$1,550 at Best Buy

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Rating:6/10

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WIRED

Excellent performance and battery life at a lower price than comparable laptops. Vibrant, high-resolution OLED touchscreen display. Inclusion of number pad doesn't make touchpad off-center. Big touchpad doubles as a Wacom-like drawing tablet.

TIRED

The oversized haptic touchpad often produces unwanted clicks. Only charges from one side. Webcam is grainy. Some flex in the chassis.

Acer’s budget laptops are its bread and butter. But the 2026 Acer Swift 16 AI makes a strong case for its high-end options too.

This thing has competitively impressive performance, a gorgeous OLED screen, and the biggest touchpad I’ve ever seen, even on the very best laptops. It's so large that it can double as a drawing tablet with the included stylus. Unfortunately, using this oversized touchpad was more frustrating than useful, which makes this otherwise fast and long-lasting laptop much harder to recommend than it should be.

Sleek but Not Quite Polished

The Acer Swift 16 AI might be the prettiest laptop the company has ever made. It doesn’t have the refined aesthetics of a MacBook Pro or Dell XPS 16, but the dark silver chassis doesn’t look cheap like so many Acer laptops do. That’s important, as this costs $1,550, and it needs to look the part. The build quality left me disappointed, though. There's some give in the keyboard and palm rests, and the lid can bend if you press on the corners. Getting the thing open isn't as smooth as I had hoped, since the lip isn't big enough to easily get my finger in.

It’s certainly portable, though. It’s only 0.58 inch thick—slightly thinner than the MacBook Pro but matching the Dell XPS 16 almost exactly. Throughout this review, you’ll see the XPS 16 come up time and time again, as it’s clearly one of the laptops the Swift 16 has its targets on. Despite how thin it is, Acer managed to squeeze in both an HDMI 2.1 and two USB-A ports. That’s unlike the Dell XPS 16, which only sticks with USB-C.

Photograph: Luke Larsen

The two USB-C ports are on the left side, alongside HDMI and a USB-A port. The second USB-A port, a microSD card slot, and a headphone jack are on the right. It’s not a nice assortment of ports overall, and I just wish Acer had split the USB-C ports up so the laptop could have a charging port on either side.

Acer is using a top-notch 16-inch OLED touchscreen display on the Swift 16 AI. It has a resolution of 2880 x 1800, a refresh rate of 120 Hz, and color saturation as close to perfect as I've seen. Like most OLED laptops, it has a glossy, highly reflective display that maxes out at 315 nits of brightness, according to my testing. It's nowhere near as bright as IPS or mini-LED displays, but the trade-off in brightness is to achieve that unbeatable contrast that only OLED can deliver.

A Risky Touchpad

Photograph: Luke Larsen

The full-size keyboard and oversized touchpad are definitely the most notable elements of this laptop. The first thing you notice is the touchpad, which is certainly the largest I’ve ever seen. You might think it looks a bit silly, but I always like it when companies leave as little wasted space on a product as possible. I really wanted to like this touchpad, but unfortunately, it could deter most people from buying this product.

On large laptops like the Swift 16 AI, which have a number pad to the right of the keyboard, the touchpad is typically below the keyboard, making it visually off-center. While it's functional, this arrangement looks odd, and some 16-inch laptops get around this by omitting the number pad entirely. That's what you see on the MacBook Pro, the Dell XPS 16, and most gaming laptops these days, too.

Rather than removing the number pad, Acer expanded the touchpad and centered it. This makes good use of the space below the keyboard, preserves the number pad, and solves the aesthetic annoyance that typically plagues full-size laptops.

Personally, I can't remember the last time I used a number pad—but I know some people rely on them for work. (Although, if you really need one, you can always buy an external number pad that connects over USB). But assuming Acer has data suggesting that people do, in fact, like having a number pad, this solution just introduces new problems.

When I place my hands on the palm rest while typing, half the time, my right palm accidentally triggers a click on the touchpad. It happens less often when my palm is actually resting on the touchpad while typing, but it still occasionally triggers an unwanted action when I tilt my palm back and forth.

My biggest frustration is that while typing, I really need to lift my right hand up entirely to use the touchpad to avoid problems. If not, I frequently ended up with unwanted clicks or failed attempted clicks. Over time, I think I c

Acer Swift 16 AI (2026) Review: Where Do Your Hands Go? | WIRED