I bought my current laptop, an Acer Swift X in late 2023 and wrote a review of it in January 2024. My tldr was that it was a powerful laptop but a few issues made it, ultimately, disappointing.
So, 12 months later, has my opinion changed?
The Good
The performance of this machine, with its Intel Core™ i7-13700H processor, remains solid and I don’t have any regrets about choosing the 16GB RAM model rather than the 32GB version.
Having watched quite a lot of YouTube and streaming media, I’ve come to appreciate the OLED screen much more than I did initially. Movies really do look good. It’s let down slightly by the built-in speakers, which sound fine but don’t get very loud, so aren’t ideal for media consumption.
I do a lot of video calls, and the webcam and built-in microphones are great - the webcam produces a clear, detailed picture and the microphones do a good job of picking up my voice and eliminating background noise.
I also really like the fingerprint scanner and Windows Hello, which are quick and reliable.
The Meh
For day-to-day use the 120Hz refresh rate and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 aren’t really useful and I generally leave both turned off due to their impact on battery life.
Bluetooth is a mixed bag. It works well with some headphones and speakers and not so well with others. That suggests it may be more to do with the bluetooth devices than the leptop though.
Initially I wasn’t happy with the touchpad. I liked that it was big and responsive, but it’s pal-rejection was terrible. A year and some driver improvements later, that problem seems to have been fixed. Either that or I’ve just got used to it. Either way, it doesn’t bother me any more.
The Bad
Although I mainly use this machine plugged in, battery life when I’m not plugged in remains the biggest weakness of this machine. I flew from Sydney to London this year and the battery had died before the plane had crossed the northern coastline. I get about 3 hours of basic web development with the screen set to 60Hz refresh rate and the NVIDIA card disabled. Turn either of those on and I’m lucky to get 90 minutes. Not acceptable when other laptops are regularly getting 10 hours or more. If I needed to work away from a desk regularly I would have long-since replaced this machine.
The other issue with this machine is that it’s noisy. As I’m typing this in VS Code, with nothing else running, the fan is running. With any load, the fan sounds like a jet plane taking off. There’s clearly a problem with this machine’s thermal management, which probably means I won’t get the 6+ years of use out of it that I’ve had from the Lenova it replaced (which is still in regular use).
Overall
I’m still torn about this machine. There’s a lot that’s good about it, but it’s let down by the battery life and the noise.
Would I buy this machine again, knowing what I know now? No.
The negatives aren’t bad enough that I feel the need to replace it, but if I were buying a new machine today the current equivalent model from Acer wouldn’t be on my list.