Acer Swift Lite Review – Lite On Its Feet

Generally, laptop buyers can be divided into three groups: those who want the cheapest thing available, those who want the best that money can buy, and finally, those who want the best value for their money. Sure, there might be some overlap, but we’d wager most folks fall into the third group. Luckily for them, that’s also where the Acer Swift Lite lives.

It isn’t going to blow anyone away with its performance, but that’s not what Acer set out to achieve. The target with this one is its value proposition, and to that end, Acer does pretty well.

With a starting price of R10,000, depending on where you shop, this should be plenty of laptop for anyone with assignments to complete. Whether those come from a teacher, a lecturer, or an overly zealous corporate boss won’t make a difference to the Swift Lite.

Metallic sheen

The Swift Lite’s minimalist silver chassis won’t be studied in design schools, despite the friendly doodles on the lid. It also isn’t the thinnest, at 16.9mm, but that’s okay because it means there’s plenty of space for useful ports. Those include a single USB-C port for quick data transfers and charging duties, a full-sized HDMI 1.4 port, a 3,5mm audio combo jack, three USB-A ports, and a microSD card slot. Its 1.35kg heft, thanks to the mostly metal construction, also means it should survive gentle knocks without too much protest.

Under the metal lid lies a fairly standard 14in 60Hz 16:10 display. It boasts a slightly larger 1,920 x 1,200px resolution than regular Full HD laptop displays, but other than that, there isn’t anything special to report. Its picture quality is okay, its motion handling is okay, and its brightness… you get the idea. Whether you’re scrolling spreadsheets, checking your email, or keeping up with whoever is famous these days, the Swift Lite will handle the task.

Entry-level power

Where the Swift Lite does more than just ‘okay’ is in Acer’s choice of internal components. At the sub-R10k mark, the field is chock-full of laptops sporting Intel Celeron CPUs. While those chips do technically provide some compute power, the 13th-gen Intel Core i3-1315U inside our review unit wipes the floor with them without requiring much more power or money. Our unit came with 8GB of  RAM and a 512GB NVMe SSD, but can also be upgraded in the Acer Swift Lite to a Core i5-1334U for R2,000 more.

Seeing as the ‘U’ on the end denotes ultra-low power consumption (12 – 15W for this one), you should keep your expectations reasonable. Heavy workloads are going to slow the i3-1315U down, but word processing and light browsing should be handled well.

We hoped Acer could make the most of using a low-power chip to eek more runtime out of the 58Wh battery. But while Acer says you can get “up to 10 hours of battery life”, during our benchmarks, we only saw an average of around seven hours during our best-case scenario streaming test.

For that, we disable unnecessary features if any are available, keep screen brightness at its lowest setting, and make sure the power profile is set to ‘best efficiency’ while streaming a YouTube video. We’d expect that time to drop if you increase the brightness or stream with Bluetooth headphones connected. Expect even less battery life if you’re giving the CPU anything particularly taxing to do.

A few extras

Entry-level performance is most of the package here, but it isn’t the only benefit of going with the Swift Lite. It also comes with a rather quick Wi-Fi 6E module for fast wireless connectivity. There’s also a 2MP Full HD webcam for the odd meeting or online lecture, but it doesn’t allow for Windows Hello facial unlocking – worth keeping in mind.

Don’t get excited when you see that dedicated Copilot key on the bottom keyboard row, it will call up Microsoft’s AI assistant alright, but this laptop misses out on proper Copilot+ capabilities without a dedicated NPU in the i3-1315U.

Acer Swift Lite verdict

Good-value hunters should give the Acer Swift Lite serious consideration. There’s plenty to like if you’re not going to throw heavy workloads its way. That’s doubly true if it’s going to be relegated to little Timmy’s desk for homework assignments. The only admittedly small issue is that this isn’t the only laptop offering good value. You’ll just need to decide what headline features you desire more and go with that.