According to our colorimeter, they did – in the sense that the average display on premium laptops today is very good compared to a year ago. There are better displays available, but the average provides a solid mix of brightness, contrast, and colors that are going to please the average person. That’s almost exactly where the Swift 7’s display lands.
It comes in at 273 nits of brightness, which is below our preferred 300 nits but – you guessed it – roughly average for the class. The HP Envy 13 is brighter at 369 nits, and the IdeaPad S940 is much brighter at 470 nits, but most laptops in our comparison group come in at around the same as the Swift 7.
If there’s a metric where the Swift 7’s display disappoints, it’s in its contrast ratio. It managed just a 790:1 ratio, which is at the low end of our comparison group and well under the 1,000:1 ratio we like to see from modern premium laptops. The HP Spectre Folio exceeds that threshold and the Asus ZenBook S13 comes close. The Swift 7 isn’t bad, mind you, but we’ve come to expect better.
The Swift 7 felt the tiniest bit sluggish when we had too many browser tabs and apps running.
Color gamut and accuracy show the Swift 7 smack dab in the middle at 72 percent of AdobeRGB, except the very good IdeaPad S940’s 83 percent. You have to step up to machines like the Dell XPS 15 4K display and the HP Spectre x360 15 AMOLED panel to get 90 percent of AdobeRGB or better.
In real-life use, we have no complaints. The Swift 7’s display provides all the colors and contrast we need for comfortable productivity work, and its gamma is only a little dark at 2.3 (2.2 is perfect), and so Netflix and other video looks just fine. The Swift 7 isn’t necessarily a laptop for creative professionals, but then again, the performance limitations likely disqualify it anyway.
Audio performance is another victim of the tiny chassis. Volume doesn’t go particularly high, in fact, it’s one of the quietest laptops we’ve heard in recent memory. It’s clear enough, without distortion, and mids and highs are pleasant (bass is non-existent, as expected). But if you want to entertain a few friends, you’ll be disappointed. Keep a pair of headphones or a Bluetooth speaker handy.
A LOW-POWER PROCESSOR THAT’S A STEP BEHIND
The Swift 7 equips an 8th-gen Intel Core i7-8500Y, which is a fanless dual-core CPU that’s aimed at extending batteries and reducing heat. As we experienced with the Spectre Folio, this processor is fully capable of solid productivity performance – did Acer get the best out of it?
In short, no. The Swift 7 falls behind the Spectre Folio in our testing, which makes it considerably slower than laptops running Intel’s 8th-gen quad-core U-series CPUs. In the Geekbench 4 synthetic benchmark, for example, the Swift 7 managed 4,031 in the single-core test and just 6,449 in the multi-core test. That’s just slightly faster than the 2018 Swift 7 with the older Core i7-7Y75 processor, and significantly behind the Spectre Folio.
When we ran the Swift 7 through our Handbrake test that encodes a 420MB video to H.265, the laptop took 607 seconds to finish. That’s 40 seconds behind the Spectre Folio and 10 seconds slower than the 2018 Swift 7. The ZenBook S13, with its full-power CPU finished in a much faster 212 seconds.
We suspect that Acer tuned the system to avoid generating too much heat. That makes sense in a fanless laptop with such a thin chassis. And indeed, we never felt the laptop get much warmer than around 100 degrees F on the bottom of the chassis. But the tradeoff is reduced performance, to the point where – unlike the Spectre Folio – the Swift 7 did feel the tiniest bit sluggish when we had many browser tabs open and ran Microsoft Office applications. That’s not a good sign.