Rating:

6/10

Acer’s budget laptops are its bread and butter. But the 2026 Acer Swift 16 AI makes a strong case for its high-end options too.

This thing has competitively impressive performance, a gorgeous OLED screen, and the biggest touchpad I’ve ever seen, even on the very best laptops. It's so large that it can double as a drawing tablet with the included stylus. Unfortunately, using this oversized touchpad was more frustrating than useful, which makes this otherwise fast and long-lasting laptop much harder to recommend than it should be.

Sleek but Not Quite Polished

The Acer Swift 16 AI might be the prettiest laptop the company has ever made. It doesn’t have the refined aesthetics of a MacBook Pro or Dell XPS 16, but the dark silver chassis doesn’t look cheap like so many Acer laptops do. That’s important, as this costs $1,550, and it needs to look the part. The build quality left me disappointed, though. There's some give in the keyboard and palm rests, and the lid can bend if you press on the corners. Getting the thing open isn't as smooth as I had hoped, since the lip isn't big enough to easily get my finger in.

It’s certainly portable, though. It’s only 0.58 inch thick—slightly thinner than the MacBook Pro but matching the Dell XPS 16 almost exactly. Throughout this review, you’ll see the XPS 16 come up time and time again, as it’s clearly one of the laptops the Swift 16 has its targets on. Despite how thin it is, Acer managed to squeeze in both an HDMI 2.1 and two USB-A ports. That’s unlike the Dell XPS 16, which only sticks with USB-C.

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

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.

Personally, I can't remember the last time I used a number pad—but I know some people rely on them for work. (Although, if you really need one, you can always buy an external number pad that connects over USB). But assuming Acer has data suggesting that people do, in fact, like having a number pad, this solution just introduces new problems.

When I place my hands on the palm rest while typing, half the time, my right palm accidentally triggers a click on the touchpad. It happens less often when my palm is actually resting on the touchpad while typing, but it still occasionally triggers an unwanted action when I tilt my palm back and forth.

My biggest frustration is that while typing, I really need to lift my right hand up entirely to use the touchpad to avoid problems. If not, I frequently ended up with unwanted clicks or failed attempted clicks. Over time, I think I could probably get used to carefully setting my right hand down to type and lifting it up to use the touchpad. I'm also aware that it's possible (and perhaps ergonomically recommended) to type with your wrists floating above the palm rests. But do I like it? No.

But it isn't large just for the sake of it. It lets the touchpad double as a drawing tablet with the included Acer Active Stylus, which uses Wacom's “Feel” technology to replicate a pen-on-paper sensation. I won't pretend to be an artist, but the stylus certainly felt responsive while writing and doing some sketching in Adobe Illustrator. This isn't the first time such an idea has been tried, but with this touchpad's larger size, it makes more sense than ever. It's still nowhere near the size of a Wacom tablet or even an iPad, but if you like to take handwritten notes, for example, it's handy.

Like many premium laptops, this touchpad uses haptic feedback, meaning there's no physical mechanism that clicks down. I'm a big fan of these, and aside from the inadvertent clicks caused by the size, the Swift 16 AI's touchpad otherwise feels highly responsive and natural to use.

The keyboard itself isn't anything special, though it's not my favorite to type on. The actuation point on the keys feels a bit too shallow for fast, precise typing. Meanwhile, the layout feels a little cramped due to the number pad and the very large touchpad directly below.

Performance

The Core Ultra X7 358H is a very special chip. It’s part of the Core Ultra Series 3 line, Intel's latest this year, which is still rolling out very slowly in high-end laptops. Alongside the Dell XPS 14 and XPS 16, this Swift 16 AI is one of the few laptops you can actually buy today with these new chips. What makes the top-end Core Ultra X7 and X9 really exciting is their new ultra-powered discrete graphics. It can play AAA games like Cyberpunk 2077, speed up video rendering, and even better handle advanced tasks like 3D modeling. It's not yet on the level of one of Nvidia's RTX 5050 or 5060 graphics cards, but it's getting awfully close. It's no gaming laptop, but it feels awesome being able to average 56 frames per second at Medium settings in Cyberpunk 2077 on a machine like this.

The Core Ultra X7 is also a highly efficient chip. It's what allows the Swift 16 AI to be so thin without compromising power. It's also the reason the battery life is so good. I was able to get a full workday away from the outlet. And then in local video playback, I ran it for over 16 hours until it eventually gave out.

Considering the OLED display, the great performance and battery life, and the solid price, I wanted to like this laptop a lot. If Acer had opted to remove the number pad rather than implement its oversized touchpad as a solution, the Swift 16 AI would have been a meaningful alternative to the very expensive Dell XPS 16. It being one of the very few laptops to showcase this new Intel makes it even more appealing, even if the price ends up over $1,500. It's hard for it to compete with the 15-inch MacBook Air, which can be up to $50 cheaper when similarly configured. The screen isn't as nice, but it has a higher-quality webcam, touchpad, keyboard, and far better speakers.

But as it stands, it's difficult to recommend due to the touchpad. I found it frustrating, and I think most people who try it will too. I hate to be the one ragging on a more experimental design choice, but this is a case where boring would have been better. The Acer Swift 16 AI might be worth it if you have a specific need for either the number pad or the stylus, but it isn't a laptop most people should buy.