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Acer Swift 3 vs Microsoft Surface Book 3

Acer Swift 3

181 reviews

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Microsoft Surface Book 3

Microsoft Surface Book 3

81 reviews

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Consumer Reports · Best Back-to-School Sales on Laptops, Headphones, and More

#11 most mentioned

Reddit · r/laptops

Best Mid-Range Laptop

RTINGS · The 7 Best Laptops

#28 most mentioned

Reddit · r/laptops

Great performance

Good battery life

Strong build quality

Comfortable keyboard

100% sRGB rating

Great portability and battery life

Powerful 4-core i7-1065G7 processor

GTX 1650 Max-Q graphics

16 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD

3K 13.5" IPS touch display

Not much key travel

No dedicated graphics card

Limited storage options

Not suitable for heavy gaming

Occasional issues with tablet not reconnecting to the base

Stylus feels like a twig or Nintendo DS stylus

Verdict

The Acer Swift 3 is a great laptop for its price, offering good performance and battery life. It has a strong build quality with magnesium and aluminum construction, making it very portable and able to withstand the stress of travel. The keyboard is comfortable to use, although there is not much key travel which may take some getting used to. The display offers 100% sRGB rating, making it suitable for watching movies or playing games.

Verdict

The Microsoft Surface Book 3 is a powerful detachable 2-in-1 laptop that offers great portability and battery life. It comes with a 4-core i7-1065G7 processor, GTX 1650 Max-Q graphics, 16 GB RAM, a 256 GB SSD, and a 3K 13.5" IPS touch display. The device is suitable for general use tasks, light gaming, and CAD work. However, some users have experienced issues with the tablet not reconnecting to the base and the stylus feeling like a twig or Nintendo DS stylus.

Reviews by Topic

Our analysis shows how reviewers feel about different topics. Please note these are not full reviews.

Performance

But there are plenty of drawbacks that give me pause. Update: I ended up returning this laptop as the freezeups were happening more, even after I finished doing all of the windows/driver updates. Perhaps those will be fixed in future firmware patches, but I'd rather get a computer that functions "correctly" from day one. It's weird because as I mentioned, overall performance of this laptop is very impressive and far outshines my old 2 core macbook pro, but I don't have the same freezeups on the mac (running windows) - I imagine that this has something to do with lack of AMD drivers or something

Great Quality, Poor Performance

However, the performance downgrade and struggles makes me question if just getting a Laptop 4 w/ double the RAM + iPad Mini or regular iPad would be a more efficient use of money. We're talking about the Book 3 struggling with 1080p video on YouTube without frame drops, yet a cheap iPad wouldn't question that for a second. It seems like the best of both worlds, while the Book 3 seems to offer the mediocre of both. Much of the negatives didn't truly sink in until after the return period, so I may recommend purchasing through Microsoft directly, as they offer 60 days to make up your mind rather than 30

Weight

Great little beast

Usually, to get a laptop of this size and this 'thinness', with this performance, you'd have to be looking at at least $1000. I'm happy with this laptop because: 1. It's really light. Not the lightest laptop ever, but it is just so

Versatile, LONG battery life,

Versatile, LONG battery life, but it's so heavy. It's like a brick. I've had issues with OS upgrades, so -2 star.

Price

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Acer Swift 3 2021 Review - WAIT!

They do start to look and feel a little bit cheap, considering how much they cost and when you consider the top end 3x has the same pretty average 108...

Neutral

Microsoft’s 13.5-inch Surface Book 3 puts modern guts in a dated design

The price also hasn’t changed. Our review unit, which includes a Core i7, 32GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, and a GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q GPU, is $2,499. That’s the same price as the Surface Book 2 with comparable specs. (You can also get the Book without discrete graphics; the base 13

Battery Life

Great laptop for students on a budget!

The charger plug doesn’t fit nicely into the computer. I have to push it in harder than I would like to get it to charge, and I always worry that it’s going to break. However, the battery life is so great that I’ve only had to charge it once in the past three days. I’ll update later when I’ve spent more time with it

Too Many Flaws, Extremely Buggy and Overpriced

The 15.5 hours of battery life advertised is a complete lie. --Sometimes when the laptop needs a system update, it will refuse to launch any programs until all updates are finished. --Microsoft's support has not been too helpful, either

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