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Acer's new Swift 7 laptop is less than 10mm thick

Acer says its new 13-inch system sets a new slim laptop record.

Dan Ackerman Editorial Director / Computers and Gaming
Dan Ackerman leads CNET's coverage of computers and gaming hardware. A New York native and former radio DJ, he's also a regular TV talking head and the author of "The Tetris Effect" (Hachette/PublicAffairs), a non-fiction gaming and business history book that has earned rave reviews from the New York Times, Fortune, LA Review of Books, and many other publications. "Upends the standard Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg technology-creation myth... the story shines." -- The New York Times
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Dan Ackerman
2 min read

The Apple MacBook Air used to be the very pinnacle of slim laptops. But today, the 17mm-thick Air feels hefty compared with the HP Spectre (10.4mm) or Apple's own 12-inch MacBook (13mm). Acer is joining the super-slim club with the new Swift 7, a 13.3-inch clamshell laptop that measures just 9.98mm thick. Acer says that makes the Swift 7 the first laptop to get below the one-centimeter mark.

While it's hard at first glance to see the difference between laptops mere millimeters apart in size, the Swift 7's black-and-gold design is especially striking. The body is machined from a single piece of aluminum, and the 13-inch display is a full HD (1,920x1,080) IPS panel, so it'll look good even from side angles. Like the next-slimmest laptop we can think of, the HP Spectre, this isn't a touchscreen laptop, which apparently would require a thicker display panel.

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Inside, this is one of the very first laptops to be offered with Intel's new seventh-generation Core i-series processors (sometimes known by the code name Kaby Lake), which Intel says will provide extra power for video decoding and playback, while operating more efficiently for better battery life.

Having had a chance to handle a Swift 7 recently, I can say it feels impressively thin in the hand, and gives the Spectre and other super-slim laptops some real competition.

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Andrew Hoyle/CNET

Besides the Swift 7, Acer is also introducing a few other new laptops. The Swift 5 is under 15mm thick and has a 14-inch display, despite being closer in size to most 13-inch laptops. The Swift 3 is a mid-priced 14-inch laptop, about 18mm thick, with both sixth- and seventh-gen Intel CPUs. The budget-priced Swift 3 is another 14-inch laptop, but with only Intel Pentium and Celeron processor options, and a low-res display.

Exact configurations, dates and prices will vary by region, but the Swift 7 is coming to the US and Europe in October starting at $999 and €1,299 (which works out to £1106).