Acer’s Swift 7 certainly lives up to its promise of being superslim; it’s just 0.39 inches thick which makes it one of the slimmest laptops on the market. It’s also incredibly stylish and quite beautiful to look at. If this is important to you, you’ve hit the jackpot.
The Swift 7 is thinner than Apple’s latest MacBook. The HP Spectre and comes in one-hundredth of an inch thicker. When the Swift 7 is closed, its thickest edge measures 9.98mm, so it really is the first laptop to be under 1cm thick. So if you’re after an ultra-thin laptop, you’ll fall in love with the Swift 7.
Looks-wise, the Swift 7 is cast in an eye-catching bold black and gold: a black lid coupled with a golden, anodised aluminium keyboard deck and base. It really is a beautifully streamlined style with rounded corners and chamfered edges around the touchpad add just the right touch of depth to its design.
It has a lovely black keyboard, dominated by a large touchpad directly below it. (A downside is that the keyboard isn’t backlit – I’m very surprised that a laptop that costs over $1000 doesn’t include this feature). It’s designed to appeal to a wide range of tastes and it really delivers in the design category. Visuals are nice and crisp: thanks to the 13.3-inch Full HD display with IPS technology.
The trackpad takes longer to get used to. I would prefer it if it was smaller. It really is huge – a massive 5.5 inches wide. So, that’s a good 1.5 inches more than the Spectre 13.3’s and an inch more than the XPS 13’s trackpad. I also found it a bit over sensitive on default settings but once you play around with the settings you can work your way around it.
The Swift 7 has a starting RAM and storage that are the same as the MacBook’s but Acer goes one step better by serving up an additional USB-C port. The Swift 7 is powered by the 7th generation Kaby Lake Intel Core i5-7Y54 processor which has a stock clock speed of 1.2GHz (you can boost it to 3.2GHz.)
Images look clear and crisp, making the Swift 7 incredibly pleasant to use. For me, there’s a slight issue with glare but it wasn’t enough to really annoy me. As a touch typist I loved the Chiclet-style keyboard which didn’t take me long to get used to and I was quickly typing at my usual speed.
The battery is very impressive, especially for an on-the-go freelance journalist like me: you can’t go wrong with nine hours of battery life. That’s more than enough to binge watch some Netflix (I’m late-to-the-party but loving ‘Fargo’), or slam out a few more chapters of that novella you keep meaning to write.
Overall, WLT thinks it’s a fabulous laptop if you’re looking for something thin and incredibly stylish. It’s reliable, nice and quiet, and has handled all my (admittedly basic) tasks very easily. Naturally, tastes vary so while I find the enormous trackpad difficult to get used to, others might think it’s the bomb. Overall, it’s a laptop I’d be happy to add to my collection!
