Acer Swift 7: How much would you pay for thinness?

I’m all about thin and powerful laptops. In my book, the thinner the laptop, the better, which is probably why I fawned over the HP’s Spectre 13 when it first launched.

Then, Acer took things up a notch (wait, I guess they took it down a notch) when they released the Swift 7 — the new ‘world’s thinnest laptop” and the first to bring a laptop’s thickness down below 1cm. But all that thinness comes with a price. RM4,999 to be precise. Yowza.

For that kind of money, you will be getting a 7th-gen Intel Core i5-7Y54 processor with 8GB of LPDDR3 memory and a 256GB SSD for storage. The Swift 7 also comes with a 13.3-inch Full HD IPS display and a nice metal body that weighs just 1.1kg.

These specs are rather underwhelming if you ask me. Not only is it powered by a Y-series chip, which is essentially Kaby Lake’s Core m, you also get fairly limited storage and just two USB Type-C ports plus a headphone jack.

So, much like the Spectre 13, you’re paying for the thinness and the amount of engineering that went into keeping it at 9.98mm. Granted, it’s still RM1,000 cheaper than the Spectre 13, but with HP, you get a Core i5-6200U instead.

If you’re looking for value, you won’t find it here. If you’re looking for thinness, Acer’s the king right now with the Swift 7.

Besides the high-end ultra-thin, Acer also unveiled a new all-in-one — the Acer Aspire C 22. It’s got a 21.5-inch Full HD display, 4GB of 2,133MHz DDR4 memory and a 500GB 2.5-inch 5,400 RPM hard disk.

The AIO itself looks pretty sleek with thin 8mm screen bezels. In fact, to the untrained eye, one might even mistake it for a regular monitor. The Acer Aspire C 22 is priced at RM2,099.

In the gaming department, Acer officially launched the Predator Z1 — the world’s first 27-inch curved monitor with NVIDIA G-SYNC technology — here in Malaysia. The monitor has a curved Full HD panel (144 Hz) for more immersive gaming. It’s also got Tobii eye-tracking technology which is a really cool way of using your eyes to aim and game by simply looking at your target. The Predator Z1 is priced at RM2,999.

Also making an appearance is the Acer Swift 3, priced at RM2,899 and the Acer Spin 5, priced at RM2,199. For more information on these and other products, head on over to Acer Malaysia’s website.