The Acer Swift 14 is all over AI the place. It has powerful chip options, exceptional battery life, and loads of ports for such a portable laptop. The keyboard and trackpad are solid, which is not always a given at any price. But the screen and webcam are mediocre, and the speakers are outright terrible.

Battery life, performance, and ports are important, and it makes sense to prioritize those, even if it means cutting costs elsewhere. Those are the kinds of tough tradeoffs that budget laptops have to make.

Unfortunately, the Swift 14 AI is not a budget laptop.

Our review configuration of the Swift 14 AI comes with a Core Ultra 7 Series 2 258V (Lunar Lake) processor, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB SSD at an MSRP of $1,299.99. There are numerous Swift 14 variants, including a $1,199.99 AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 config (which I also tested) and a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus / Elite model with a better screen. Acer also makes a 16-inch Intel version with an OLED screen, and it’s actually $50 cheaper than the 14 but with less RAM.

At 2.95 pounds and 0.63-inches thick, the Swift 14 AI isn’t the thinnest or lightest around, but it has four USB ports — two USB-A 3.2 and two USB4 — plus a 3.5mm audio jack and HDMI 2.1. I’m used to thin-and-light laptops in this price range having just a couple USB-C ports, maybe a USB-A or proprietary charging port, and an audio jack. Having all this I/O on a laptop of this size is a treat when you need it.

The other big treats, in both the Intel Lunar Lake and AMD Ryzen AI models, are the performance and battery life. Both are great for everyday productivity tasks like running many Chrome tabs, Google Docs editing, lengthy video calls, and frequent use of messaging apps like Slack and Signal. The Intel model is an impressive battery sipper, lasting from sunup to well past sundown under lighter workloads. In our battery rundown test, it lasted nearly 17 hours — matching the 15-inch Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition and beaten only by Arm-based Snapdragon laptops like the new Surface Laptop 13-inch and last year’s HP OmniBook X.

The AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 version, which is nearly identical to the Intel Lunar Lake except for a different hinge design and color, sacrifices a bit of battery life for the sake of better multi-core and graphics performance. But it can still last through an extra long day of average use and then some, and it still got 15 hours in our battery rundown test.

The keyboard and trackpad aren’t showstoppers, but they’re solid. The keyboard feels a little thin, but it has decently sized keycaps with just enough tactile feedback to not feel mushy. The mechanical trackpad is a decent size, clicks easily, and is surprisingly quiet. It has a design in its top-right corner reminiscent of some kind of neural pathway. It glows when the neural processing unit (NPU) is being used, to indicate that it’s “thinking,” but it sometimes lights up unexpectedly during everyday tasks, too.

Boot up the Swift 14 AI for the first time and you’re met with two of its most readily apparent flaws: a mediocre screen and egregious bloatware. The 14-inch 1920 x 1200 / 60Hz display can reach a bright 400 nits, but it looks a bit low contrast and lacks visual punch. Your eyes may adjust to it, but as soon as you spot a better screen on something like a Surface Laptop or MacBook Air you’re reminded of the Swift’s shortcomings.

The bloatware isn’t too hard to stamp out, but it’s a bit more invasive than other laptops. You may have wanted Dropbox anyway, but I doubt you want it pestering you with subscription offers as soon as you set up your computer. Then there’s the taskbar shortcut to Booking.com and the pop-ups for Google Play Games and free-to-play dreck. Bloatware is one way to subsidize the price of a laptop and keep the price down, but I’m not sure the Swift 14 AI is cheap enough to justify it. But at least it’s easy to uninstall.

Unfortunately, you can’t uninstall the speakers or the webcam. The two-speaker setup is a crime against music. You’re better off cranking the volume on your phone. Zoom and Google Meet calls are somehow always too loud or too quiet — I had to keep changing the volume during meetings to accommodate different people’s voices. And the webcam is only a little better. I’ve seen it render an okay image in bright lighting, but once you’re in even slightly lower lighting then it falls apart. Acer’s built-in software offers image enhancement, but it just boosts contrast and oversharpens, making everything look crunchy.

You can certainly get a worse laptop for more money. But for around the same price, you can get the same or similar processor with a nicer screen, better speakers, and equivalent battery life in Lenovo’s Yoga Slim 7i (it’s just a touch larger, with a worse trackpad). Or you can spend a little more and get an Asus Zenbook S 14 with an excellent OLED screen and slightly better specs (though one less USB-A port). And if you can work with macOS or Windows on Arm and put up with fewer ports, then the 13-inch MacBook Air M4 or 13-inch Surface Laptop are far better all-around packages for less.

Part of me still really likes the Swift 14 AI. Performance and battery life are top notch, the port selection is great for a thin-and-light, and almost everything else is at least decent. If you can get it well below its $1,300 MSRP — say, around $1,000 — the mediocre screen and awful speakers are more forgivable. And it seems to go on sale fairly often. Just don’t forget your headphones.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge