next generation sony vaio

[.a]

have a look at http://www.sonystyle.com/intershoproot/eCS/Store/en/imagesOnline/x505_microsite/x505_flash.html
though it has no internal cd-drive ...
should apple start producing a super-slim notebook, too (without cd-drive)?

anyway, it's quite a nice laptop, the best pc-laptop i've seen!
even the desktops by sony are going to look better (or best on the pc-side).

even compared with apple they look good. probably a little bit more plastic
.a

[MacFan26]

The new Sony's do look good. I personally wouldn't want one due to the lack of features. I suppose some people would be in the market for that, but I rather have another inch on my laptop with twice the features instead. No optical drive, so, this seems essentially to me like a large PDA.

[Chip NoVaMac]

It is a nice niche, but I doubt that Apple would do something like that. I could see a $3000 Apple price.

[belair]

This is a really good looking Pc. But this is for a very small market only. I mean CD/DVD drives ARE very usefull.

I guess its meant for the travelling executive who does not need much storage space. With this computer and a USB stick and only Word, Exel & Powerpoint files you could get along quite well.

And you would look good on a board meeting wich all Dell and hp users cant say. :o

[sandmann41]

I have a Vaio for work. It feels so cheap compared to my powerbook, and it cost a couple hundred more.

[abhishekit]

Well, that looks good. But without CD drive, it wouldn't be of much use to most users.

[mkrishnan]

I still think the Sony innovation Apple should improve upon is the integrate camera for iChat AV....

This VAIO concept is very pretty though. Not sure I like how it bulges out for the spine -- it *looks* pretty, but I can also see it as being a nuisance fitting the computer in cases and so on.

[MacFan26]

I have a Vaio for work. It feels so cheap compared to my powerbook, and it cost a couple hundred more.

and people always complain about Apple's prices

[mac_gal]

I agree it looks great, but look at the keyboard. How would you type with it on your lap!

[superbovine]

first off it looks thinner than it really is. sony creates an optical illusion with the black and black. its makes it hard to see the depth. also on sony laptops the edges of the base of the laptop are angeled from the top to bottom to make it look thinner, however it not as thin as it looks.

[jknight8907]

You'd have to be crazy to spend 3k on a notebook like that. Sure it's nice to have a light notebook, but who cares how light it is if you can't do anything with it!

[quagmire]

How would you update windows with no optical drive. Even though it won't matter with longhorns requirements.

[Crikey]

The desktop: gee, shiny metal on a computer case? Where have I seen that before?

The notebook: looks strikingly like my friend's 233MHz Pentium VAIO notebook from circa 1998, only his was silver plastic. Sony likes that super-thin-and-light-with-cylindrical-battery approach. His was an enviably tiny notebook.

Now that USB 2.0 external CD burners are pretty cheap (and bootable), and it's easy to rip all your music to your hard disk, I think it's a very valid compromise to leave the optical drive off a thin-and-light notebook.

I'd rather have a PowerBook, especially with a thousand bucks left over.


Crikey

[MorganX]

The desktop: gee, shiny metal on a computer case? Where have I seen that before?
Crikey

Actually, I believe it's the air between the metal everyone seems to think is cool. It's a big square doughnut.

[mkrishnan]

Actually, I believe it's the air between the metal everyone seems to think is cool. It's a big square doughnut.

Lost me here...is the spine (the round part) hollow? :confused:

[Krizoitz]

I agree it looks great, but look at the keyboard. How would you type with it on your lap!


EXACTLY what I was thinking, I mean seriously that is a bad design right there putting the keyboard so far forward.

[musicpyrite]

HTF do you install XP if you don't have a CD drive? :confused:


I wouldn't even call this a laptop, more like an utrla-portable. (or a large PDA)

I'd take a toilet seat iBook over that thing.

[jknight8907]

EXACTLY what I was thinking, I mean seriously that is a bad design right there putting the keyboard so far forward.

And as a result of that: where are you going to put the trackpad or the buttons for a 'stick'? Kinda dumb...

[slughead]

I wonder what all of you would be saying if Apple had created something like this.

When Apple released the iMac (which had no floppy drive), all the mac fans were chanting "I never rarely use a floppy drive, bleh blee blar blou."

On an air plane or when you're running around with your laptop, how often do you use your CD drive? When you're at your desk at home or work, that's when you load stuff onto your laptop.. but not when you're at a restaurant or a coffee shop.

I think this is a daring design and will appeal to the people who want an ultra-mobile laptop.

It's like the ipod mini: less features but more mobile, and also a good seller.

edit but I digress, that keyboard thing is really crappy.. but my shoulders are so broad (because I'm a super pimp) I can't work with my dad's 12 inch powerbook keyboard either... my arms and wrists are at the most terrible conked out positions unless I sit like 4 feet away, in which case I can't read the screen. Whenever I work with it, I hook up another keyboard and mouse, put it BEHIND the laptop, and work with it that way.

[titaniumducky]

HTF do you install XP if you don't have a CD drive? :confused:


I wouldn't even call this a laptop, more like an utrla-portable. (or a large PDA)

I'd take a toilet seat iBook over that thing.

