The Acer Swift Go 14 is a prestige portable laptop that costs slightly less than most of the competition.
It’s a bit like the laptop I assume inspired its name in that sense, the Microsoft Surface Go laptop. However, this kind of machine is nothing truly new for the Acer Swift series.
You’ve been able to find laptops with a similar modus operandi for years in the Swift 3. But unlike the old-old days, the Swift Go 14’s specs go genuinely high, including an 1800p OLED display that’s reviewed here.
The issues? It’s not the most stunning ultraportable in its class, and the plastic touchpad seems simply out of place in the higher-end Swift Go 14. Keep reading for the full review.
Acer Swift Go 14
The success of the Swift Go 14 is in using a high-performance processor ready for demanding jobs, and yet not making a laptop that weighs a lot or has short battery life. However, a few parts stick out as mid-tier at best, especially when shopping for the higher-spec models.
Pros
- Powerful CPU performance
- All-day battery life (for indoors work, at least)
- Great portability
- Colour-rich OLED screen
Cons
- Touchpad and keyboard quality are behind the pack
- Dull design
- Bass-free speakers
Design
- Metal casing
- 1.25kg weight
- A largely non show-off design
The Acer Swift Go 14 pricing starts from $799/£699 and goes up to $1050/£999, depending on your configuration. It’s willing to go high-end, but at its heart this is a sensible and practical laptop rather than a luxury show-off.
It doesn’t look hugely different to some of Acer’s budget models. But perhaps that says more about the touches of class the company manages to fit into laptops like the ultra-budget Swift 1.
The Swift 14 Go has an aluminium casing. None of the main body panels are plastic, and this laptop is made for coffee shop-hopping portability. It weighs a shade under the category average at 1.25kg, and is moderately slim at 14.95mm thick. Keyboard plate rigidity is excellent and the screen is pretty stiff for one without a massive pane of display glass to stabilise it.
Here’s where I come to the first of the less high-end looking parts of the Acer Swift Go 14. It has a plastic screen, which helps lower weight, but also means there’s a raised plastic border around the display itself. All of these borders are slim. But some of you may significantly prefer the appearance of end-to-end display glass.
The Acer Swift Go 14 also lacks the luxury laptop trait of being able to open the lid from closed with a single finger. In its place you get a reliable bog-standard hinge that only opens to around the 130-degree norm, but doesn’t wobble about if you work with the laptop on your knees while out and about.
Display
- Up to a 1800p OLED
- Extreme colour coverage
- Non-touch display (in review model)
Some of these screen observations are not going to apply to the Swift Go 14 version you may be eyeing up. There are three displays on offer, depending on where you live. Two IPS LCDs, with and without touch, and what’s being tested here – so do watch out for that.
This is the Big Mac, a 1800p 14in OLED. It’s one of the most colourful laptop screens I’ve ever reviewed, and as it’s an OLED you naturally get pretty much flawless contrast. Having written some of this write-up out in the blazing sun at the local park, I can confirm it gets pretty bright. Not MacBook Pro miniLED screen bright, but comparable with the other OLED displays found in even more expensive laptops in 2023.
It could perhaps look slightly better with a glass display surface instead of a plastic one. But in most situations the difference isn’t that noticeable as the display is still glossy.
The real potential drawback here is the lack of touch and stylus support. If you need either of those, look elsewhere – even at the lower-end touch-capable IPS Swift Go 14.
Keyboard and touchpad
- Weak plastic touchpad
- OK keyboard
- 2-stage backlight
The keyboard and touchpad are the areas in which the Acer Swift Go 14 doesn’t quite match up to the standards of my favourite ultraportables. And the pad is the main sticking point.
Acer’s Swift Go 14 keyboard is fine but nothing special. It has mid-tier action, an enthusiastically springy feel and is neither particularly dark or bright. In the first few minutes I didn’t like it that much, but over the days and thousands of typed words – yep I can live with this just fine. It also has a basic 2-level white key backlight.
The Acer Swift Go 14 touchpad is OK to put in a laptop selling towards the lower end of the this family’s price range – as mentioned, models start at $799/£699. But this pad is a slab of plastic, and I expect glass when you might end up paying $1050/£1000+.
