AI-Powered Laptops: Acer Swift Go 14 AI and HP OmniBook Ultra Showcase Advanced Features and Performance

Acer Swift Go 14 AI review: fast, long-lasting, and affordable

Acer Swift Go 14 AI MSRP $1,000.00 Score Details "The Acer Swift Go 14 AI takes battery life on Windows laptops to a whole new level." Pros Solid build quality Very good IPS display Fast productivity performance Excellent battery life Attractive price Cons Keyboard is just OK Aesthetic is a little aggressive Too few configuration options Table of Contents Table of Contents Specs and configuration Design Keyboard and touchpad Webcam and connectivity Performance Battery life Display and audio Acer offers up another long-lasting 14-inch machine I recently reviewed the Acer Swift 14 AI, a 14-inch laptop aimed at significantly better battery life than most Windows laptops. It succeeded, thanks in part to Intel's newest Lunar Lake chipsets. Now, Acer wants to accomplish the same in a similar, but not identical, laptop using Qualcomm's Snapdragon X -- for less money. Recommended Videos The Swift Go 14 AI uses a larger higher-resolution display and a more aggressive aesthetic, and it, too, offers very good battery life that brings Windows a lot closer to Apple's highly efficient MacBook Air M3. It's not one of the best laptops, but it's a very good option for anyone wanting great battery life and good performance in a more affordable package. Specs and configuration Acer Swift Go 14 AI Dimensions 12.30 x 8.80 x 0.67-0.74 inches Weight 3.05 pounds Display 14.5-inch 16:10 QHD+ (2560 x 1600) IPS, 120Hz CPU Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 GPU Qualcomm Adreno Memory 16GB Storage 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD Ports 2 x USB4 2 x USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 1 x 3.5mm headphone jack Camera 1440p with infrared camera for Windows 11 Hello Wi-Fi Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetoth 5.4 Battery 75 watt-hour Operating system Windows 11 on Arm Price $1,000 There's only one configuration of the Swift Go 14 AI, and it's only available at the Acer web store. It lists for $1,000 but is currently on sale for $800, with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 14.5-inch QHD+ IPS display. On sale, that's an attractive price for a well-configured laptop. You can imagine that a 512GB model would come in even lower if one were offered. A few Qualcomm laptops have come in around the same price, such as the Lenovo IdeaPad 5x 2-in-1 that's $895 with a smaller, lower-res FHD+ OLED display. The Acer Swift 14 AI using the Intel Lunar Lake chipset is considerably more expensive starting at $1,200 with an FHD+ IPS display. We've seen more premium options like the Surface Laptop 7th Edition come in at around this price when on sale, but with less storage. Design The Swift Go 14 AI is essentially a chunkier version of the Swift 14 AI. It's around the same width and depth in spite of having a larger display at 14.5 inches versus 14.0 inches. But, it's a bit thicker and heavier. It's also a more aggressive design, with large vents below the lid that hint at a higher performance laptop. Acer incorporated the same kind of reverse notch that Lenovo uses to keep the top bezel slim while avoiding Apple's display notch. It's really not as attractive, and that goes double for some other recent 14-inch machines like the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 with its more elegant aesthetic. The Swift Go 14 AI has a sweeping curve along the side, but that clashes with the chiseled lines on the rear of the chassis. Somehow, it doesn't flow as well as the lines on the Swift 14 AI. The all-aluminum construction is just fine, with no bending, flexing, or twisting in the lid, keyboard deck, or bottom chassis. That's common lately, even in laptops well under $1,000. I really can't think of the last laptop I reviewed that wasn't well-built, and that includes the IdeaPad 5x 2-in-1 that sometimes comes in at under $700 on sale. Keyboard and touchpad The keyboard is just OK. The keycaps are just a tiny bit smaller than I like, while key spacing and the layout is comfortable. The switches are a little spongey, while the Swift 14 AI has snapper switches and the OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 has a much better keyboard. The touchpad is large enough and its mechanical design works well enough. I do prefer haptic touchpads like the best version on Apple MacBooks, but we're not quite at a point where sub-$1,000 laptops are equipped with them. Unlike the Swift 14 AI, the Swift Go 14 AI doesn't have a touch display. That may not matter to that many people. The Swift Go 14 AI touchpad has an LED that lights up when AI features are being used, but I didn't see it engage during my testing. Webcam and connectivity Connectivity is fine. There are two USB4 ports that provide fast connectivity, and two legacy ports. There's no SD card reader, which I'm seeing on fewer laptops. Wireless connectivity is fully up-to-date. The webcam is a 144op version, so higher-res than the new standard of 1080p. The Qualcomm chipset has a fast neural processing unit (NPU) at 45 tera operations per second (TOPS), exceeding the Microsoft Copilot+ requirement of 40 TOPS. That means the Swift Go 14 AI will support all the Copilot+ AI features on-device with good efficiency and performance. Performance The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 