Acer Swift 14 AI with Intel's 'Lunar Lake' processor. Arthur Fuentes, ABS-CBN News

MANILA - Acer made a splash at the IFA tech expo in Berlin last September when it unveiled its first laptops featuring Intel’s “Lunar Lake” chips. While previous Intel-powered laptops could barely make it through 6 hours of work, Acer said the new Lunar Lake notebooks could go up to 29 hours on video playback, and get up to 23 hours of web browsing on a single battery charge.

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Of course, this claim was based on “ideal conditions” like running a video and nothing else for several hours. Still, if these notebooks could live up to even just half of the claimed battery life doing real-world, real work, it would be a real achievement.

A few weeks ago, Acer loaned us the Swift SF14-51, a 14-inch Copilot+ ultraportable. Also called the Swift 14 AI, our review unit came with 32 gigabytes of RAM, a 1 terabyte SSD, and the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V or Lunar Lake chip. So did it live up to the lofty claim?

But first, let’s talk about this laptop. While a lot of new thin-and-light notebooks have been getting thinner and thinner lately and boasting new materials for their chassis, Acer seems to have opted to keep a tried-and-tested design. It’s not as thin as some other laptops in this category, but it’s thin enough and light enough at 1.26 kg or 2.78 lbs. The aluminum chassis feels solid, with little noticeable flex. The laptop is also certified with MIL-STD-810 Military Grade Durability so you know it’s tough. Nothing fancy, but good fundamentals.  

It has a 3K (2880 x 1800) OLED screen with a 16:10 aspect ratio, which is great if you’re writing a document, doing code or editing photos or videos as the taller screen displays more information. The screen can also go up to 400 nits of brightness, and up to 500 nits in HDR, which is plenty bright even in well-lit surroundings. I’ve taken this outdoors and the screen was still viewable in daylight.

The keyboard is very good–firm and clicky, while the touchpad is wide and responsive. Like Acer’s other business-oriented laptops, the Swift 14 AI can also be “flat-layed” with the hinge able to tilt 180 degrees. This is handy for collaboration if you want to gather people in a circle to show them something on your laptop.

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It also has this nifty power-saving trick that dims the screen when you walk away. When you go back, the laptop detects your proximity and raises the screen’s brightness again.  The 1440p front camera also has an infrared sensor, which means it can scan your face using the Windows Hello feature to unlock your screen. The speakers' audio is pretty good too–not the best, but good enough if you want to watch a few YouTube videos or some Netflix.

If you need to connect peripherals, the laptop also has plenty of ports:

• 2 USB Type-C 
• 2 USB A Gen 3.2
• Audio jack
• HDMI 2.1 with HDCP support

It would have been nice if they also included a card reader, but that is already a lot of ports for a thin-and-light laptop.

And since this is a Copilot+ device, it also has a lot of AI features built in such as: 

• Live Captions which gives subtitles in real time
• Cocreator which lets users generate AI drawings with text prompts
• Windows Studio Effects which improve lighting and blur distractions in the background during video calls
• Automatic Super Resolution which upscales games in real time to deliver high-definition, high frame-rate gaming

It also has a 65 Wh 3-cell Li-ion battery and a 65W charger, which brings us to the exciting part–did the laptop live up to the lofty battery-life claim?

I used it for several days as my main work laptop, with my work generally done on the cloud through a browser. While editing and writing news articles, I generally have 30 or more tabs open–2 to 4 YouTube news channels, several news websites, Facebook pages, Instagram, Twitter, Turboscribe for transcriptions, Pixlr for fixing photos and Spotify for music that helps with focus. Aside from this I also use Viber and Telegram. I also usually set the screen at 80 percent brightness, or sometimes at 100 when I’m working near a window and the sun is shining.

So, no I did not get 29 hours, or 23 hours, or even 13 hours with the load I was putting the laptop through. I usually got around 9 hours before the low battery warning was triggered–which is still more than enough to get the job done.

Intel's Lunar Lake seems to be par with or slightly better than AMD's Strix Point when it comes to minimizing power consumption, but Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is still the king of efficiency. But like I said in an earlier review, Snapdragon has its tradeoffs when it comes to app compatibility. An Intel chip meanwhile has no such issue.

As of this posting the Swift SF14-51 is not yet available on the Acer website and its official stores on Shopee and Lazada, and is not yet priced locally. But a local retailer is selling it for P79,950.