This use of plastic in touchpads is something of an Acer 2023 trend. You’ll also find one in the even pricier Acer Swift Edge. Why? It seems to be part of Acer’s push to use more recycled materials, because it calls the pad OceanGlass. It’s another word for recycled plastic.
A cynical take is that Acer is dressing up cost savings as eco marketing. But it doesn’t actually make much of a fuss about OceanGlass in the Swift 14 Go’s product page.
It’s tackier, squeaker than glass, and feels less substantial. Its mechanical clicker is also quite bright. However, it at least functions perfectly well, and while small the entire surface is clickable. Mechanical pads are often hard to “click” in towards their top. Not so here.
Performance
- High performance processor
- No dedicated graphics card
- Noticeable fan noise under pressure
Another category, another caveat. Just like last year’s Swift 3 series, the Acer Swift Go 14 are a diverse bunch, with CPU options ranging from the AMD Ryzen 5 7520U right up to what’s tested here, the Intel Core i7-13700H.
Storage is what brings them together. As seen in some other recent mid-tier Acers, 512GB is the minimum storage you’ll find in the Swift Go 14. This is double what you get in the base MacBook Air. And unlike Apple and Microsoft, Acer’s upgrade costs are entirely reasonable.
512GB is going to go a long way as long as you don’t plan on editing video or playing games that take up dozens of gigabytes. You’re going to have limited luck with the latter anyway, as the Acer Swift Go 14 only has the Intel Xe graphics chipsets built into the central processor.
For other stuff you’re golden, though. The Core i7-13700H is part of Intel’s performance laptop range, the kind of CPU you might find in a much heavier and thicker laptop.
Of course, a laptop like that is going to be able to push the processor harder, for longer. But would I use the Swift 14 Go for video editing? Sure, particularly the 16GB RAM version tested here.
Under normal workloads – word processing, email, a bit of browsing – the Swift Go 14 is entirely silent. However, as is the norm for this class you do pay for the thin, low-weight design with the slightly annoying higher-pitch fan tone, heard whenever you put the thing under real stress.
Battery life and features
- Almost 10 hours of light use
- Fairly advanced 1440p webcam
- Handy array of connections
A slim laptop like this with a performance-led processor usually sets off alarm bells. Back in the day you wouldn’t have expected the average Intel H-series laptop battery to last much more than five hours.
Thankfully, the Acer Swift Go 14 does much better than that. It can last up to nine hours and 40 minutes, comfortably over the classic 8-hour “all day” use.
However, when working outside with the display blasting at maximum brightness, you can expect the Swift to last closer to five hours 20 minutes.
The Swift Go 14’s webcam is another curiosity. I’ve seen loads of laptop ranges switch from 720p cams to Full HD ones over the last 12 months or so, but the Swift has an even higher-res option, at 2560 x 1440 resolution camera.
While this doesn’t solve traditional webcam problems like bad-looking colour in indoors lighting and bad dynamic range, it does effectively enable a system-level feature called Automatic Framing. Like the webcam of some smart speakers or Insta360’s action cameras, this crops into the camera view to centre the image on your face. It’s a neat concept, but does mean you don’t use the whole field of view when aiming for that classic webcam look.
The Acer Swift Go 14 also feels ready to roll with work in other ways too. Its connectivity is, by 2023 standards, generous and diverse. You get two Thunderbolt 4 USBs (USB4 in AMD CPU models), two USB-A 4.2s, a microSD slot and an HDMI 2.1, ready for the latest TVs.
Take that, MacBooks. They will handle movie playback directly from the laptop screen itself better than the Acer Swift Go 14, though, as this laptop does not have great speakers. Maximum volume is fine, but even after fiddling with the Nahimic sound modes on offer, none can conjure a remotely persuasive approximation of real bass.
Verdict
The Acer Swift 14 Go may be part of a new sub-series, but this is classic Acer design, in a mostly positive sense.
For sensible money you can get a seriously performant, portable and decent-looking laptop that will last through a full day of work. And Acer doesn’t charge obscene amounts if you want to bump up the spec, as Microsoft does for its own otherwise lovely Laptop Go line.
A few issues arise when you get to the higher-end models, as tested here, where some of the concessions to value start to stick out, like the plastic touchpad and bland design. I’d have liked to see better.