My laptop is my most used gadget. It gets several hours of use every day. But I don’t do anything particularly demanding - I do a bit of development in VSCode, watch a bit of YouTube and spend too much time browsing the web. For the last 5 years I’ve been using Lenovo Yoga 920, a 13” 2-in-1 that’s probably my favourite laptop ever. I didn’t need a new laptop, but my wife did, so we decided that she should have my laptop and I’d get a new one.
I love researching new gadgets, so I spent a lot of time looking in to how technology had moved on in the last 5 years. OLED screens seem to be the new hotness and although I’ve been perfectly happy with the screen in the Lenovo, I decided that for a laptop I’ll hopefully be using for the next 5 years this was a key requirement. A minimum of 16GB of RAM (I would have preferred 32GB) and a 1TB SSD were also on the list along with a processor with a higher core/thread count. Better battery life would also be nice (the Lenovo battery was down to just a couple of hours) and a good keyboard (after dreadful experiences with the keyboards on HP laptops).
After many, many hours of research and a spreadsheet to help me compare different models, I finally settled on the Acer Swift X 14. While it didn’t have the 2-in-1 form factor or the touchscreen of the Lenovo, but it had a great spec at a reasonable price (£1,299 including taxes) and overwhelmingly positive reviews.
The Spec
An Intel® Core™ i7-13700H processor is the beating heart of the Swift X, along with 16GB RAM (32GB was available but I couldn’t justify the extra expense) and a 1TB SSD. The screen is a 14.5” OLED with a 2880 * 1800 resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate and is paired with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 with 6GB RAM. Connectivity is well covered, with 2 USB-C ports, 2-USB-A ports, HDMI and Micro SD card reader. Wireless connectivity is covered with WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5E.
The Good
As you would expect, performance is a step up from the Lenovo. Being 5 generations newer and having 14 cores rather than 8 means that performance should, in theory, be about double that of the Lenovo. I haven’t benchmarked it so I don’t know if that’s true, but build times are noticably quicker for the .NET projects I work on. Other than that, the type of things I use my laptop for aren’t very demanding and my old laptop was fine, so the Swift X being faster is nice but doesn’t make much difference in day-to-day use.
Whilst the overall design is fairly pedestrian - the Swift X is a bland generic grey slab - the build quality feels solid, with very little flex or creaking. It can also be opened with one hand, which is nice.
The screen is pretty good. Although it has a lower resolution than the Lenovo this isn’t noticable in use, but it is noticably brighter and it has better colour accuracy. It’s not “spectacular” as many of the reviews I read claimed, and I’d question whether anyone would notice the difference unless you put the Swift X and Lenovo side by side, but it’s definitely nicer for watching videos and playing games.
The webcam supports 1920 * 1080 resolution at 30Hz. Image quality is good and it tracks the speaker so you always remain centre-stage. The microphones do a good job picking up the speaker and cancelling background noise. It’s slightly disappointing that it doesn’t include an infrared camera, so there’s no Windows Hello, but overall it gets the job done. My only real complaint is that there’s no physical camera shutter.
Talking of Windows Hello, there is a fingerprint scanner and it works well - much more reliably than the fingerprint scanner on the Lenovo.
The sound from the speakers is fine, pretty loud but lacking much bass, like most laptop speakers. But does anyone actually use laptop speakers? I use Bluetooth speakers and they work well, pairing quickly and with no noticable lag.
I liked the idea of a dedicated graphics card and, on paper at least, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 with 6GB or dedicated RAM runs rings around the integrated graphics of the Lenovo. In practice, however, it’s only really used for gaming and the games I play aren’t very graphically demanding so, for me, it’s not really that useful. I would probably have been better off with saving myself some money.
The keyboard is pretty good too. Probably on a par generally with the Lenovo but with better and more even backlighting. Decent movement, nice even backlighting. The only compromise is a half-sized left shift key.
The Bad
It’s not a deal-breaker, but this is a noisy machine. The fan runs constantly, even when you’re not doing anything. And it’s pretty loud, you’re aware of it all the time and when the machine is under any significant load it’s quite intrusive. By contrast the Lenovo is basically silent unless you’re pushing it really hard and pretty quiet even then.
There’s a ton of crapware installed and getting rid of some of it isn’t as easy as it should be (I’m looking at you McAfee!). Not really acceptable on a laptop at this price point.
Maybe not bad exactly, but certainly disappointing. Acer claim 15 hours of battery life but, in my experience using it primarily for coding, with a couple of browser tabs open but not much else going on, 4 hours seems to be about all you’ll get. I don’t know if this is related to the dedicated graphic card, but given how little use that gets I can’t see how it would be.
The Ugly
The touchpad is simultaneously great and terrible. It starts well enough, it’s large and smooth and has a nice click action, but then it all goes wrog, with the worst palm rejection experience of any touchpad I’ve used in the last decade. A million miles away from the Lenovo experience which never had any problems with palm rejection. This is a laptop you’re going to want to use with a separate keyboard and mouse.
The Maybe Ugly, Definitely Weird
I had a weird experience when I used a 65W charger with the Swift X. I expected that with a lower power charger the Swift X would charge more slowly (which it did), but otherwise behave as normal. What I found was that the Swift X wouldn’t boot up at all when it had been charged with the lower power charger, even when the battery was fully charged. Plugging the charged in solved the problem, but a laptop that won’t boot unless plugged in has a major problem.
I didn’t find any reviews which mentioned this, but when I went searching after I experienced it I found it was mentioned a lot on Acer’s support forums and seems to be a problem that has plagued much of Acer’s laptop range over the last few years.
What made this really weird though is that when I used the power supply that Acer provided, which provided the full 100W, this didn’t happen - the Swift X would boot up from cold, and wake up from sleep, with no problems regardless of whether it was plugged in or not.
Overall
I’m torn about this machine. Overall, I think the Swift X is a solid performer and good value for money, with a few niggles which stop it being a great laptop. I don’t regret buying it but, knowing what I know now, if I were buying today I’d probably go for something like the Asus S15 or ASUS Zenbook 14, which lack the dedicted graphics and have a slightly lower spec processor but are cheaper, or a Lenovo Yoga 9i, which is a bit more expensive but has the advantage of a 2-in-1 form factor, touch screen, pen and infrared camera supporting Windows Hello.