➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: Ryzen shine

• ✅ Acer is putting out Ryzen 7000-series versions of the Nitro 16 and Nitro 17

• 🤷 The Acer Swift series gets AMD CPUs too, but only in the Swift Go 14

• 📅 The Nitro laptops release in May, while the Ryzen Swift Go 14 comes in June

If you read yesterday’s Acer CES 2023 announcement and found yourself in dismay at the lack of AMD love, not to worry, friend: Acer hasn’t forgotten you.

In fact, it just announced three new laptops driven by the latest AMD Ryzen 7000 series chips, and come May and June, when they get released, we’ll get a better idea whether they and other AMD Ryzen 7000 laptops deserve consideration for the title of best gaming laptop or best laptop.

Acer Nitro laptops

Budget-conscious gamers get two Ryzen-powered CPUs in the form of the Acer Nitro 16 and Acer Nitro 17. Both of Acer’s slender (for a gaming laptop) clamshells can be outfitted with Ryzen R9, R7, and R5 processors, 16GB RAM with support for upgrades to 32GB RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 40-series laptop GPU, dual M.2 SSD slots, and a Wi-Fi 6E card.

Acer says updated cooling techniques, like an upper air intake and liquid metal thermal grease, will keep these laptops running cooler and more efficiently for longer. Both have HDMI out, a MicroSD card, an interestingly broad range of USB ports from USB 2.0 to USB 4, and an ethernet port. They’ll be available in May in North America, with a starting price of $1,149.99 for the Nitro 16 and $1,199.99 for the Nitro 17, and buyers get a month of Xbox or PC Game Pass.

Acer Swift Go 14

Acer announced a few updates to its Swift line yesterday, but the only one getting an AMD Ryzen CPU will be the Swift Go 14. The 14-inch laptop is offered with an AMD Ryzen 3, Ryzen 5, or Ryzen 7 processor from the 7000-series family. The base model gets a 2,240 x 1,400 resolution IPS LCD, but can be upgraded with a 2,880 x 1,800 OLED. Storage starts at 256GB and goes up to 1TB on an M.2 NVMe SSD.

The Swift Go 14 is fairly thin, though not as much so as some of the slimmest Samsung or Dell laptops. It’s only a little heavier than a 2022 MacBook Air, however, and hey, it comes in green, which rumor once said Apple’s smallest laptop would.

The Swift Go 14 will be out in North America in June, starting at $849.99.