The Acer Swift Air 14 is a budget laptop redefined

There's no doubt we live in a golden age for cheap laptops. Apple's cracking little MacBook Neo heralded the dawn, but the Windows boys have responded quickly and dramatically.

Dell was fast out of the blocks with the £899 XPS 13, with Acer hard on its heels with the £699 Swift Air 14. Lenovo has even joined in with its IdeaPad Vibe.

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We can expect competing machines from HP and Honor in due course, all built around Intel's new budget Wildcat Lake and Qualcomm's X1 Snapdragon CPUs, all with screen sizes between 13 and 14 inches and all costing somewhere between £700 and £900.

The first of the Neo-worriers to land here at ITPro is Acer's offering, which, for the time being, also appears to be the only one that can match the Neo's price, starting at £699 ($699 in the USA) for the entry-level model.

Acer Swift Air 14: Design

Like the MacBook Neo and Lenovo's Chromebook 14 Plus, the new Swift Air fully subscribes to the philosophy that a very cheap laptop doesn't have to be an unholy lump of plastic tat.

All the bits you regularly touch are made from aluminium, and both the build quality and paint finish are every bit as good as you'll find on much more expensive Acer machines like the Swift Go 16.

There's a choice of colors – sage green, frost blue, blossom pink, or lilac purple – complete with some stylish pinstriping on the lid. However, that was missing from our sample as it was technically an engineering sample rather than an actual production unit.

Acer reckons the Swift Air 14 weighs 1.2kg, but our sample tipped the scales at 1.07kg. That's more than feather-light 840g Asus Zenbook A14 but less than the 1.23kg MacBook Neo.

The design of the Swift Air is typical Acer, which means it's not quite as visually interesting as your average Asus, Dell or Apple notebook. It's not ugly, just a little nondescript.

On the left side of the Swift Air there are two Thunderbolt 4 ports, while on the right there's a single 5Gbps USB-A port and a 3.5mm audio jack. Some may bemoan the absence of an HDMI output, but given that both Type-C ports support DP Alt Mode video, it's a minor issue.

Wireless communications are handled by an Intel AX211 card, which supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. Neither is the latest word in modernity, but as long as there's support for 6GHz Wi-Fi, we won't be complaining.

Taking the base panel off the Swift Air is simplicity itself once you've undone the 4 Torx screws that hold it in place. There's no space for a second SSD, and the RAM is soldered in place, as is the WLAN card, but you can easily replace the 2280 SSD and the battery.

Speaking of SSDs, the 512GB SanDisk drive in our test unit went like the dickens, recording sequential read and write speeds of 5,692MB/s and 5,017MB/s respectively.

Acer Swift Air 14: Keyboard, touchpad, and webcam

The keyboard is typical of many 14in laptops, a nicely spaced chiclet affair with pleasant soft-feel keys. The typing action is light but still positive, and there's a two-stage white backlight.

The keyboard deck has rather more flex than we'd like, especially around the F/G/H keys in the middle, but it's no worse than we've encountered on laptops costing far more.

The Mylar touchpad is bang on the money. It's a decent size at 125 x 80mm and reacts instantly to taps, swipes and gestures. The click-action is crisp and not too loud, acing our "Can you use it in a library reading room without getting disapproving glances?" test.

The 1080p webcam is another component that punches above the Swift Air's price, producing images that are bright and colorful, and there's a manual privacy slide shutter. It also supports Windows Hello facial recognition and Windows Studio special effects.

Acer Swift Air 14: Display and speakers

When both Apple and Dell have opted for 2.5K displays in their small, cheap laptops, Acer's decision to stick with 1,920 x 1,200 may raise an eyebrow, but the Acer still boasts a 162PPI dot density, the equal of the Dell XPS 14 we had in to test recently and looks crisp and sharp to the naked eye.

Elsewhere, the IPS panel does far better than you'd generally expect from a budget laptop. Peak brightness is a solid 440cd/m2 and it covers 97% of the sRGB color space, equal to 77.6% DCI-P3. The Delta E accuracy of 1.9 won't win any awards, but at below 2, the vast majority of users won't notice the discrepancies.

There's no option to have the Swift Air with a touch interface, but it's some compensation that you get a smooth 120Hz refresh rate and that the matte finish is good at suppressing reflections.

Like the display, the sound system is much better than the price tag would suggest. There's ample volume, our sound meter registering 77.1dBA from a pink noise source at a distance of 1m, and the soundscape is rich, detailed, and composed.

Even at maximum volume, there's none of the shrillness that was evident during our listening tests with the MacBook Neo.

Acer Swift Air 14: Specs and performance

Intel's Core Series 3 Wildcat Lake processors are the puny little brother to the muscular jocks of the Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake chips.

