Acer Swift Go 14 Ai (2025 | Snapdragon) Review

We’ve been big fans of Acer’s Swift Go laptops since we first saw them two years ago. But, the latest iteration is based on the Qualcomm SnapDragon platform. That means it’s potentially even more portable but will have compatibility issues with most Windows. We’ve also come to expect such laptops to come at a silly price premium (despite their limitations) but were pleasantly surprised. With its predecessor being our daily driver for as long as we had it, I was keen to discover, is this finally a Snapdragon laptop worth buying?

Acer Swift Go 14 Ai Specs

Features, Ergonomics & Design

Acer’s Swift Go 14 Ai, once again, has a silver, metal chassis that’s solid and classy if unspectacular. It’s helped, however, by both the Acer logo and the Ai logo that adorn the lid with the former potentially going full rainbow when it catches the light. It’s a nice-looking laptop.

Opening it up reveals the 14.5-inch, 1,920 x 1,200, IPS display. It’s matte-finished, so it doesn’t turn into a glossy mirror when displaying dark content (or outside). The Windows Desktop is crisp and clear. Colours are acceptable, with only light stepping appearing in both colourful and black-and-white transitions. It’s not an HDR screen but contrast is decent, true blacks aren’t a million miles away from the perfection provided by OLED screens, but details do often get lost in bright highlights.

The screen has a quick, 120Hz refresh rate but the slow pixel-response time leaves fast-moving objects looking blurry which any players of any compatible, shoot-em up games would gripe about.  

Above the screen is an impressive 1,440p webcam that does well at banishing noise in low light and whose Acer-Ai, image-enhancing augmentations are useful and simple to activate. The webcam also offers Windows Hello facial-recognition. A fingerprint reader (embedded in the power button) does too, but it wasn’t working on our review unit. The microphone array also didn’t work.

The stereo speakers get loud but they’re tinny and offer little bass. I expect much more from ultraportable laptops nowadays.

The keyboard is very comfortable and accurate with its touch-type, Scrabble-tile keys (that actually feel like Scrabble tiles). The arrow keys are well positioned and usable despite the up-and-down buttons being squished.

The trackpad is smooth and accurate and has a logo that glows when the NPU is active which is a nice touch. You can turn it off if it bugs you.

Being an AiPC, it supports Microsoft’s CoPilot+ enhancements. These are potentially very useful features but learn about the recently activated and contentious Recall function before using it.

Acer provides additional apps for things like video conferencing (background blur and lighting-based enhancements) plus user sensing (which recommends having a break after looking at the screen for too long and telling you if you’re too close to the screen). It also provides wake-on-approach functionality. The Acer Sense app lets you choose between high performance (with fans), silent running or a balanced compromise. It’s well laid out and represents slightly more than bloatware, but it doesn’t do much that isn’t already baked into Windows.

Connectivity & Ports

Inside, there’s Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3. That’s a decent, modern connectivity complement for such a laptop.

All in all, Acer’s Swift Go 14 Ai handles like a good daily driver for general office work, web browsing and multimedia consumption (speakers notwithstanding). It’s worth labouring the point, though, that Snapdragon-based Windows laptops have very limited software compatibility compared to Intel and AMD-based rivals (and even Apple’s MacBooks) and it loses points because of this.

Features, Ergonomics & Design Score: 2.9 / 5

Performance

As the Acer Swift Go 14 Ai has been on the market for some time (we first saw it at last year’s Computex) I’m going to whizz through the performance scores after listing the hardware components.

It’s powered by one of Qualcomm’s lower-end Snapdragon X Plus processors, the X1P-42-100, which has eight cores that operate between 3.2 to 3.4GHz. It has integrated Adreno X1-45 graphics and an NPU that’s capable of 45 TOPS. This is all backed-up by 16GB of LPDDR5x RAM and a 512GB SSD. Ultimately, it’s designed for low-end laptop tasks and the scores back this up: it works fine for office work and occasional photo editing, but it’s (unsurprisingly) poor for rendering and video editing.

See here for how we test laptops and what our star-ratings mean. If there’s no star rating, it doesn’t count towards the overall score.

General Computing & CPU Tests

Graphics & Gaming Performance

I also ran the UL Procyon Video Editing benchmark which uses Adobe Premiere to encode multiple video files. Its score of 3,264 is very low and means that, while you can actually perform video-rendering workloads, you’ll be waiting a very long time for them to finish compared to most other laptops. Score: 1.1 / 5

The Acer Swift Go 14 Ai would only run some of our lesser gaming benchmarks and even then, not very well. It also wouldn’t install Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 because of software-compatibility issues. These facets, coupled with the slow screen, mean it’s only really suited to phone-grade games. Here are the results for reference…

Cooling

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a low-powered laptop, when under a sustained load, the Acer Swift Go 14 Ai’s fans only produce a moderately robust whooshing sound. It doesn’t ever get more than slightly warm.

Portability & Battery Life

The Acer Swift Go 14 Ai weighs 1.35KG which is OK for an ultraportable but noticeably heavier than the sub-1KG Asus Zenbook A14 that I reviewed recently. The USB-C power supply and cables add a modest 313g to the mix.

Unfortunately, we struggled to test the battery life. It’s not compatible with PCMark 10 and UL’s Procyon Office Test was only fixed right before we had to return our review sample. Acer states it will last 28 hours. Based upon what we’ve seen with other Snapdragon laptops, it’s likely to be over 20 hours, but I’m not sure by how much. Much will depend upon what you’re doing with it anyway.

It’s worth noting that the metal chassis feels robust and the lie-flat hinges are high quality, so I expect it to survive life on the road.

Portability & Battery Life Score: 4 / 5

Price & Value

There are several variants of the Acer Swift Go 14 Ai on the market – some with Intel and AMD processors – but this Snapdragon version (SKU: SFG14-01) can be had for just $1,599 at Harvey Norman (at the time of going to press). A consistent problem with Snapdragon laptops has been that they’re way too expensive for limited-functionality devices, but this is around $1,000 less than rivals. You can find Ryzen-based siblings for just over $1,000, mind.

There are other great alternatives like the Intel Core Ultra-based MSI Prestige 14 AI Evo which can be found for even less. There are also plenty of Lunar Lake-based laptops vying for top spot in our regularly-updated Best Laptop Group Test rankings. These are frequently on sale, offer similar portability and suffer none of the software compatibility issues. Still, there’s no denying that the Acer Swift Go 14 Ai represents very good value at this price.

Value Score: 4.5 / 5

Conclusion: Should You Buy The Acer Swift Go 14 AI?

In short… probably not. It’s not that the laptop is bad per se, but I still see little reason to buy a Windows laptop with such limited software compatibility when there are so many (mainly) Intel alternatives that offer similar portability and none of the compromises. If you don’t mind Windows software compatibility issues and want an ARM-based processor, you should also consider Apple’s MacBooks which have a far more mature software ecosystem and similar portability chops. Still, this is the cheapest Snapdragon laptop that we’ve seen, so it is likely to attract some buyers regardless.

Last Updated on 28 April 2025 by Nick Ross