New Windows 11 laptop beats the MacBook on screen, weight and price

If you want the lightest laptop with the largest screen possible, a new PC just announced at the IFA technology trade show in Berlin might pique your interest. Acer has unveiled the Swift Air 16, a Windows 11 laptop with a mammoth 16-inch screen, packed into a featherweight package that weighs just 0.99kg.

You can optionally buy the new machine with a fancier OLED screen instead of the standard IPS LCD, but this only increases the weight to 1.1kg, making the large-display laptop lighter in all configurations than Apple’s smaller 13-inch M4 MacBook Air.

Usually the go-to example of laptop portability, the £999 MacBook Air tips the scales at 1.24kg. Hardly heavy, but Acer’s engineering on the Swift Air 16 is notable, even when its plain stealing of the ‘Air’ branding is less admirable.

Should you want to go for the OLED screen upgrade on the Acer, it’s another spec that comfortably outguns Apple’s MacBook, none of which boast this tech. You have to opt for an iPad Pro if you want a large screen Apple device with OLED.

You can go for a 60Hz refresh rate with LCD or a slick and smooth 120Hz OLED, again, a superior refresh rate to any MacBook Air, all of which are stuck on 60Hz. You need to opt for a recent MacBook Pro to get ProMotion, Apple’s term for 120Hz screens.

In a move away from Intel chips, the Swift Air 16 is powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series processors, with several configuration options when you buy. The laptop comes with Windows 11 Home, a nod to it being suitable for personal use, but Acer also bigs up its professional chops, saying it has “robust performance for video conferencing, streaming, editing, and creative workflows.”

The laptop also has a gapless keyboard, a design decision also seen on Dell’s latest premium clamshells. They are an acquired taste for some season typists, so proceed with caution.

Where the latest MacBooks can run Apple Intelligence, Apple’s AI tools, Microsoft appears further down the line with rolling out its Copilot+ AI, which is available in some form on the majority of new Windows 11 PCs.

The Swift Air 16 can cope with Microsoft’s controversial Recall tool feature that basically scans everything you’re doing so you can go and find it later with a prompt. More important to high-end Windows fans though will surely be this powerful device’s promise of fast boot times and up to 32GB RAM and 1TB storage.

Elsewhere the Swift Air 16 packs in a 2MP webcam with privacy shutter, two stereo speakers and two mics, two USB-C ports, one USB-A, one HDMI and a headphone jack. It also promises up to 13 hours of battery life, which is not as generous as the up to 18 hours that Apple predicts you’ll get out of the smaller 13-inch MacBook Air.

The trade-off with the Swift Air 16 seems to be the pokey 50Wh cell inside its shell. Acer clearly couldn’t manage larger.

As ever, buying a laptop is a compromise. If you’re not bothered whether you get a PC or a Mac, then the Acer offers a larger screen in a lighter shell, but the Mac will last longer on a charge.

If you’re tempted by Acer's latest, it goes on sale later this year with a starting price of £899, undercutting the 13-inch M4 MacBook Air by £100.