You can’t talk about an antivirus suite without looking at its protection capabilities. We don’t do our own in-house testing, but of the three testing houses we do follow, both McAfee and Norton were very highly rated—but there are differences.

A-V Test rated Norton 100 percent in its September and October 2018 tests, for both 0-day and widespread malware detection. McAfee was a little weaker for the same time period on the 0-day attack, hitting 99.4 percent in September and 98.6 percent in October. McAfee scored 100 percent on the widespread malware test just like Norton.

For AV-Comparatives, its real-world protection test ran from July to November 2018. Norton consistently scored between 99 and 100 percent, with about four false positives. McAfee’s range was 98.5 to 100 percent, with fewer false positives. The Malware Protection test from September 2018 saw Norton hitting a 99.9 percent online detection rate, a 100 percent online protection rate, and an 81.5 percent offline detection rate. McAfee scored a 99.8 percent online detection rate, a 100 percent online protection rate, and a 84.8 percent offline detection rate.

Finally, SE Labs gave Norton a AAA rating for its July through September 2018 report, while McAfee received a AA grade. SE Labs said targeted attacks (where their experts tried to hack a system) were more of a problem for McAfee and others, while Norton was in a group that handled both targeted and widespread malware more effectively.

McAfee and Norton are very close in protection rates overall, but there are a few significant areas based on the testing above where Norton performs just a little bit better.

Winner: Norton

McAfee vs. Norton: Conclusion

No surprise here, but our top pick is Norton Security Premium. McAfee has some extra features to recommend it, and its protection levels are very good. Taken together with the quality of the desktop app, the extra features, the protection and the performance, however, Norton is our winner in this close showdown.

Count the Swift 7 among the new generation of laptops that’s made a wholesale shift to USB-C ports—again, partially driven by the thinness of the Swift 7’s chassis. Neither port is Thunderbolt enabled. There’s a headphone jack alongside these ports, as well.

On the other side of the chassis there’s something a bit more interesting: a SIM slot. The Swift 7 is a “connected” PC, with both Wi-Fi and an optional cellular connection to allow you to work on the road. You won’t find any microSD or even miniDisplayPort I/O here; if you want to connect to an external display, you’ll have to invest in a USB-C hub of some sort.

From a security standpoint, there’s a fingerprint reader that works with Windows Hello. It doesn’t rank among the best I’ve tried. While I could log in fairly consistently using the reader alone, I often had to tap once, twice, or even three times before it would identify my fingerprint. After setting it down for the holidays, I had to re-key my finger.

Mark Hachman / IDG

From a software perspective, Acer doesn’t gum up the Swift 7 with too many unnecessary apps. The Acer Care Center provides the basic utility software that many laptop makers supply, with everything from a driver-update checker to a disk defragmenter unnecessary with the Swift 7’s SSD. An Acer Collections app serves as a referral to some of the better apps found in the Microsoft Store. There’s also Acer Quick Access, which provides shortcuts to managing the eSIM, dialing down the display’s blue-light output to manage insomnia, and “color intelligence” to adjust the color warmth of the screen in relation to the content it’s displaying. There’s still the usual Windows 10 crapware though, with unnecessary games like Candy Crush Soda Saga.

A connected PC

As noted, the Acer Swift 7 is a connected PC, meaning you’ll be able to use it at home or in the office using its built-in Wi-Fi connection, as well as on-the-go via cellular data. The Swift 7 includes both eSIM as well as an actual SIM card tray, and Acer includes a one-month, 1GB trial through a third-party wireless ISP, Ubigi. 

While I wasn’t able to test the Ubigi service—this review was put on hold for the holidays, and the trial expired—setting up a physical SIM was simple enough. In fact, the SIM tray on the Swift 7 doesn’t use a typical SIM ejector pin, but includes a small indentation in which to hook a fingernail and pull out, which I found much, much easier to use. Windows was smart enough to recognize the new SIM and configure itself, and I was up and running within seconds.

Cellular performance will vary due to a variety of factors—the carrier, the proximity to a cellular tower, network congestion, and the like—but a quick speed-test comparison between my older OnePlus 5 and the Acer Swift 7 showed the Swift 7 recording download speeds a few times faster than my phone, using the same T-Mobile SIM swapped between devices in the same location. Obviously, an integrated SIM doesn’t preclude you from tethering your phone, either.

Typing experience: Bad to worse

Unfortunately, the typing experience on the Swift 7 is rather poor. As I wrote this review upon the Swift 7, I simply found that the landing areas of the keys were slightly too small to be comfortable or accurate over longer periods of time. Function keys are scattered over the first and second rows somewhat haphazardly. Though the keyboard is backlit, there’s a great deal of light bleed from underneath the Delete key on the top row, as well as from the directional arrow keys in the bottom right-hand corner. (Backlighting can be toggled only on and off, with no gradation.)

