by Acer has unveiled its latest flagship laptopthe Swift Edge that competes with the LG Gram 16 in a niche category best defined as ultrabook with a large screen. The SFA16-41, as it’s otherwise known, is just 13mm thick, has a 16-inch screen and weighs 1.17kg, around 30g lighter than its LG rival. this thanks to its magnesium alloy chassis.
It is also one of the first, if not the first mainstream laptop to be powered by the new AMD Ryzen PRO 6000 processors along with Plutoa new security feature implemented by Microsoft.
The Swift Edge is available with 16GB LPDDR5 RAM (albeit in one slot) and 1TB SSD, which is a lot more than what others offer (the LG Gram 16 for example starts at 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD).
The flip side of this improved hardware configuration is a higher price: $1499.99 / €1499.99 / £1499.99. We have yet to receive confirmation that it will be available in Australia.
Designed for creatives
While the screen is impressive, it’s not the first time this screen has appeared on a laptop.
Previously Acer, Lenovo, Gigabyte, Dell and Asus bundled a similarly sized 16:10 OLED display with some of their notebooks, allowing users to enjoy the real estate offered by the 3840 x 2400 resolution (that’s 9, 22 million pixels). Acer claims it supports 100% of the DCI-P3 color gamut and a maximum brightness of 500 nits for what it calls “cinema-quality graphics” – and it could very well be the perfect laptop for photoshop for some users.
What makes the device stand out is the presence of the Ryzen 6800U, a powerful 8-core, 16-thread processor based on AMD’s Zen 3+ technology and manufactured using a 6nm process. The end result is an inexpensive CPU that has a TPD comparable to the Core i7-1260P (as used in the LG Gram 16), but with performance that rivals a more demanding processor such as the Core i5-12500H (as used in Honor MagicBook 14).
Currently, there are only two models that offer this: the amazing 1Kg Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED and the surprisingly affordable Lenovo ThinkBook 13s Gen 4.
Other specs include Radeon 680M graphics with an 8K-capable HDMI 2.1 port, Wi-Fi 6e wireless, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C ports, two Type-A ports and an audio jack, all powered by a rather small battery 3 54 WHr cells, which Acer says will power the Swift Edge for up to 7.5 hours.
Compared to the LG Gram 16, you miss out on battery capacity, a numeric keypad, Thunderbolt 4 ports, and an extra SSD slot. Worth? Yes, if you want color fidelity and speed, no if you want battery life and expandability.
