- How thin is too thin for a laptop?
Well, Acer's going to tell us today with the Swift 7.
It's their brand new LTE 14 inch laptop
and modeled super cool.
Not really sure I can tell you to go buy it,
but it is super cool. Stay tuned.
(energetic music)
Looking at the exterior of the Swift 7,
it is an all metal design
that lends itself to feeling quite dense.
It's 2.6 pounds.
It's not the lightest laptop out there,
but for a 14 inch, it's pretty light as is,
and it feels substantial but evenly balanced.
That's only betrayed by the fact that it's 8.9mm thin,
which is thinner than a lotta smart phones.
It is ridiculous.
Holding this device feels like
you're holding a dinner plate,
or maybe something you'd throw in your oven.
It's just kind of bizarre how thin it is.
Now, there obviously gonna be some trade-offs there,
including those ports.
You get two type C ports, 3.1 power delivery data.
You can charge the device, obviously, through there.
You also get a headphone jack.
I should mention, these are not thunderbolt 3 ports,
due to the chip set on this.
It just doesn't support it, so that's a downside.
And that's really it for the ports you get here,
but you do get a dongle in the box,
which supports ethernet, display out and USB-A.
So, it's a nice little trade-off, but yeah,
definitely dongle life here.
Turn to the right hand side,
you get a single power button and a Nano-SIM slot.
This is an always-connected PC,
which if you followed my video previously,
when I talked about that,
that means it supports SIM out of the box,
as well as E-SIM, which this does have.
In fact, you get a gigabyte of free data for 30 days,
and you can sign up through software
to keep renewing that on a day-to-day basis
or a monthly basis.
Turning to the top of the device, and very clean.
I just really like the design and look of this device.
It's very smooth.
It doesn't pick up fingerprints too badly,
it does a little bit, so you have to wipe it down,
but I've seen worse.
I like the logo.
You can see over here, this little bar,
that is where part of the LTE antenna goes.
Reception on this device is pretty good.
Surface Pro, in my opinion,
sets the bar for reception and performance
of LTE modems on PCs.
This one's just okay.
Being lower versus on top here, it's not gonna be as good,
but that's why that line is there.
Turn to the hinge, you can see it's actually put Swift
etched in black, and it looks really cool and very subtle.
And you have two LEDs there as well,
to tell you when the device is plugged in and powered on.
Turn to the bottom, very clean design here.
You do have the speaker grills on the bottom.
Normally I'd complain about that,
but these speakers are actually on the better end.
I'd give'em B, B+.
Don't get a lot of bass and richness,
but they're still pretty loud and they sound nice.
They also resonate through the body, through the keyboard.
That means if you block these,
it actually doesn't muffle the speakers
coming up through the keyboard.
So, very good audio for what this device is.
You should also notice there are no vents on this device.
This is completely fanless, and therefore silent.
Opening the Swift 7 does require two hands though,
no one-handed usage there.
That's good and bad.
The good news is, well, you get a very stiff hinge on this,
so being so thin, when this is in your lap
and you're on the train, it won't wobble
as much as say HP Spectre does,
and that's actually a pretty good trade-off.
There's always a pro and con to everything.
All right, turning to the display,
this is a 14'' full HD IPS.
Very good color accuracy and contrast.
I really, really like this display.
Now I know what you're saying, it's only full HD,
but it's a very sharp and good looking full HD.
In fact, I think most people would look at this
and think it's a 2K screen, and that's pretty cool.
That also helps with battery life.
You're gonna get a really good full HD one,
but it won't really impact your battery too much,
like a 2K or 4K.
However, you are paying $1,700 for this device,
so unfortunately the screen is a little bit weird,
but...
Let's talk a little bit about these bezels.
Very thin on three sides, which look excellent.
I know a lot of you are freaking out
about this chin here at the bottom.
A lotta you guys don't like that.
Let me defend it a little bit though.
First of all, you do have the web camera down here,
which is kind of not a good thing actually,
and two speakers.
No Windows Hello IR, which is a bummer.
But, they do put the WiFi and LTE antennas here,
which is kinda necessary for this device.
You have to put'em somewhere and you're gonna do it there.
You do get a plastic contrast there
for the reception there, for those antennas.
The other cool thing is, because of this chin down here,
it makes the display slightly taller.
When you're using this in your lap,
that screen sits up higher.
It's actually really nice,
as it's more forward-facing for your face,
and it's just a better experience
than having to keep your chin angled down.
That's one benefit.
The other one is, because it's taller,
the bottom half of this device has to match it.
That means you get more room here for your wrists.
A lotta laptops that are 16x9, which is what this is
cut off this section down here,
so your wrists kinda hang off on the edge,
and it's a little uncomfortable for typing.
That's why people like Surface laptop
and Surface books so much,
because it has a large area down here for your wrists,
and this works here too.
It's a little unusual for design,
but in terms of actually using it,
it's actually a great experience.
Although you don't get a Windows Hello IR camera,
you do get a fingerprint sensor on the left-hand side,
which is weird.
This is where Acer does things a little strange.
I would've put it on the right-hand side,
but it's on the left-hand.
It's also not a very good fingerprint sensor.
