Acer kicked off its IFA 2019 keynote with news that its refreshed Swift 5 laptop will both come with Intel’s new 10th gen Ice Lake processors, promising faster performance and better power management, as well as support for Thunderbolt 3 and Wi-Fi 6.
Coming with a Core i7 Ice Lake CPU – presumably the Core i7-1065G7 – Acer says that the Swift 5 will give you 12.5 hours of battery power, which is no mean feat, considering that the magnesium-lithium chassis is just 14.95mm thin and the laptop weighs just shy of a kilogram (990g).
Paired with an Nvidia MX250 GPU (version currently unknown), the refreshed Acer Swift 5 looks set to be a powerful lifestyle laptop that’ll compete well with the Dell XPS 13 and Apple MacBook Air.
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The presence of Thunderbolt 3 is key, as it means that you will be able to hook your Acer Swift 5 up to a monitor and keep the battery topped up at the same time.
Both Ice Lake and Comet Lake laptop processors feature support for Thunderbolt 3 and Wi-Fi 6 baked in – but it’s not always a given that a laptop with an Ice Lake or Comet Lake chip will feature this.
A key difference between Ice Lake and Comet Lake chips is that the former features support for Intel’s new Iris Plus integrated graphics – so expect to see Ice Lake processors sitting in the kind of laptops aimed at photographers, web developers, digital artists, or anyone working in design.
We don’t yet know much else about the new Acer Swift 5. Presumably it will come with a 15.6-inch Full HD display, as previous models have, but we’re currently in the dark about storage and memory options, as well as prices, release dates, so we don’t know when these will be coming to the UK, or how much a Swift 5 would cost. We’ll update this and out IFA 2019 hub as soon as we know more.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.