Mark Hachman / IDG

A more egregious flaw, in my view, concerns the editing keys: The Delete key is just a fraction of the Backspace key next to it, and the Caps Lock key is even slightly smaller. (Granted, the latter key is rarely used.) But I found my fingers also tracked more naturally to the Delete key if and when I made a mistake—which, on an unfamiliar keyboard, I found myself doing more than I usually would. I also found the key travel slightly uncomfortable, perhaps not that surprising in a laptop designed specifically for thinness.

But it’s Swift 7’s precision touchpad that really disappointed. The touchpad is of sufficient size, and its glassy surface is the equal of competitors like the Surface devices. 

Mark Hachman / IDG

But unlike the majority of touchpads, the Swift’s 7 is not clickable. I’ll freely confess that I had to search out a reminder on how to click and drag files with a non-clickable touchpad. (Double-tap the file or files, but leave your finger on the file and drag, instead of removing it.) But occasionally it wouldn’t register taps. I hurriedly plugged in a mouse instead.

Even after some use, I felt rather miserable typing on the Swift 7’s keyboard, making it one of the few review laptops I was anxious to be rid of, and return to…well, anything else. 

Mark Hachman / IDG

Performance: A tablet challenging a notebook

The Swift 7 faces a somewhat unique challenge: it’s a notebook, but powered by a processor designed for a tablet. Unfortunately, the 2-core, 4-thread 7th-generation Y-series Core chip inside the Acer Swift 7 (2018) is no match for the 4-core, 8-thread 8th-generation U-series Core chips used by most competing notebooks during 2018. The Swift 7’s challenge is also made worse by tablets like Microsoft’s Surface Pro 6, which are powered by the same U-series chips most notebooks are. 

We noticed that the Swift 7 tended to power-throttle itself, too, restricting performance further. The Swift 7 (2018) also significantly warmed up during large file transfers, especially during a large Windows rollup update where the SSD was being stressed. But the laptop remained relatively cool during a computationally-intensive benchmark like Handbrake, and also when using it on a daily basis.  All of this is somewhat academic, as the Swift 7 still underperformed a mix of competing laptops, all priced somewhat north of $1,000. That includes the recent HP Spectre Folio, which is also powered by a Y-series processor.

Though we don’t always test using all three benchmarks of the older PCMark 8 suite—Work, Home, and Creative—they’re representative of the type of workloads that you’ll encounter on a near-daily basis. In each, though, the  Swift 7 (2018) finished at or near the bottom of the pack.

The Work benchmark tests word processing and spreadsheet use, with a little video chat and Web browsing mixed in. While the Acer Swift 7 felt fine for daily use, the numbers show it offers less performance than the competition.

Mark Hachman / IDG

Ditto for the Home and Creative tests, as well. While the Home and Creative tests both stress some light gaming and web browsing, the Creative test leans more heavily into photo editing and video. 

IDG

IDG

Cinebench is probably the most commonly used benchmark across laptops and desktops, as it renders a 3D scene stressing all of the CPU cores in turn. Here, the 7th-gen Core compares very unfavorably.

Mark Hachman / IDG

Handbrake, an open-source viceo conversion tool, is primarily used as a stress test of the laptop’s load over time. Unfortunately, the Swift 7 records an abysmal score, though the HP Spectre Folio’s is even worse.

Mark Hachman / IDG

Don’t buy the Swift 7 to play games, either. We use the 3DMark “Sky Diver” test as an indicator of 3D performance, and again the Swift 7 finished well down the pack.

Mark Hachman / IDG

Unfortunately, the Swift 7’s thin chassis doesn’t allow much room for a battery, and the 33 watt-hours that it can generate on a full charge is well below the forty- and even fifty-odd watt-hours of the competition. Battery life therefore suffers, though in all fairness about eight hours or so suffices for close to an all-day work experience. Our rundown test loops a 4K video over and over until the battery expires, however, and doesn’t measure the ebb and flow of a day’s work.

IDG

It’s worth noting that turning on Dolby Audio—which, as we noted above, improves the sound quality—appeared to steal possibly 45 minutes of battery life. We tested, as we usually do, using a pair of earbuds with Dolby Audio turned off. There’s enough volume that Dolby isn’t necessary except to enhance the sound.

Conclusion: Thin may be in, but count the Swift 7 out

Because of a number of delays, our review of the Swift 7 (2018) arrives after we’ve already seen the Swift 7 (2019), thanks to Acer’s booth at CES. And we’re enthusiastic: not only is it lighter, but the bezel has nearly disappeared, the USB-C ports now include Thunderbolt capabilities, and—hallelujah!—the touchpad is now a true “clickpad”. There’s an 8th-generation Core processor, too, which hopefully should bring the performance of the Swift 7 up to par with its competition. In all, it sounds like a substantial improvement.

