Stride Post Latest News
Related Articles
The last time we were able to see this model Acer Swift 3 was in July of 2020. The Swift 3 was an ultraportable laptop with a 13.5-inch display with a hefty 3:2 aspect ratio, which caused us to declare it fashionable for a square. The 2021 version of Swift 3 (starts a $749.99; $999.99 as tested) is a different story, sporting 14-inch screens that use the more popular square 16:9 aspect ratio, and it’s making us long for last year’s more spacious view and less scrolling.
Suppose you’re okay with the larger screen (or you specifically desire it since you’re a fan of watching films with your laptop). In that case, There’s plenty to appreciate about the new Swift 3, from its aluminum frame and Thunderbolt 4 support to its extravagantly long battery life as well as its affordable cost. However, it doesn’t take away over the Dell the XPS 13 and its impressive 16:10-sized display in the ultraportable Editors’ Choice honors list.
Sleek, Sturdy, and Silver
The 14-inch Swift 3 starts at $699.99 with an Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. Our $999.99 test unit bumps the CPU to the Core i7 and increased the memory. Although the 500GB SSD in the basic model will be nice (256GB is beginning to feel tight these days), It reduces the $300 upgrade appealing since it won’t get you additional storage.
All models feature a non-touch display with full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) resolution and a 16:9 aspect ratio. Swift 3 is a study of silver. The aluminum chassis has an aluminum lid as well as a silver keyboard deck that has silver keys, as well as the bottom panel is silver.
The only part of the laptop that isn’t silver is the black matte bezels that frame the display. It’s an unassuming yet minimalist design like it belongs in an office or an espresso shop. For more information, you can check this article.
The chassis is made of metal and feels sturdy. The lid is strong, providing good protection to the display. The keyboard deck is solid. There’s a little flex on the chassis, and the hinge on display is free of the usual screen wobble. The Swift 3 measures 0.63 by 12.7 by 8.4 inches and weighs 2.71 pounds.
It’s larger and deeper than the previous Swift 3 model we tested in the past due to the screen’s aspect ratio. This model is slightly heavier than the 2.62-pound model, but it’s still extremely portable (and smaller than its predecessor, 2.8-pound Dell XPS 13).
The keys are comfortable with shallow travel, making them feel swift and responsive, yet it’s not as rigid as an older MacBook “butterfly” keyboard. The main drawback is the small cursor arrow keys. Click here to know more about this machine.
Best Part
The down and up arrows share space on one key, and the right and left Arrow keys are half-height because Acer has squeezed in Page Pages Up and Down keys over the other keys. It may take some time to get familiar with before you get used to not using the incorrect keys.
The keyboard is illuminated. However, there’s only one level of brightness. For the price, you should look for two or three levels of backlighting that can be adjusted for the ambient lighting. Silver keys with gray letters don’t provide the most vivid contrast, making it difficult to determine the keys in specific lighting situations.
A fingerprint reader is situated just below the cursor and arrows. If you don’t have an IR webcam to detect faces, The fingerprint reader is your sole choice for logging in using Windows Hello instead of typing passwords.
Contrary to the keyboard, it offers an excessive amount of travel, making clicking seem slower. It’s not a major issue, but overall, the touchpad is acceptable, with smooth, smooth movement and a precise recording of mouse movements.
A Wide, But Still Cramped, Display
The biggest difference from the previous season’s Swift 3 is returning to a 16:9 aspect ratio. With a screen of 14 inches, I could feel the pinch of this aspect ratio. It’s an ideal choice for watching movies; however, the lack of vertical space causes the need to scroll through more documents and websites. A 16:9 display is a more suitable choice for 15.6or 17.3-inch laptops, which do not just provide more screen space but are often employed for entertainment. If you have a 14-inch or less display, a 16-inch or 3:2 aspect proportion offers more flexibility and makes the screen appear bigger than it is.
This aspect ratio is just one of the three modifications to the display, making us appreciate this year’s Swift three times less. Another change is that the resolution has been reduced from 2,256 x 1,504 to the standard 1920 in 1,080 pixels. In reality, Full HD is adequate for a 14-inch display. However, images and text appear sharp. The colors appear accurate, and the screen is also a good choice. Acer states that the screen can cover all of the sRGB colors. (More about the screen’s quantitative testing at the close in this article.)
Best Part
Although the smaller resolution isn’t a problem in such a size, the 3rd issue is that the screen’s measured brightness has decreased from 300 to 400 nits in the model this year. I used the Swift 3’s display adjusted to maximum brightness when I was using the device and mostly in a dimly bright space. The screen appeared dull in my bright breakfast area, and I would not suggest using it outdoors for any period of duration.
The webcam with a 720p resolution above the screen recorded fairly sharp videos, but the videos were grainy unless lighting conditions were optimal. The camera’s colors looked oversaturated, with skin tones inclining towards red, whatever the lighting conditions.
However, they provide surprisingly high-quality audio for laptops. The bass response is moderate to provide music playback with an extra impact, and the speakers can play a decent volume at maximum volume but without loss of clarity.
You don’t have to carry any dongles on Swift 3. Swift 3. The laptop has Type-A and TypeC USB ports. There’s a USB-C port, which has Thunderbolt four support at the left-hand edge, a USB 3.2 Port for Type-A, and the HDMI Video output.
Productivity Tests
The primary benchmark for the UL’s PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to assess the overall performance of office-related tasks like spreadsheeting, word processing, videoconferencing, and browsing the web. We also test PCMark’s Full System Drive test to test the load speed and performance of the laptop’s storage.
Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses the business’s Cinema 4D engine to render complex scenes. At the same time, Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro emulates the most popular applications ranging from PDF rendering to speech recognition to machine learning. We also use the Handbrake video transcoder, which is open source, 1.4 to transform a 12-minute video from 4K to 1080p (lower time frames are more efficient).
Best Part
Our final productivity test was Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop that utilizes a version of the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to assess the performance of a computer in multimedia and content creation applications. It’s an automated extension and performs a range of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop functions, ranging from opening the image, rotating it, resizing it, and saving an image to applying gradient fills, masks and filters.
It’s Swift 3 did well among the Intel models, with the only exception of being a bit behind in PCMark 10’s test for storage; in fact, it managed to eke out victories in both the Geekbench as well as Photoshop benchmarks.
Battery and Display Tests
We test the battery life of laptops by playing a locally-stored video at 720p (the Blender movie, which is open source Blender film Tears of Steel) with the brightness of the display set at 50% and the volume of the audio at 100 percent.
Verdict: Wider Isn’t Always Better
It’s a great laptop. Acer Swift 3 has several positive aspects: it’s an ultraportable that offers a variety in features and a hint of fashion and competitive performance (especially its battery longevity) for a price of $999.99. Similar to its competition, there’s no game laptop but does tick the boxes you’d expect from an ideal travel companion.
