Back in the '80s, ABC had a proto-reality show called That's Incredible! The network should bring it back.
The first guest could be someone standing on stage holding the new Acer Swift 5 ($999.99).
The Acer replaces the 2.4-pound LG Gram 15 as the world's lightest 15.6-inch laptop—at 2.2 pounds, it feels like a hollow shell, half the weight of many desktop replacements, less burdensome in a briefcase than most 13.3-inch systems.
It's no red-hot powerhouse, but it's a perfectly capable office-productivity platform and an astounding feat of engineering.
Don't Expect Discrete Graphics
While you will also see 14-inch Acer notebooks that carry the Swift 5 name, the real newsmakers are two 15.6-inch machines.
My test unit is model SF515-51T-507P, equipped with a 1.6GHz Core i5-8265U ("Whiskey Lake" class) processor with Intel UHD Graphics 620 integrated silicon, 8GB of memory, a 256GB NVMe solid-state drive, and a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) touch screen.
For $1,399.99, you can step up to the SF515-51T-73TY model, which sports a Core i7-8565U (another Whiskey chip), 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD.
Both come with a one-year warranty and Windows 10 Home.
The Acer isn't remarkable to look at, unless someone spots you carrying it between thumb and forefinger.
It's a simple silver wedge measuring 0.63 by 14.1 by 9.1 inches—roughly on par with compacts like the Dell XPS 15 (0.66 by 14.1 by 9.3 inches), and trimmer than conventional slabs like the Lenovo ThinkPad L580 (0.9 by 14.8 by 10 inches).
The top and bottom covers are made of a magnesium-lithium alloy, while the keyboard deck is magnesium-aluminum.
To its credit, the Swift doesn't feel flimsy—there's no flex if you mash the middle of the keyboard, though there's a bit if you torque the screen corners.
(I heard one faint creak when I grasped the laptop and turned it over in my hands.)
A minor disappointment is that there's no Thunderbolt 3 port for the latest desktop docking, video, and storage solutions; a bigger one is that there's no SD card slot for expanding storage or importing digital images.
Instead, there's a USB 3.1 Type-C port and two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, along with an HDMI port and the power connector, on the left side.
The right side holds only an audio jack and a Noble lock slot.
Here's Looking at You
Like many touch screens, the Swift's is a mirror when switched off and prone to reflect room lights behind you when in operation.
Otherwise, it's a winner, with ample brightness (turning it down three or four clicks to save battery life is no hardship) and wide viewing angles.
Contrast is high, with rich blacks and toothpaste-white backgrounds, and colors are vivid.
Fine details are impressively clear.
The backlit keyboard earns a mixed review, though.
I'm happy that it has dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys (there is no numeric keypad), but it also has my eternal gripe of cursor arrow keys in a row instead of an inverted T (with half-size up and down arrows sandwiched between full-size left and right).
Also, the Delete key is tiny.
The typing feel is shallow and stiff, somewhat like a detachable tablet's keyboard cover instead of a laptop keyboard.
I was able to type at a fast pace, but with more than my usual number of dropped or doubled keystrokes.
The buttonless touchpad is a bit slippery but glides and clicks competently.
A fingerprint reader in the palm rest lets Windows Hello users skip sign-in passwords.
The screen bezels are stylishly thin, but the top bezel makes room for a 720p webcam that took a well-lit selfie, capturing the fine stripes in my shirt and the flyaway details of a bad hair day, though the background was somewhat dark.
The Acer's bottom-mounted speakers are passable for casual listening, but they are not loud enough to fill a room and are prone to muddle or mix overlaying tracks.
Acer preloads the Swift 5 with a dismaying amount of bloatware, including eBay, Booking.com, and not one but two game catalogs (WildTangent and Electronic Arts Origin, asking you to sign in to the latter at startup until I disabled it with Task Manager).
Also, at least twice I noted ads using Windows' pop-out, right-of-screen notifications from partners like H&R Block.
That's not counting the operating system's own Candy Crush Friends Saga, Cooking Fever, and card games.
Some software scrubbing straight out of the box is in order.
The Lightest Machine on the Test Bench
For our performance comparisons, I matched the Swift 5 against three comparably equipped Core i5 laptops: The Lenovo IdeaPad 530S and Asus VivoBook S15 are 15.6-inch systems priced below the Acer, while the Microsoft Surface Laptop 2 is a 13.5-inch notebook priced a bit above it.
Since that left one slot open, I slid in the Asus ZenBook 15 to see how much of a difference a Core i7 chip and dedicated graphics would make.
See the table below for a breakout of the key specifications for each.
Overall, the ultra-lithe Acer delivered thoroughly competitive results in all our tests except the graphics exercises, where neither it nor any other laptop without a discrete GPU will satisfy would-be gamers.
Even in our unplugged marathon, where Acer clearly chose not to equip it with a big, heavy battery, the Swift exceeded expectations.
Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark).
The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows.
We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, Web browsing, and videoconferencing.
The test generates a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a Storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the laptop's storage subsystem.
The result is also a proprietary numeric score; again, higher numbers are better.
All five solid-state drives whisked through the storage subtest.
The Core i7 ZenBook won PCMark 10's office productivity contest, but the Swift 5 was a strong second, fewer than 200 points shy of the 4,000 that we consider excellent.
Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads.
Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image.
The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
The Asus VivoBook S15 was a surprising overachiever among the Core i5 laptops, while the Acer finished at the back of the pack.
But while it's no CAD or video-editing workstation, it's more than strong enough to handle a complex spreadsheet or database.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark.
Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image.
We time each operation and, at the end, add up the total execution time.
(Lower times are better.) The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so powerful graphics chips or cards may give a boost.
The Swift 5 and Surface Laptop 2 tied for best-in-class honors among the Core i5 notebooks with integrated graphics.
I still wish it had an SD card slot, but the Acer is definitely capable of managing a photo collection.
Graphics Tests
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting.
We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems.
Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff.
The results are proprietary scores.
Here's where it gets ugly: While the ZenBook and its Nvidia GPU cruise to victory, the Acer and its Intel integrated graphics peers eat dust, bite the bullet, buy the farm, or any other cliché of your choosing.
It's nothing we haven't seen in this test a thousand times when integrated graphics meet dedicated, but it's still painful to watch.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp.
Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes.
In this case, it's done in the company's eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark, for a second opinion on the machine's graphical prowess.
We present two Superposition results, run at the 720p Low and 1080p High presets.
As easily as it prevails in this group, the 2GB GeForce GTX 1050 is actually at the bottom (or marginal, at best) when it comes to game-worthy GPUs.
The laptops with integrated graphics are suitable solely for casual or browser-based games, not top-tier titles.
Video Playback Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test.
(We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop into airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the open-source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system conks out.
Okay, it finished next to last here, but the Swift's 10 hours and 49 minutes of stamina is pretty impressive for such a featherweight system (and probably the reason Acer fitted it with a 1080p panel instead of a more energy-draining 4K display).
You should have no trouble getting through an average workday, if perhaps not an entire Netflix movie in the evening too.
Up, Up, and Away
If I hadn't made a few of those keyboard stumbles, and if I wasn't annoyed by that H&R Block ad, I'd nominate the Acer Swift 5 for an Editors' Choice.
Even without that honor, I'm dazzled each time I pick it up or carry it around—it genuinely changes the experience of what using a full-size laptop is like.
If you're looking for a productivity rather than gaming machine and don't want to be deskbound, you need to check it out.
The Bottom Line
The lightest 15.6-inch laptop the world has ever seen, Acer's 2.2-pound Swift 5 is a design landmark whose portability outweighs its minor imperfections.