The updated 2019 version isn’t launching until May, though. Right now, it’s hard to recommend the current iteration of the Acer Swift 7. It’s certainly a joy to behold, and to carry from home to work. But then the problems set in. We’d lower its review score as a consequence of its poor performance, certainly. Its fatal flaw, however, is the poor keyboard and even worse trackpad.

Fortunately, it’s only a few months until Acer ships an improved version of the Swift 7.

The left ear cup has power for ANC and a 3.5mm receptacle for wired mode. The right ear cup features the main power for wireless use, volume, and a Micro-USB port for charging. The power button does double duty as a play/pause toggle. Press it once for play/pause or depress it for several seconds to turn the headphones off.

I applaud the fact that ANC worked independently of the headphone’s main power. That’s not always the case with ANC headphones. There are some times where you just want ANC while using your headphone in wired mode.

I tried the headphones with calls, voice dictation, and Siri. The performance was average, meaning that the headphone worked as advertised, but had trouble with higher noise environments.

I did notice that the E7 gave a noticeable sonic thud when going in and out of Siri or phone calls. The thud was so noticeable and bothersome that I feel Mixcder should address this issue with a firmware update. All they need to do is apply a volume fade during that transition and voila! The problem will be solved.

Noise-cancelling prowess?

Let me please state a fact: Sony’s and Bose’s active noise-cancellation technologies are in their own league. Don’t be fooled into thinking that the E7 will give you anywhere close to the same levels of ANC performance.

In every context, the Mixcder failed to put me in a total cone of silence like today’s top performers can. In fact, the E7’s are among the least-effective ANC headphones I’ve ever reviewed. But lets put things into perspective: the E7 are also among the least-expensive ANC headphones I’ve reviewed. Do they deliver $60 worth of ANC performance? Probably.

In my experience, the E7 only took the edge off ambient noise at specific frequencies. To my ears, the ANC attenuated the midrange and midbass more than the rest of the frequency spectrum. If you’re trying to block the sound of your air-conditioner, for instance, these will take that edge off, but they won’t entirely mask it.

For example, I pit the E7 with Bang & Olufson’s Beoplay H9i (in for a forthcoming review). In two noisy restaurants, the E7 muffled the ambient noise around me to a slightly greater degree than the headphone’s own passive noise cancellation. The Beoplay H9i, by contrast, deadened the restaurant’s loud din, significantly attenuating people’s voices, mechanical hum, and other ambient sounds. To use an analogy, the E7 was like putting my hands over my ears while the B&O H9i was like using pillows. The same held true in other noisy venues: a bus, walking outdoors, and in a convention center.

The B&O H9i retails for $499—five times the retail price of the E7—and the H9i’s ANC is still a notch below Bose and Sony. In this case, there was a direct correlation between price and performance. All in all, I’d say that the Mixcder’s ANC performance is comparable to it’s price-point. And I don’t intend that as a criticism.

I should also mention that the E7 exhibit higher than average ANC-related hiss. Conversely, there was little to no ANC-related pressure on my ears. Some ANC headphones give you the feeling like you’re under water. That’s not the case with the E7.

Theo Nicolakis / IDG

Decent sound for the price

ANC performance aside, how do these headphones sound? The answer is not bad! I tested the Mixcder E7 with my iPhone XS and music from Tidal. I listened to the headphone primarily over Bluetooth.

Dynamics was one of my favorite aspects of the E7’s voicing. If you like headphones that deliver some toe-tapping, musical involvement then you’ll be satisfied with the E7’s performance.

I found myself easily engaged with Imagine Dragons’ “Natural,” Dido’s “Hurricanes,” and the Revivalists’ “Wish I Knew.”

I did, however, notice a difference in the music with ANC engaged. For example, On Amy Grant’s “Lead Me On,” the E7 delivered the kick drum and other percussive instruments with more oomph when the ANC was turned off. The same was true in the midbass and the lower midrange on Imagine Dragons’ “Machine” from Origins.

The E7’s overall tonal balance was good, though I longed for more top-end openness and less veiling of midrange frequencies. What you really give up with these headphones is the ability to resolve micro-dynamics. Here again, however, it’s hard to complain consider the $60 street price.

Conclusion

The Mixcder E7 will never be in the same ballpark as the noise-cancelling cans Bose and Sony have to offer, but they are solid value. You’ll get basic active noise-cancelling performance, good battery life, wireless freedom, and decent sound for less than the price of dinner for two.