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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Acer announced a slew of new laptops at IFA in Berlin, but the Swift Air 16 is one of the most exciting.
- The 16-inch laptop has a starting weight of 2.18 pounds – one of the lightest on the market.
- There are some trade-offs with getting a 16-inch laptop down to this size, specifically with battery life.
Acer announced a new 16-inch featherweight laptop at IFA in Berlin yesterday, weighing just 2.18 pounds for the IPS configuration — about the same weight as Asus’ Zenbook A14, one of the lightest laptops I’ve ever held. The AMOLED weighs just 2.43 pounds, still lighter than a 13-inch MacBook Air.
The Acer Swift Air 16 manages this weight with a 16-inch display — an impressive feat on first glance and one of the lightest 16-inch laptops on the market right now. Currently, we have European pricing set at around €999, but no set price for North America just yet.
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One of the first things to stick out with this laptop’s physical design is the keyboard, which looks a whole lot like the “zero-lattice” keyboard emblematic of Dell’s XPS lineup. The full-sized board on the Swift Air 16 features the same unified design with gapless keys (without the LED function panel, of course). It looks cool, but like the XPS, we’ll have to test its practicality.
The Swift Air 16 will come with an IPS or AMOLED option, up to a WQXGA+ resolution at 120Hz for the latter configuration at 400 nits of brightness. Under the hood, it’s powered by an AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 processor, officially earning it the Copilot+ PC title.
It comes with 32GB of LPDDR5 memory and up to a 1TB M.2 PCIe Gen4 SSD, two USB-C ports, one USB-A, an HDMI 1.4 port, and an audio jack.
One thing to note is the device’s 50Wh battery, which is small for a 16-inch laptop. For comparison, the previously mentioned Zenbook A14 houses a 70Whr battery and weighs about the same, leading me to believe this is one of the more significant trade-offs made to get it down to weight.
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Acer says the Swift Air 16 will get up to 13 hours of battery life on one charge, which is average, but these days isn’t all that impressive for a thin and light Copilot+ PC. We’ll have to test how it performs in day-to-day use while untethered from power.
The Swift Air 16 is geared toward hybrid commuters and professionals who want a device that can slip into a bag unnoticed and value portability and a nice-looking display over raw power. In that sense, it seems Acer is hoping the display, future-forward design, and lightness-at-all-costs outweigh (no pun intended) any gaps in longevity.
The Acer Swift Air 16 will be available in North America in Nov., 2025.