is an 8-core ARM-based chipset that runs at 3.2GHz with a single-core boost to 3.4GHz, compared to the other common chipset, the 12-core Snapdragon X Elite that runs at 3.4GHz with a dual-core boost to 4.0GHz. That makes it slower, but as we'll see is still quite fast and, in fact, faster than the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V that's part of the Lunar Lake lineup. The Snapdragon X Plus has an Adreno GPU that runs at 1.7 TFLOPS, a lot slower than the Elite Adreno that's 3.8 TFLOPS or faster. In our benchmarks, the Swift Go 14 AI does well in CPU-intensive tasks. It's faster than each of the Lunar Lake laptops but slower than the HP OmniBook X with the Snapdragon X Elite. It's slowest in its GPU performance, falling well behind the leaders here. The MacBook Air M3 is faster across the board in single-core and slightly behind in the Cinebench R24 multi-core test. Cinebench R24 (single/multi) Geekbench 6 (single/multi) 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Acer Swift Go 14 AI (Snapdragon X Plus / Adreno) 107 / 716 2413 / 11388 3231 Acer Swift 14 AI (Core Ultra 7 258V / Intel Arc 140V) 121 / 525 2755 / 11138 5294 HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 (Core Ultra 7 258V / Intel Arc 140V) 116 / 598 2483 / 10725 7573 HP Spectre x360 14 (Core Ultra 7 155H / Intel Arc) 102 / 485 2176 / 11980 N/A Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition (Core Ultra 7 258V / Intel Arc 140V) 109 / 630 2485 / 10569 5217 Asus Zenbook S 14 (Core Ultra 7 258V / Intel Arc 140V) 112 / 452 2738 / 10734 7514 HP OmniBook X (Snapdragon X Elite / Adreno) 101 / 749 2377 / 13490 6165 MacBook Air (M3) 141 / 601 3102 / 12078 8098 Battery life The focus of both Qualcomm and Intel lately has been on efficiency. Windows laptops had fallen well behind Apple's Silicon MacBooks in battery life, and that's been changing. The Swift Go 14 AI does very well in both our web browsing and video looping benchmarks, promising multiday battery life unless you're working the chipset particularly hard. That's Acer's second win, as the Swift 14 AI with Intel Lunar Lake also stood out. The MacBook Air M3 still looks pretty good, but it's no longer true that you can't get Windows and good battery life at the same time. Web browsing Video Cinebench R24 Acer Swift Go 14 AI (Snapdragon X Plus) 15 hours, 29 minutes 21 hours, 38 minutes 1 hour, 42 minutes Acer Swift 14 AI (Core Ultra 7 258V) 17 hours, 22 minutes 24 hours, 10 minutes 2 hours, 7 minutes HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 (Core Ultra 7 258V) 11 hours, 5 minutes 15 hours, 46 minutes 2 hours, 14 minutes HP Spectre x360 14 (Core Ultra 7 155H) 7 hours, 9 minutes 14 hours, 22 minutes N/A Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition (Core Ultra 7 258V) 14 hours, 16 minutes 17 hours, 31 minutes 2 hours, 15 minutes Asus Zenbook S 14 (Core Ultra 7 258V) 16 hours, 47 minutes 18 hours, 35 minutes 3 hours, 33 minutes Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 (Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100) 14 hours, 21 minutes 22 hours, 39 minutes N/A HP Omnibook X (Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100) 13 hours, 37 minutes 22 hours, 4 minutes 1 hour, 52 minutes Apple MacBook Air (Apple M3) 19 hours, 38 minutes 19 hours, 39 minutes 3 hours, 27 minutes Display and audio The Swift Go 14 AI has one display option, a 14.5-inch QHD+ (2560 x 1440) IPS display that runs at up to 120Hz. That's an improvement over the 14.0-inch FHD+ (1920 x 1200) IPS display in the Swift 14 AI that maxes out at 60Hz. Subjectively, I did enjoy the extra sharpness in the Swift Go 14 AI, and colors and brightness were good. I've been commenting lately that displays across the board have gotten a lot better in the last few years. Not only are there more OLED displays available at lower prices but IPS displays have gotten brighter with better contrast and wider, more accurate colors. The Swift Go 14 AI's panel is in line with that trend. It's bright at 407 nits, well above our 300-nit standard that we really need to adjust. Contrast is also good at 1,270:1, exceeding our 1,000:1 threshold -- every display I've reviewed in the last couple of years is higher than that, so it needs adjusting as well. Colors were reasonably wide at 100% of sRGB, 80% of AdobeRGB, and 82% of DCI-P3, and accuracy was good at a DeltaE of 1.61 (less than 2.0 is great for productivity but not optimal for creative applications). This is a good display with decent sharpness, very good performance, and probably represents a good trade-off between battery life and quality. The audio isn't all that great, though. It uses two downward-firing speakers that deliver sound that's good enough for the occasional YouTube video or video call, but for anything else, a pair of headphones is recommended. Acer offers up another long-lasting 14-inch machine The Swift Go 14 AI isn't the best-looking laptop around. But it's attractively priced, especially if you can get it on sale. At just $800, you get a well-built and fully-configured laptop with a very good IPS display. But perhaps more important, it's also fast for productivity users and it gets excellent battery life. You'll want to make sure your apps are supported on Windows on Arm, but that's less of an issue than it's been in the past. If you can look past the lackluster design, the Swift Go 14 AI is easy to recommend.

