Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Edit: Updated after spending more time with the laptop. I ended up buying two of these. First one was for me, the second one was for my son who is in the military. I can say that my power brick works fine and the "pigtail" fits into the brick just fine. I think that reviewer was unlucky and got a dud. RAM is soldered on, so there aren't any upgrades. However, it's low power DDR4 4266, so it's fast and also in dual channel. 16 GB should be enough for most people. The SSD is a PCIe 3.0 x4, so it's relatively quick. HWinfo64 reports it's also NVMe 1.3, which isn't the latest spec. The SSD itself is made by SK Hynix and performs reasonably well. There are two M.2 slots inside. Slot 1 is NVMe/SATA. Second is NVMe only. Both slots are PCIe 3.0 as the AMD Ryzen 5000 series only supports PCIe 3.0. If you want to upgrade your storage, don't waste your money on a Gen 4/PCIe 4.0 SSD unless you plan on moving it to a faster computer later. I recommend the SK Hynix P31 Gold 1 TB for a second drive. I put one in my son's Swift X and it performs very well. The Wifi is made by Mediatek. I had a lot of issues with this card. It wouldn't connect to my Fios wireless network (it'd connect to the guest network though - go figure). Card was very slow. I bought an Intel AX210 for my son's laptop and it fixed the problems. Speed and connectivity is significantly better with an Intel card. The laptop is a little short on ports, including an Ethernet and an SD card slot. You may want to get a USB dock that has these and additional USB ports. Now the graphics card. First off, this is NOT a gaming laptop nor does it claim to be. This is a low power version of the RTX 3050 Ti. If you buy this with gaming as your primary focus, you'll be disappointed. There are dedicated gaming laptops that will do a much better job. With that being said, this laptop is one that is capable of doing some lighter gaming and doing it reasonably well. It will perform better than other thin and light graphics solutions like the Nvidia MX450 or the Intel Xe. Think more of playing a game in your hotel after a day of work. The lower power edition will have lower performance than other RTX 3050 Ti's running at a higher wattage. The graphics card is there to give a boost to creator software like Photoshop and Premier. This laptop is primarily a work laptop. Still gaming will be significantly better than with the onboard Radeon graphics, or a comparable laptop with Intel Xe graphics. Screen is pretty good for its segment. Sound is ok. Headphones would be advised for better sound. Keyboard backlight was another issue for me. The white backlight with the gold keys can make it hard to read with the backlight on. I found the keyboard more readable with the backlight off in a lit room. The middle right section of the keyboard was significantly dimmer than the left side and right edge. It made the keyboard even more difficult to read and quite frankly, it drove me nuts. My son's laptop didn't have the issue. Acer offered to do a warranty repair for me, but a tech at an authorized Acer repair shop told me to just send it back as I'd have the situation resolved much more quickly. I ended up exchanging it for a laptop that better meets my needs (IA testing and development). I bought another Acer as I still like the brand. I just needed something a bit beefier and a bit more upgradeable. It's a great laptop for my son who has much more "normal" computing needs than I do. Overall, it seems like a solid laptop for the price. It's not fancy but should do it's primary tasks well (business) with a little extra for entertainment. Compared to other thin and lights I've owned (an Aspire 5 and a Lenovo Ideapad 720S), this outperforms them. If you go in with reasonable expectations, you should be quite happy with the purchase.