Acer Swift 16 AI (2026) Review: Where Do Your Hands Go?
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 so the laptop could have a charging port on each side.
Acer uses a premium 16-inch OLED touchscreen on the Swift 16 AI. It has a 2880 x 1800 resolution, a 120Hz refresh rate, and color saturation that’s as close to perfect as I’ve seen. Like most OLED laptops, it has a bright, highly reflective display that reaches a peak brightness of 315 nits, according to my tests. It’s nowhere near as bright as IPS or mini-LED displays, but the brightness trade-off is getting that unbeatable contrast that only OLED can deliver.
A risky touchpad
Photography: Luke Larsen
The full-size keyboard and oversized touchpad are definitely the most notable features of this laptop. The first thing you notice is the touchpad, which is certainly the largest I’ve ever seen. You might think this sounds a little silly, but I always like companies to leave as little wasted space on a product as possible. I really wanted to like this touchpad, but unfortunately this might deter most people from purchasing this product.
On large laptops like the Swift 16 AI, which have a number pad to the right of the keyboard, the touchpad typically sits below the keyboard, making it visually off-center. While functional, this arrangement seems odd, and some 16-inch laptops get around this problem by omitting the number pad altogether. This is also what you see on the MacBook Pro, Dell XPS 16, and most gaming laptops these days.
Rather than removing the number pad, Acer widened the touchpad and centered it. This makes good use of the space under the keyboard, preserves the numeric keypad, and resolves the aesthetic annoyances that typically plague large laptops.
