The two USB-C ports are on the left side, alongside HDMI and a USB-A port. The second USB-A port, a microSD card slot, and a headphone jack are on the right. It’s not a nice assortment of ports overall, and I just wish Acer had split the USB-C ports up so the laptop could have a charging port on either side.
Acer is using a top-notch 16-inch OLED touchscreen display on the Swift 16 AI. It has a resolution of 2880 x 1800, a refresh rate of 120 Hz, and color saturation as close to perfect as I’ve seen. Like most OLED laptops, it has a glossy, highly reflective display that maxes out at 315 nits of brightness, according to my testing. It’s nowhere near as bright as IPS or mini-LED displays, but the trade-off in brightness is to achieve that unbeatable contrast that only OLED can deliver.
A Risky Touchpad
Photograph: Luke Larsen
The full-size keyboard and oversized touchpad are definitely the most notable elements of this laptop. The first thing you notice is the touchpad, which is certainly the largest I’ve ever seen. You might think it looks a bit silly, but I always like it when companies leave as little wasted space on a product as possible. I really wanted to like this touchpad, but unfortunately, it could deter most people from buying this product.
On large laptops like the Swift 16 AI, which have a number pad to the right of the keyboard, the touchpad is typically below the keyboard, making it visually off-center. While it’s functional, this arrangement looks odd, and some 16-inch laptops get around this by omitting the number pad entirely. That’s what you see on the MacBook Pro, the Dell XPS 16, and most gaming laptops these days, too.
Rather than removing the number pad, Acer expanded the touchpad and centered it. This makes good use of the space below the keyboard, preserves the number pad, and solves the aesthetic annoyance that typically plagues full-size laptops.
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