Stop obsessing about the MacBook Air. It’s Acer who is dominating portability

Let me take you back to the 2008 Macworld Conference & Expo. Steve Jobs arrives on stage carrying a simple, string-tie manila envelope. The audience waits with bated breath. Seems like an odd prop, but you know he’s going to reveal something special.

What was inside? You got it. The all-new MacBook Air.

Jobs, ever the showman, masterfully captured the essence of how thin and light his new creation was. The problem is, many people still think the MacBook Air is the industry leader when it comes to portability.

You could not be more wrong. Since its inception, the MacBook Air has weighed around 1.36 kg (3 pounds), with no signs of that coming down in meaningful terms. Don’t get me wrong, that’s pretty light, but that’s no longer considered ultra-portable.

Enter the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI that I recently had the pleasure of testing. At 990 grams (2.18 lbs), it sits right alongside the lightest laptops on the market, including the Asus Zenbook A14 and the Dell Latitude 7350. The Acer is one of a number of laptops that have defined a new category of laptops which weigh under 1kg.

The Swift Edge 14 AI also achieves an exceptionally thin profile, measuring as little as 9.3 mm (0.37 inches) at its slimmest point. This also places it among the thinnest high-performance laptops on the market. Very good, Acer.

The compactness becomes even more impressive when you consider the laptop’s specs. Powered by a high-performance Intel Core Ultra CPU (up to the Ultra 9 288V), featuring integrated Arc Graphics and a powerful NPU for dedicated AI acceleration, the Swift Edge 14 AI is no slouch. That’s not all; the laptop also boasts a 14-inch 3K (2880 x 1800) 120 Hz OLED display.

The fact that Acer can pack all this in, alongside an impressive set of connectivity options, and keep everything cool at the same time is a true feat of engineering. It might be lightweight in the hand, but its performance is far from it.

So, can we please stop talking about the MacBook Air when we’re discussing the ultimate in portability? It might have ‘Air’ embedded in the name, but that’s become pretty meaningless now that Acer (and several others) has smashed them out of the park. The ball is in your court, Apple. You can forget a foldable iPhone. I want to see a sub-1kg MacBook, please.