HP OmniBook Ultra review

Why you can trust Tom's Guide Our writers and editors spend hours analyzing and reviewing products, services, and apps to help find what's best for you. Find out more about how we test, analyze, and rate. The HP OmniBook Ultra is the company's latest AI laptop, packing AMD's new AI processor and other high-end specs under the hood. This notebook is a productivity powerhouse. With a cutting-edge AMD CPU onboard, the OmniBook Ultra can handle most tasks from simple word processing to more intensive, multi-core tasks like video or photo editing. Performance doesn't come at the expense of battery life, which lasts up to 13 hours. The laptop is also quite small and lightweight, sporting an all-metal body that easily slips into any laptop sleeve. The 14-inch, 2.2K touchscreen display is no showstopper, but it is reliable and color-accurate. While not everyone needs a touchscreen display, it's a nice bonus if you prefer the tactility of scrolling or swiping on the screen. The one letdown here is that the HP OmniBook Ultra is an AI laptop lacking most of its useful AI features. The few it currently has are far from impressive, though that's likely to change when HP updates the laptop with Copilot+. Sure, AI features could make the HP OmniBook Ultra better, but it doesn't need AI to be great for productivity. As a small, lightweight laptop with solid construction and even stronger performance, this laptop is made for power users on the go. Check out my review of the HP OmniBook Ultra for a deeper dive. Putting the AI hype aside, the HP OmniBook Ultra stands on its own as a top-tier productivity laptop with a small footprint. It has a long battery life, is easy to lug around, and it's not bad for gaming. It's a reliable notebook for surfing the web, writing, or even using creative software. Despite some of the shortcomings with the AI integration, the HP Omnibook Ultra is great for work, creative pursuits, and leisure. Whether I was writing this review, playing video games, watching YouTube, or doing research, I was not disappointed with the performance. When I'm writing, I like to have dozens of tabs open -- yes, I know how chaotic that sounds -- which can be taxing on most laptops. Not in this case, though. I was pleased with the hands-on performance of the Omnibook Ultra, and the lab tests backed it up. The Geekbench 6 scores were higher than the HP Omnibook X, which is one of our favorites from earlier this year. While the single-core Geekbench 6 score for the MacBook Air 13-inch M3 was slightly higher, the Omnibook Ultra blew the MacBook out of the water in the multi-core tests. The Handbrake score, which is a benchmark for video editing, was also higher than the two previously mentioned laptops, with the Omnibook Ultra completing the encoding benchmark by more than a minute. Although the HP Omnibook Ultra is not a gaming laptop, it performs well in that department, so long as you don't expect to run the latest games on the highest graphics settings. For casual gaming, the OmniBook Ultra performs a lot better than you might expect. I played several indie games, such as Core Keeper and Arco, and had a great time. There were no framerate dips, crashes, or other interruptions. I even managed to play The Finals, though it was far from being the ideal gameplay experience -- the small keyboard and slow refresh rate are the main culprits. The Omnibook Ultra is good for gaming in a pinch, but you're better off with one of the best gaming laptops to get your game on. The battery on the Omnibook Ultra lasts all day. HP claims the Omnibook Ultra can last up to 16 hours on battery, and an additional six hours if watching video. Testing revealed that number was closer to 13 hours, which was spent mostly surfing the web. With over 12 hours of battery life, I never worried that the laptop would quit on me when I needed it. That's exactly what you want from a productivity machine. I also tried playing a few games while unplugged from the charger. While these were smaller indie titles that didn't consume much resources, the battery life held up surprisingly well. I played in sessions around an hour long, and the battery didn't dip significantly during that time. Playing more graphically intensive games consumes more battery life, so it's best not to push the battery by playing something like Fortnite with maxed-out graphics. The battery is also efficient when not in use. This is especially important if you like to leave your laptop untouched for a few days, which I constantly do as I'm always switching between devices. So long as the battery still has some juice, you can expect to come back to a laptop that wakes up on command after a few days. The HP Omnibook Ultra may be small, but it's far from flimsy. Nothing about it feels cheap, with the all-metal body adding the right amount of heft. The single long hinge makes opening and closing the laptop a smooth experience whether you do it with one hand or two. It's also comfortable to type on for extended periods. The center placement of the touchpad allows for enough space on