Gadgetory

you know it's funny it seems like just yesterday I was making a video about the thinnest notebook in the world and Here I am doing the same damn thing again meet the Acer Swift 7 it is even thinner than the old King while costing significantly less cooller masters master case maker five features they're freeform modular system allowing you to customize adjust and upgrade make it yours at the link in the video description so naturally today's video is going to contain a lot of comparisons to the previous thinnest notebook champion the HP Spectre 2016 so let's begin then with the raw physical impressions we will start of course with thickness or thinness is the Acer swift seven thinner than the HP Spectre the answer is yes was it impossible for me to tell without running down to the workshop for a level or a caliper tool also yes so then it would appear that we've arrived at the point where declaring one's device to be thinner is purely an exercise in bragging rights as opposed to a meaningful advantage for the actual user so let's move on then on the bottom of the clamshell we find a unibody aluminum design with an aluminum bottom plate that is more rigid in my hands and squeaks less while it flexes making it feel more premium but that ends up actually performing worse in my Bend and see if it stays bent test than the Spector's aluminum carbon fiber hybrid approach with that said it's definitely not the worst I've seen so if you don't keep bowling balls in the same backpack as your laptop this shouldn't be a huge issue and Acer comes back swinging with the display get it swinging like on a hinge anyway while HP may be very proud of their fancy-pants hidden hinge in practice Acer's more traditional hinge design gives the display less flex overall and more importantly bring screen wobble back down to a level that I would consider acceptable on the subject of acceptable let's talk about IO HP Rush's acer in this department with two Thunderbolt three ports each capable of carrying a display Thunderbolt or USB 10 gigabit data signal and a third five gigabit USB port that doubles as a dedicated power input while Acer brings only two five gigabit USB threes to the back end of its type-c connectors with only one of them even capable of carrying a DisplayPort signal I mean this is still better than Apple's MacBook because at least I can use either of the included adapters HDMI or USB a and or third-party ones that I purchased at the same time as charging the device and at least it's got you know a headphone microphone combo jack butum but this is about as bare-bones as it gets these days without being unreasonable IMO Acer does make up some ground and then also loses some when we make our way to the keyboard and trackpad the Spector's trackpad is simply put too small and the Swift 7s is especially by comparison glorious the extra width adds more convenience than I would have at first expected and once I turned off enhanced pointer precision which is trashed by the way and turn down the speed in Windows to a reasonable level I was actually really impressed with it the keyboard though is a bit more of a mixed bag for me the keys feel a bit spongy requiring a lot of pressure to press down but without much of a tactile feel though as far as typing speed goes while I don't like them they don't slow me down much so I can't complain too much about that so I'll complain about the lack of a backlight instead I mean how many fractions of a millimeter would that have cost me here Acer no backlight which brings us I guess finally then to specs and performance eight gigs of ram ddr3 ram by the way a 256 gig SATA 3 SSD which was a noticeable downgrade compared to HP's PCI Express based model and for the CPU Acer has gone a very interesting route here opting for a four and a half watt intel you class processor so I've got a core I 5/7 Y 54 in mine instead of a normal 25 watt notebook chip but what does that mean for performance then well looking at a couple choice benchmarks here we're going to be running anywhere from 25 to 35% slower than HP's beast but this comes with an advantage too so let's get into some of the more experienced you'll stuff battery life for the Swift 7 is great and while Cinebench certainly ran slower it also ran without turning on any kind of cooling fan and without bringing the temperature of the bottom of the unit above slightly warm to the touch which is damn impressive considering that it still has the power to do the sorts of things that most people are interested in doing on their ultra portable notebooks like watching movies on the very good Gorilla Glass 4 top 13.3 inch 1080p IPS display we're using video chat applications to talk to their friends over the Internet that is provided their friends don't mind the potato quality of the included 720p webcam and that they don't mind the unexceptional speakers that manage to make it to the 50 percent mark which is good enough to watch a movie at home with a little bit of ambient noise without this subtle distortion setting in the specter speakers are better there's more good news though there's nothing on this machine that I would consider to be bloat other than maybe the pre-installed office trial the onboard nu MIMO two-by-two AC Wi-Fi solution manages easily in excess of 30 megabytes per second sustained transfers on a wave to AC access point and I found the side positioned IO however scant more natural to use than the ports on the butt of the specter which means the conclusion pretty much comes down to price here sort of if you want the world's thinnest or second thinnest notebook then at MSRP the spectre is positioned as a more premium product with faster performance better i/o and subjectively more sex appeal if you want to save a few bucks and dodge the screen wobble issues at the expense of creature comforts like keyboard backlighting swift 7 is your go-to but bear in mind I said if you want the world's thinnest notebook do you I feel like it's become a bit of a pissing contest at this point and I'd like to see products built to target a use case rather than a V height measurement so let me know in the comments if someone built a notebook with a u processor with like the power of the Swift 7 but twice as thick that lasted for like two to three days of continuous use on a single charge would you be interested in that or tell me do you think Acer nailed it I really really would like to know here and you know what else I want to know why aren't you using tunnel bear you can try it for free it's the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse privately and enjoy a more open Internet so will tunnel bear turned on which is as simple as literally installing the program and then clicking one switch boom your connection gets encrypted and it appears to the services and websites that you use as though you are browsing from a completely different countries you'd be like yeah no I want to use web services as though I'm an American whoo I can watch whatever it is that Americans watch on TV yeehaw there you go Tunnel Bear is the solution to that and like I said you can try it for free 500 megabytes of data for nothing head over to the link in the video description try it out and if you like it you can get a year of unlimited data for a very reasonable price even more reasonable because you're going to save 10% by going to tunnel bear comm /l tt that's right 10% off so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy this notebook at Amazon in the video description also linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally totally join now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what should I watch next great question check out that little button in the top right corner to see our 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