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.

Acer Predator Helios 300

            The Acer Predator Helios 300 is a good laptop. The first thing to notice about the machine is the design and if you consider gaming laptops in the same price category, this is a good looking laptop.  The Predator's aluminum-and-plastic design doesn't stray far from the look of Acer's other budget gaming notebooks; its black, metal lid has two red stripes flanking the Predator logo. There's a small plastic bumper on the top of the lid that feels far cheaper than the aluminum that surrounds it. When you lift the lid, you'll find the 15.6-inch, 1080p display, surrounded by a bezel that has the Predator logo on the bottom and the Acer logo on the top-left corner. That second logo is distracting, and I wish Acer had the confidence to let the Predator brand stand on its own, the way Dell does with Alienware and Asus does with its Republic of Gamers line. There's also a full keyboard with a number pad utilizing red backlighting and red WASD keys, as well as a black, metal deck. At 5.5 pounds and 15.4 x 10.5 x 1.5 inches, the Predator Helios 300 is a little larger than other mainstream gaming notebooks but also just a tad lighter. As any good gaming notebook should, the Predator has plenty of ports. On the left side are an Ethernet jack, a USB Type-C port, HDMI output, a USB 3.0 port and an SD card slot. A headphone jack and a pair of USB 2.0 ports are located on the right side of the laptop.

The 15.6-inch, 1080p display on the Predator is sharp but otherwise lackluster. When I watched the trailer for Marvel's Inhumans, Medusa's red hair didn't pop against her lavender dress, and bright lights overpowered both Black Bolt and Medusa in a scene together. It wasn't as bright as I would have liked, but it was perfectly usable. The Predator's keyboard is comfortable, but I wish it felt more responsive. The keys have  1.6 millimeters of vertical travel, so I never felt as if I were bottoming out. But the keys require 79 grams of pressure to actuate, which kept them from feeling light and clicky. he Predator is armed with a 2.8-GHz Intel Core i7-7700HQ CPU, 16GB of RAM and a 256GB solid-state drive, which is more than enough for some serious multitasking. I had 30 tabs open in Chrome while I watched a 1080p stream on Twitch, and didn't see any lag. This is a gaming laptop that lasted far longer than we expected. It ran for 6 hours and 48 minutes on the Laptop Mag Battery Test, which browses the web continuously over Wi-Fi. That's lower than the mainstream average (7:00), but gaming notebooks tend to not even come close to that.