Credit where credit is due, Apple’s MacBook Air truly kickstarted the thin-and-light revolution when it was released 12 years ago. It has since triggered a tsunami of clones and challengers all over the world that have tried to emulate the design philosophy of Apple’s paradigm shifter.
The closest rival right now is the SF314-42-R7LH, part of the Acer Swift 3 (opens in new tab) family, which is currently available at $574 from Amazon (opens in new tab). It is cheaper than the MacBook Air (by a staggering 42%), but where it really shines is in sheer compute performance.
The Acer laptop is powered by a 6-core AMD Ryzen processor, while its alter ego runs on a dual-core Intel Core i3 CPU. In terms of numbers, there’s no real comparison, with the former more than twice as fast as the latter by popular benchmarks such as CPUBenchmark.
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Both have the same amount of system memory and onboard storage, a fingerprint sensor and a backlit keyboard.
Apple wins out when it comes to the software bundle (MacOS, plus its goodies), the screen resolution (almost twice the resolution), the availability of Thunderbolt 3 and an ever so slightly longer battery life.
But Acer has the upper hand in the connectivity category (more ports and Wi-FI 6) and is lighter (by a tiny fraction).
At the end of the day, embracing Apple’s device is a much bigger commitment than just buying a laptop as it sits in a vertically integrated ecosystem that also includes smartphones, tablets, smart home devices, smartwatches and more.
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