighter. We were completely wrong.

This year, the same trend appears to be repeating itself. Manufacturers have been trying to outdo each other lately with laptops that are even thinner and lighter, where usual elements such as normal USB ports and video outputs have had to make way. Everything is done to make laptops as thin as possible. Apple has its 12″ MacBook in this class, HP recently came out with its Specter 13, Asus has the Zenbook 3 and now at IFA Acer has joined this club with the Acer Swift 7, a laptop that is less than an inch thick and only weighs a little over a kilogram.

The Swift 7 is part of a completely new series from Acer, which will also include Swift 1, 3 and 5 models, but for now we focused on the flagship.

If we compare the specs of the main competitors, it is immediately clear that Acer can indeed claim the thinnest laptop, although the difference with, for example, a Specter 13 is minimal. Acer’s designers might have wanted it even thinner, but then the engineers would almost certainly have complained. In its current form, the Swift 7 is not much thicker than a USB-C port and it seems almost impossible to eat more of it.

The Swift has two of those USB-C ports. That’s beneficial because one is used to charge the laptop and you don’t want there to be no possibility to connect other things, such as with Apple’s MacBook. However, in practice you will also have to work with adapter plugs with the Swift 7 if, for example, you want to connect a device with a USB-A plug, plug in an Ethernet cable or control an external monitor. That is a limitation that you have to accept if you choose a laptop of this size.

Although the housing is less than a centimeter thick, Acer seems to have made few concessions in terms of build quality. The Swift 7 feels sturdy and has a sleek finish. As usual with a laptop in this class, the keys don’t provide a lot of feedback, but we still found them to feel nicer than, for example, the keys on a MacBook. The touchpad, which is nice and wide, also responds well. The duotone color scheme with champagne and black looks great, although we hope that there will also be a more classic version with a gray color.

The 13.3″ screen in the Swift 7 has a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels and while there are plenty of laptops with higher resolutions out there, we understand Acer’s choice. With so little room to fill inside the chassis, the battery won’t last be huge and a full-hd screen saves energy consumption. The glossy finish of the display ensures that colors look beautiful, but it also brings extra reflections. the screen is not touch sensitive, Gorilla Glass from Corning should ensure that the screen can take a tap.

Acer proudly reports that the Swift 7 has a ‘micro-bezel’, or a very small border around the screen. That may be the case compared to laptops from a few years ago, but in 2016 the size of the edges is really nothing special. In fact, the aforementioned competitors of this laptop have smaller screen edges.