Acer Swift 1

                   The Acer Swift 1 is one of the cheapest laptop you can buy that looks a little like a MacBook. The Swift 1 is a simple but sleek laptop. Outfitted with a sturdy, full aluminum body, the Swift 1 is matte gray with black plastic accents, including the keyboard, fingerprint scanner, hinge, trim and rubber grip. A silver Acer logo can be found on the laptop's lid, while a black one lies on the bottom bezel. The word "Swift" is engraved on the hinge. The Swift 1 also has all the main connections we like to see in a laptop, including some you’ll miss by choosing a much more expensive model.

                          The attractive feature of this laptop, after its design, is its screen. It uses an IPS-type LCD panel, so has great viewing angles and surprisingly good overall image quality to boot. Its colour temperature is a bit too high, at 7075K, giving the image a slightly cold/blue tinge but it’s very subtle. Meanwhile a contrast ratio of 1261:1 is excellent, showing that this display can muster up deep inky blacks while also showing bright colours, resulting in a deep, rich looking image. There are two USB 3.0s — great for the price — and one USB 2.0. A USB-C port complements these, although it’s predictably only specked to the 3.1 standard, not the much faster Thunderbolt 3.0. We’d be frankly confused if it did: you don’t tend to get Thunderbolt in cheap laptops. A full-size HDMI and full-size SD card slot finish off what is a connections array fit for a much more powerful laptop than the Swift 1.

                          A 720p resolution webcam sits in the bezel above the screen and it delivers perfectly acceptable image quality for basic video-calling. With a framerate of 30fps and relatively low resolution you get a somewhat choppy, grainy image but it’s enough to get by. Similarly, you get a couple of speakers that fire down from the underside of the laptop and they do a reasonable job. There’s enough volume and clarity that you can enjoy the latest film trailers or Skype without needing a headset but inevitably the lack of bass means that you’ll want separate speakers or headphones for watching a movie or listening to music. Acer claims this laptop will last ten hours on one battery charge but this didn’t tally with my testing. In our standardised PowerMark test it lasted six hours and 28 minutes – well short of its target.