Ignoring the milksop Core 3 304, there are five 6-core processors (two cores are termed Performance and 4 Low-Power Efficient) in the Core 5 and Core 7 lineup, with clocks ranging from 4.4GHz to 4.8GHz and NPUs with 15, 16 or 17TOPs capacity.

Our sample featured the 4.6Ghz Core 5 320 CPU, but Acer UK is also advertising a model with the 4.8GHz Core 7 350 processor and 12GB of RAM.

A word of warning here: The Swift Air laptops that you buy in the shops won't be quite as nippy as our review unit because it came with 16GB of RAM rather than the 8GB (but still multi-channel), which is standard with the Core 5 320 processor.

All feature an Intel GPU with 2 Xe cores, though with slightly varying speeds, and all have a base power rating of 15W and a turbo rating of 35W.

The biggest difference will obviously be in multitasking performance. If you avoid running multiple apps along with a dozen or more Chrome tabs simultaneously, you shouldn't experience any serious bogging down.

It may seem a little unfair to compare the cheap Acer with the significantly more expensive – by a factor of almost two – MSI Prestige 13 AI+, which has 8 CPU cores and 4 GPU cores, but it's a testament to Acer (and Intel) that the Swift Air does not disgrace itself in such a comparison.

In our trusty old 4K multimedia benchmark, which is built around the HandBrake transcoder, the Acer scored 167 points to the MSI's 201 and the MacBook Neo's 126.

Looking back at historical test results, that puts the Core 5 320 roughly on a par with some Raptor Lake i5 U-series chips from 2023, and you didn't find those in laptops at this sort of price.

In the Cinebench R24 test, Swift Air scored 113 in the single-core test and 359 in the multi-core test. For comparison, the MSI Prestige 13 AI+ scored 547 in multi-core and 112 in single-core.

In the Geekbench 6 benchmark, the Acer scored 7,992 multi-core and 2,576 single-core, compared to the MSI's 10,091 and 2,512 and the Apple's 8,680 and 3,456, respectively.

We had expected the gap between the Swift Air and the Prestige 13 AI+ to be bigger and were generally impressed by how well the Swift Air went about its business.

Granted, with 8GB rather than 16GB of RAM, things are likely to slow down with multiple apps running, but we'd argue that if you expect to be able to run lots of apps simultaneously and cleanly on your laptop, you should expect to pay more than £699. Quite a lot more, in fact.

With only 2 Xe graphics cores, the Swift Air is far from the fastest graphics machine around, but again it doesn't end up with egg on its face.

In the 3DMark Night Raid test, it scored 18,138 to the MSI's 23,350, and while it only managed to run the SPECviewperf 3dsmax modelling test at a pedestrian 11.7fs, compared to the MSI's 18.7fs, it did at least manage to run the complete test, something we were far from sure it would.

The 16TOPS NPU is too weak to deliver the whole Copilot+ experience, so there's no support for Recall or Cocreator in the Paint app.

The dual-fan cooling system had no trouble keeping the Swift Air well-ventilated. Running the system under maximum stress caused no thermal issues, and the fan noise never rose much above a low hum.

The combination of a low-power CPU and a larger-than-average-capacity battery for a laptop in this class of 70Wh meant the Swift Air turned in an impressive battery runtime of 22 hours and 35 minutes.

That's nigh-on double the best the MacBook Neo could manage and seven hours more than the MSI Prestige 13 AI+. Both those machines have higher-resolution displays, which makes Acer's decision to equip the Swift Air with a FullHD panel seem rather sensible.

The takeaway from all these results is that if your understanding of a "cheap" Windows laptop is something built around a Twin Lake N150 chip, then Wildcat Lake will come as something of a revelation. For a budget laptop, the Swift Air is impressively capable of functioning as a day-to-day laptop for the vast majority of users.

Acer Swift Air 14: Is it worth it?

We'd argue that the Acer Swift Air is a more important budget laptop than the Apple MacBook Neo. With a considerably longer battery life, larger display, a keyboard backlight, and a USB-A port, it's certainly more usable on a day-to-day basis.

We've yet to test Dell's new XPS13, but given that prices for the general public start at £899 in the UK, a full £200 more than the Acer Swift Air and MacBook Neo, it's already at a handicap. Hopefully Dell will rethink the difference between the UK price and the $699 it's asking for the same model in the USA.

Traditionally, buying a laptop for this sort of money meant having to tolerate a lot of mediocrity either in terms of quality, performance, or usability. It's the greatest credit to Acer that, with the Swift Air, it's cooked up a cheap laptop that won't just be selling to buyers who can't afford better, but also to buyers who quite reasonably ask themselves, "why pay more?"

Acer Swift Air 14 specifications