either side to rest your palms comfortably -- I much prefer this to the slightly off-center touchpad placement that's common with gaming laptops. As someone who's used my fair share of big, obnoxious gaming laptops, I enjoy the minimal design of the Omnibook Ultra. It's simple, clean, and perfect for working from a cafe or taking to work. The single HP logo on the top, which is made from a reflective metal, is the laptop's sole claim to vanity. The OmniBook Ultra has a utilitarian look, but that doesn't translate to the ports. There are two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, one USB-A port, and a 3.5mm audio port. The single USB-A port on the left side uses a collapsible design, similar to what some manufacturers do with Ethernet ports. It's not something I've ever seen, but I'm glad they did it. Without it, I would have had to use a dongle to connect the USB-A receiver for my wireless mouse. Although I'm not sure why HP included a touchscreen display, especially since it doesn't come with a stylus or can fold backward to become a tablet, I'm sure many will find the touchscreen useful since it's very responsive. Aside from the touch capabilities, the 14-inch (2240 x 1400) display, is perfectly serviceable. While it's not an OLED screen, everything from YouTube videos to indie games looks crisp. The display can recreate 100% of the sRGB color space, which is the most common color space for digital devices. With the ability to recreate almost all colors, along with a low Delta E score, hues will look accurate whether you're streaming a series or editing photos in Lightroom. The Omnibook Ultra is made for travel, but taking it outside might be a bit of a challenge. The display simply isn't bright enough to view in broad daylight. In our testing, the display had an average brightness of 359 nits, with the lower right portion of the screen being the brightest. That's slightly below HP's claim, which puts the display at 400 nits of brightness. While it's not bright enough for daylight use and is less bright than the MacBook Pro M3's display, it's bright enough for indoor use. Overall, the display doesn't stand out, but it is reliable. Nothing about it was a dealbreaker for me. If anything, the low brightness of the display ends up being a boon for battery life. The OmniBook Ultra is a laptop with few major flaws and fewer minor ones. You couldn't ask for much more from a productivity standpoint. Yet, with no strong AI features, the omission of Copilot+ is a glaring weakness for a laptop billed as an AI PC. Copilot is Microsoft's big foray into the AI computing space, and it's available on Windows 11 PCs. Copilot+ takes it to the next level, with AI features that leverage a computer's neural processing unit (NPU) -- essentially a processor dedicated to machine learning and AI tasks. Features like live captions, recall, and co-creator could be legitimate game-changers that partially run on the computer to speed up results. Additionally, integrations with creative software, such as Adobe software and DaVinci Resolve, are a boon for creators. This is Microsoft's killer app, the one that can move hardware. Yet, it's not present on the OmniBook Ultra at the moment. HP has promised a free update, though there is no timeline. What we're left with is an AI laptop with no AI features. Unless you count HP's AI Companion, which I don't. The built-in software offers some interesting features that don't pay off. You can chat with the app and have it change settings on your laptop. This was mostly a miss for me -- it couldn't dim the backlit keyboard when I asked it, for example. You can also upload a document and have the assistant inspect it. I used this to get a quick rundown for a board game since I didn't have time to read all the rules. It worked fine, but it's nothing ChatGPT can't already do. The truly disappointing part is that you have to be online. Disconnect from the internet for a second, and the app ceases to function -- you can't even look at the previous chat. The Omnibook Ultra is excellent for everyday work and some light gaming. The laptop didn't break a sweat when I had over 20 tabs open and a YouTube video running in the background while downloading a video game on Steam. More importantly, it did it quietly. The convenience of comfortably working from the couch paired with the long battery life meant I could lock in on the task at hand. Being an AI laptop, the missing AI features like Copilot+ are a disappointment -- I was really looking forward to seeing what it could do. That could change soon when HP drops the free update, but until then, this laptop is purely for productivity. If you don't want to pay a premium for features you can't access yet, there are better options for around the same price. The MacBook Air M3 and the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, which both reside in our list of best laptops, are also portable powerhouses. HP may have put the cart before the horse, but it's a damn fine cart. When the horse rolls around, so to speak, the OmniBook Ultra could be the complete package.