Acer Swift Go 14 AI review: fast, long-lasting, and affordable

I recently reviewed the Acer Swift 14 AI, a 14-inch laptop aimed at significantly better battery life than most Windows laptops. It succeeded, thanks in part to Intel’s newest Lunar Lake chipsets. Now, Acer wants to accomplish the same in a similar, but not identical, laptop using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X — for less money.

The Swift Go 14 AI uses a larger higher-resolution display and a more aggressive aesthetic, and it, too, offers very good battery life that brings Windows a lot closer to Apple’s highly efficient MacBook Air M3. It’s not one of the best laptops, but it’s a very good option for anyone wanting great battery life and good performance in a more affordable package.

Specs and configuration

There’s only one configuration of the Swift Go 14 AI, and it’s only available at the Acer web store. It lists for $1,000 but is currently on sale for $800, with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 14.5-inch QHD+ IPS display.

On sale, that’s an attractive price for a well-configured laptop. You can imagine that a 512GB model would come in even lower if one were offered. A few Qualcomm laptops have come in around the same price, such as the Lenovo IdeaPad 5x 2-in-1 that’s $895 with a smaller, lower-res FHD+ OLED display. The Acer Swift 14 AI using the Intel Lunar Lake chipset is considerably more expensive starting at $1,200 with an FHD+ IPS display. We’ve seen more premium options like the Surface Laptop 7th Edition come in at around this price when on sale, but with less storage.

Design

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The Swift Go 14 AI is essentially a chunkier version of the Swift 14 AI. It’s around the same width and depth in spite of having a larger display at 14.5 inches versus 14.0 inches. But, it’s a bit thicker and heavier. It’s also a more aggressive design, with large vents below the lid that hint at a higher performance laptop. Acer incorporated the same kind of reverse notch that Lenovo uses to keep the top bezel slim while avoiding Apple’s display notch.

It’s really not as attractive, and that goes double for some other recent 14-inch machines like the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 with its more elegant aesthetic. The Swift Go 14 AI has a sweeping curve along the side, but that clashes with the chiseled lines on the rear of the chassis. Somehow, it doesn’t flow as well as the lines on the Swift 14 AI.

The all-aluminum construction is just fine, with no bending, flexing, or twisting in the lid, keyboard deck, or bottom chassis. That’s common lately, even in laptops well under $1,000. I really can’t think of the last laptop I reviewed that wasn’t well-built, and that includes the IdeaPad 5x 2-in-1 that sometimes comes in at under $700 on sale.

Keyboard and touchpad

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The keyboard is just OK. The keycaps are just a tiny bit smaller than I like, while key spacing and the layout is comfortable. The switches are a little spongey, while the Swift 14 AI has snapper switches and the OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 has a much better keyboard.

The touchpad is large enough and its mechanical design works well enough. I do prefer haptic touchpads like the best version on Apple MacBooks, but we’re not quite at a point where sub-$1,000 laptops are equipped with them. Unlike the Swift 14 AI, the Swift Go 14 AI doesn’t have a touch display. That may not matter to that many people. The Swift Go 14 AI touchpad has an LED that lights up when AI features are being used, but I didn’t see it engage during my testing.

Webcam and connectivity

Connectivity is fine. There are two USB4 ports that provide fast connectivity, and two legacy ports. There’s no SD card reader, which I’m seeing on fewer laptops. Wireless connectivity is fully up-to-date.

The webcam is a 144op version, so higher-res than the new standard of 1080p. The Qualcomm chipset has a fast neural processing unit (NPU) at 45 tera operations per second (TOPS), exceeding the Microsoft Copilot+ requirement of 40 TOPS. That means the Swift Go 14 AI will support all the Copilot+ AI features on-device with good efficiency and performance.

Performance

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 is an 8-core ARM-based chipset that runs at 3.2GHz with a single-core boost to 3.4GHz, compared to the other common chipset, the 12-core Snapdragon X Elite that runs at 3.4GHz with a dual-core boost to 4.0GHz. That makes it slower, but as we’ll see is still quite fast and, in fact, faster than the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V that’s part of the Lunar Lake lineup. The Snapdragon X Plus has an Adreno GPU that runs at 1.7 TFLOPS, a lot slower than the Elite Adreno that’s 3.8 TFLOPS or faster.

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In our benchmarks, the Swift Go 14 AI does well in CPU-intensive tasks. It’s faster than each of the Lunar Lake laptops but slower than the HP OmniBook X with the Snapdragon X Elite. It’s slowest in its GPU performance, falling well behind the leaders here. The MacBook Air M3 is faster across the board in single-core and slightly behind in the Cinebench R24 multi-core test.

Battery life

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The focus of both Qualcomm and Intel lately has been on efficiency. Windows laptops had fallen well behind Apple’s Silicon MacBooks in battery life, and that’s been changing.

The Swift Go 14 AI does very well in both our web browsing and video looping benchmarks, promising multiday battery life unless you’re working the chipset particularly hard. That’s Acer’s second win, as the Swift 14 AI with Intel Lunar Lake also stood out.

The MacBook Air M3 still looks pretty good, but it’s no longer true that you can’t get Windows and good battery life at the same time.

Display and audio

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The Swift Go 14 AI has one display option, a 14.5-inch QHD+ (2560 x 1440) IPS display that runs at up to 120Hz. That’s an improvement over the 14.0-inch FHD+ (1920 x 1200) IPS display in the Swift 14 AI that maxes out at 60Hz. Subjectively, I did enjoy the extra sharpness in the Swift Go 14 AI, and colors and brightness were good.

I’ve been commenting lately that displays across the board have gotten a lot better in the last few years. Not only are there more OLED displays available at lower prices but IPS displays have gotten brighter with better contrast and wider, more accurate colors. The Swift Go 14 AI’s panel is in line with that trend. It’s bright at 407 nits, well above our 300-nit standard that we really need to adjust. Contrast is also good at 1,270:1, exceeding our 1,000:1 threshold — every display I’ve reviewed in the last couple of years is higher than that, so it needs adjusting as well. Colors were reasonably wide at 100% of sRGB, 80% of AdobeRGB, and 82% of DCI-P3, and accuracy was good at a DeltaE of 1.61 (less than 2.0 is great for productivity but not optimal for creative applications).

This is a good display with decent sharpness, very good performance, and probably represents a good trade-off between battery life and quality.

The audio isn’t all that great, though. It uses two downward-firing speakers that deliver sound that’s good enough for the occasional YouTube video or video call, but for anything else, a pair of headphones is recommended.

Acer offers up another long-lasting 14-inch machine

The Swift Go 14 AI isn’t the best-looking laptop around. But it’s attractively priced, especially if you can get it on sale. At just $800, you get a well-built and fully-configured laptop with a very good IPS display.

But perhaps more important, it’s also fast for productivity users and it gets excellent battery life. You’ll want to make sure your apps are supported on Windows on Arm, but that’s less of an issue than it’s been in the past. If you can look past the lackluster design, the Swift Go 14 AI is easy to recommend.