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The pursuit of ever lighter laptops can sometimes run aground on the rocks of durability and build quality, but occasionally a manufacturer bucks that trend. Acer is the latest to do so with its Swift Air 16: a 16in laptop that weighs just 990g, yet feels robust enough to shrug off trials and tribulations of day-to-day travel and working from home.
Announced at the IFA 2025 tech show in Berlin, Acer’s latest not only comes in at a smidge under a kilogram, but its shell is built from magnesium-aluminium alloy and feels stiff and sturdy. The price is keen, too, starting at £899 for the base model.
Acer Swift Air 16: Specifications
- 16in 1,920 x 1,200, 60Hz IPS display; or 2,880 x 1,800, 120Hz OLED
- AMD Ryzen AI 5 330, AI 5 340 or AI 7 350 CPU
- Integrated AMD Radeon 840M or 860M graphics
- Up to 32GB of RAM
- Up to 1TB iof SSD storage
- 2 x USB-C 3.2, 1 x USB-A
- 50Wh battery for a claimed 11 hours of battery life
- Dimensions: 359 x 240 x 15.9mm (WDH), IPS model; 359 x 240 x 16.5mm (WHD), 1.09kg (OLED model)
- Weight: 0.99kg (IPS); 1.09kg (OLED)
- Price: from £899
- Availability:
Acer Swift Air 16: New features and first impressions
The Acer Swift Air 16 really is a remarkable thing. It’s so light that the first time I picked it up I thought it was a dummy or a prop – that the internals had been stripped out. But no, this is a fully working 16in laptop that – to put into some context – weighs half a kilo less than the 15.3in MacBook Air I am writing this piece on right now. It looks pretty handsome, too, and is available in four colours: silver, blue, grey and white.
Despite the light weight and impressively slim profile – the laptop is a mere 15.9mm thin – the Swift Air 16 feels quite robust. The screen does wobble a bit when you pick it up but the base is rigid and doesn’t deflect too much when you type on the keyboard or give it a twist.
And it is also remarkably well appointed with ports and sockets. Many laptops in this class will only give you a power jack, a 3.5mm audio jack and a couple of USB-C ports to play with, but here those ports are accompanied by a USB-A 3.2 port, and one full-sized HDMI 1.4 display output.
It also comes with full support for Windows Hello face login thanks to its infrared webcam, it has quad-speakers to deliver audio, and wireless communications are catered for with support for both Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.4.
The Acer Swift Air 16 also bucks the lightweight laptop trend under the hood: instead of using Intel or Qualcomm silicon, it’s powered by AMD Ryzen chips – specifically, the Rzyen AI 5 330, AI 5 340 or AI 7 350 CPUs with Radeon 840M or 860M integrated graphics. Acer didn’t specify how much RAM or storage all the various models would come with, but with the top-end model getting 32GB and 1TB of storage, I would expect the base model to deliver 16GB and 256GB.
That’s a pretty healthy specification for such a slim, sleek machine at this price. Upon first impressions, both the keyboard and touchpad are decent, too. You can’t expect miracles from a laptop of this size and weight, but there didn’t appear to be any major issues with the Swift Air 16’s ergonomics.
The keys didn’t feel rattly or lightweight, and although the touchpad was of the hinged mechanical variety, it felt smooth under the finger and the action was nicely damped. Some might baulk at the zero lattice layout and there isn’t enough of a dish in each key for my liking, but I’m sure you’d get used to it after a while.
The one major concern I have here is that the battery is a pretty small 50Wh and Acer itself is only claiming 11 hours of video playback battery life. That’s below average by today’s ultra-efficient standards, where times of 15 hours, even 20 hours and beyond have become commonplace. Acer’s own Qualcomm-powered Swift AI 14 delivered nearly 24 hours in our battery tests, for example.
It’s also worth noting that you only get the sub-1kg weight and 15.9mm thickness if you opt for the model with the 1,920 x 1,200 resolution 60Hz IPS display, as the premium 120Hz OLED model is ever so slightly heavier and thicker. Still, 1.09kg and 16.5mm are hardly causes for major concern with a screen this large.
Acer Swift Air 16: Early verdict
As impressive as the build is, I’m not sure that the relatively middling battery life is a sacrifice I’d personally feel comfortable making – I’m not that desperate for a massive laptop that weighs less than a bag of sugar.
But if you absolutely must have a laptop with a 16in display and you don’t want to pay the weight penalty, a small battery is clearly the sacrifice you’re going to have to make. Still, I’ll wait to pass my final verdict until I have my hands on the laptop and have tested the battery myself. Who knows, it might yet surprise me.