I had a lot of misreads with it.
You can kinda get used to it
and train yourself to put your finger on there
and get it to work, but it's not as good as I experience.
There's also another bug with this, which is
when this laptop comes out of a deep sleep mode,
and has to completely resume,
that doesn't turn on at all, so you have to enter in a PIN,
and then use fingerprint later.
That's a bug I believe should be fixed.
Kind of annoying, Acer can do better there.
Now looking at the keyboard itself,
on such a thin device, you'd expect this to be bad,
but this is actually a very good keyboard.
I'd give it a B, B+.
Keys are a little bit smaller than on most 14 inches,
but the travel on this is actually pretty solid,
and I really liked typing on it.
They do do some weird things,
like the split Back Space key.
I didn't really have many errors with that,
but you're gonna split that with the Delete key
and that can be a little confusing.
You also have some pretty tiny arrow keys.
There are obviously trade-offs here,
with such a small and thin device,
but overall it's a very good keyboard.
It is also backlit,
which is a change from last year's model.
Lotta people complained about that, so it is now backlit.
Looking at the track pad, really nice size,
pretty huge and very smooth.
I like this track pad.
It uses precision drivers as well.
So that gets a thumbs up from me.
The weird thing is it doesn't click.
Now, some people have lamented that,
and to be honest, when I first used this device,
I was weirded out by the fact it doesn't click
or have right and left zones on it.
And I had to retrain myself
to do two-finger caps on links to open up things,
like right-click on the menu.
Having said that, I quickly got use to this, and in fact
I kinda prefer tapping now instead of clicking on track pads
even on other devices besides this one.
I wouldn't consider it a negative,
but I will point it out as something to consider
because it is different.
The reason they didn't put a clicking mechanism
in here is it's just too thin.
The battery and other components are underneath it.
They had to sacrifice it.
Having said that, I'm actually pretty happy
with this trackpad.
In another change from last year's model,
this is now a full touchscreen.
It works very well.
No pen support of course, but for those of you
who want a touchscreen on your device,
well ACER delivered this year for you.
I mentioned earlier this is a fanless design,
which is pretty awesome for such a thin laptop.
That's only betrayed by the fact
it's running a Core I7 processor.
I put that in quotes because it's a 7Y 75.
That came out in late 2016.
It is Kaby Lake, dual core four threads.
It's a really nice processor.
It idles at 1.3 GHZ, which is very good for battery life.
It can turbo up to 3.6 GHZ, which makes it a core I7.
It's actually very good performance.
The trade off is it only runs at four and a half watt TDP.
Usually these things run at 15 watt.
That means that while it can hit 3.6 GHZ,
it can't maintain it for long duration.
The end result here is that it runs apps very quickly,
so when it launches them it's very snappy.
The OS is very quick.
Everything about it feels very fast,
but if you want to do some heavy crunching
with this processor after five to ten minutes
it will throttle a bit.
That's just the trade off for a fanless design.
For RAM you're going to get 8 GB of DDR 3,
which is okay.
Let's turn to storage.
You get 256 GB.
That is PCIe, NVMe.
That's an improvement over last year's SATA model.
You get very good read and write speeds.
We're talking 1600 and 800 MB per second,
which is very respectable for this device.
Now, in the world's thinnest laptop,
combined with a Core I7.
You probably expect me to tell you
it gets really terrible battery life.
After all, how else can such a thin device,
with a nice processor, achieve anything less?
It actually gets very good battery life.
I'm talking eight to nine hours of real world usage,
which impressed me.
I was not going into this device
expecting to get very good battery life.
I expect maybe five to six hours,
but no it actually lasts all day.
You do get a USB type C charger out of the box,
which helps with fast charging as well.
I give this actually a thumbs up
for everything they're trying to achieve.
That's what you get though for using a full HD display
and a Y series processor,
combined with a pretty good sized battery.
Alright, let's bring it all in.
I can't really say I recommend you buy this device.
It's super expensive.
It doesn't do everything that a cheaper laptop can do.
Having said that, it's super cool.
I really enjoyed using it.
Typing on it was great.
It's got a really good display.
That fingerprint reader is not very good,
but it kinda works most of the time.
I like the trackpad a lot.
Audio is better than I thought too.
Performance is good.
It gets all day battery life.
There's a lot about this device I really like,
but it's not for everybody.
It's for the person who wants to show off.
It's the guy who gets a sports car.
It's not very practical.
It goes really fast, but you're still
going to just drive on a public road, right?
That's what this device is and that's okay.
I think we should allow companies
to sort of push boundaries and create these devices
and give them a thumbs up for at least trying.
I've been kind of harsh on Acer in the past,
but I really like a lot of the changes they did
this year with this device.
I think it's super impressive.
If you're looking for an always connected PC,
this one actually performs very well.
It's super expensive, but some of you guys
have money and want to get something
that really stands out from the crowd.
Well, go use this in a coffee shop.
I'm sure you'll turn a lot of heads.
Here's my review of the Acer Swift 7.
If you want more information about this device,
make sure you go to that description below
and we'll have a couple links for you.
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Thanks for watching. Take care everybody.