Hands-on with the Acer Swift 5 – in pictures

Hands-on with the Acer Swift 5 – in pictures

With its 15.6in screen and a fighting weight of under 1kg, Acer’s new Swift 5 seems to have found the perfect middle ground for a laptop. The obvious question: how the hell has Acer managed it? Is the Swift 5 just full of fluff or something? We went hands-on to find out…

Design: Slim it to win it

The key to getting a 15in laptop down under 1kg is in not using a normal aluminium alloy. Aluminium feels and looks great, but alternatives get you similar strength with much less weight. That means the Swift 5’s top and bottom are a magnesium-lithium alloy, but its insides are a more familiar magnesium-aluminium alloy, for extra rigidity. This is a chiseled, lean, eat-chocolate-when-you’re-dead laptop.

Build: Plastic fantastic

The stinger is that these alloys do feel a wee bit like plastic, particularly when you first get your hands on them. They don’t have the immediate cool, ultra-hard feel you get with aluminium or steel. The screen also has just 5.87mm bezel to the sides, making the footprint small as well. This is rapidly starting to sound like the ultimate student laptop. And starting at £899 it’s far cheaper than a MacBook Pro 15, which starts at £1899 before you even think about adding the fancy OLED Touch Bar. Ouch.

Features: Fit for purpose

Despite being the lightest 15in laptop I’ve held, the Acer Swift 5 is made for the normal buyer. It won’t force you into using USB-C ports either, like some top-end laptops today. There’s one Gen 2 USB-C 3.1 port, but you also get two normal USB 3.0 ports, an SD card slot and an HDMI. It’s your mum’s roast dinner of connections: not flashy but immensely comforting. Acer’s Swift 5 won’t judge you for still using that old hard drive you bought in 2005. There’s also a fingerprint scanner just below the keyboard keys.

Specs: Take your pick

The screen is a pretty standard HD-resolution 15.6in IPS LCD with a touch layer, although we’ll have to see whether the touch model actually makes it to the UK. It’s the same deal with the specs. Acer will make this ultra-light stunner in versions all the way up to 1TB SSD storage with 16GB DDR4 RAM and an Intel 8th Generation Core i7. But we don’t know if we’ll be able to buy that spec here because the 15in Swift 5 won’t arrive until end of 2018.

Early Verdict: Light yet substantial

The Swift 5 possesses the sort of power that will let you do pretty much anything, besides playing games. There’s no dedicated GPU, so while you can play Minecraft and Fortnite, the Swift 5 and The Witcher 3 aren’t going to get along at all. However, as adding one would mean it putting on serious weight, we’ll stick to the Swift 5 for our everyday runabout, thanks. We’ll find out how it copes with all the tasks we throw at it once we get one in for a full review.