External Drive.

[musicpyrite]

External Drive.

Thats retarded.

What if the business-man's-on-the-go computer crapps out and he has to re-install the OS? Sure you could carry the external drive every where you go, but that defeats the purpose of the computer.

[jknight8907]

On an air plane or when you're running around with your laptop, how often do you use your CD drive? When you're at your desk at home or work, that's when you load stuff onto your laptop.. but not when you're at a restaurant or a coffee shop.

I load stuff on the road all the time. Right now I'm loading software into my laptop and I'm not at home. I guess this would be good for some people but I agree with him:
Sure you could carry the external drive every where you go, but that defeats the purpose of the computer.

[SiliconAddict]

Thats retarded.

What if the business-man's-on-the-go computer crapps out and he has to re-install the OS? Sure you could carry the external drive every where you go, but that defeats the purpose of the computer.

Oh god. People you are crapping on this thing simply because it’s a PC. If Apple made this you’d be screaming revolutionary. OMG Apple did it again! Those PC pukes can’t produce squat!

Here's a reality check for you folks. If a someone's computer craps on them on the go the average person wouldn't be installing the OS from scratch. Let me ask. How many of you carry your system CD's/DVD's with your PowerBook? Huh? Thought so. Heck since Windows has the registry reinstalling the OS would break just about every app on the system rendering it dead anyways until you load Office, Acrobat, etc back onto the system. So everyone raise their hand who carries their app CD's around with them. Anyone? Anyone at all? Here’s a reality check for some folks. I manage an office of about 60 laptops. In my time as system administrator I’ve had 1. Count em. 1 failure out of the office and that was a BSOD that was caused by a failed hard drive. Everything else has been a slow degradation in performance not a complete failure of the OS. More then enough time for the user to come in and allow me to backup their files. Dump a new ghost image on their system. Setup printers. Setup VPN remote login. Setup Peoplesoft. Setup their cust office templates. And copy their docs back down. All told takes about 1/2 hour to complete.

Oh and another point I would like to make. Many of these external driveless systems have Norton ghost type means of restoring the OS to its original state. Generally you hit one of the F keys. (In IBM's case its a blue button.) and restore the OS from there. But as I said it will not restore your apps unless the IT department replace the image with a custom rolled OS with all the critical apps in that "image". That's what we've started to do with our IBM's.

The reality is that A LOT of business users don't carry any other peripherals with them other then a power brick and sometimes a mouse. All of our 4 year old Dell CS X's at the company I work at (Along with the system I'm typing on.) have external drives and in just about every case they fall into nonuse. We replaced all 40 of these systems earlier this year with IBM laptops and in just about every case the drives were sitting in a cabinet covered with dust, the user lost the drives years ago, or they "claim" that they never got them in the first place. Only people who had presentations to complete or had reference material sent to them from clients needed these drives and in just about every case their they left them attached to their docking station. The plain fact is users would like to have the option of dragging that CD-ROM drive with them or not. That’s an extra half pound. That’s an extra 1/4 “ that many don’t care for. These systems let the user choose if they want to that drive with them or not. I have users that fly between Minneapolis and Chicago (our home office.) at least twice a week and let me tell you losing even that amount of weight off their shoulder makes a difference.

That being said the system doesn't even come with an external optical drive by default. You can add a DVD RW drive for $400 which is asinine. I think Sony is cutting corners to slash prices on the system while still keeping the price high to rake in more of a profit. (I sometimes think Sony and Apple were cut from the same cloth their practices of pricing hardware and innovative designs seems eerily similar sometimes.)
Sony is trying to take advantage of the fact that this is one of the thinnest and lightest laptops without going totally into the sublaptop category. Something that this device hovers very close to. Its $3,000 for several reasons the biggest being the newness factor. You can bet that this will change by this fall.
I'm expecting more of these devices to show up as ULV Pentium M's get on the market. The M is the coolest CPU Intel has ever produced and it’s showing in these new design form factors.

[SiliconAddict]

I load stuff on the road all the time. Right now I'm loading software into my laptop and I'm not at home. I guess this would be good for some people but I agree with him:

This system wasn't designed for the average user. It was designed for road warriors who are always on the go. An average user is not going to be impressed with 20Gb and a 1.1GHz CPU.
And at 3,000 it prob is going to be used more by the corp type. In which case software is going to be loaded by IT not the user. In many cases but obviously not all.

I've bitched out users who load their own software. I'm sick of people thinking these computers are their personal toys to do with as they like. Its a tool and if you want to load a piece of software you come to me first so I can see what it is and what its going to do to your computer. I could rattle off several dozen examples of such things dinking with people's computers. Not OS related but app related. Where they install some Excel addin and all of a sudden Excel is slow as heck. Why? Because they loaded it on 6 people's computers and they only had 3 licenses and the app was network aware and was being pissy on the other 3 computers.

[MacFan26]

Oh god. People you are crapping on this thing simply because it’s a PC. If Apple made this you’d be screaming revolutionary. OMG Apple did it again! Those PC pukes can’t produce squat!


I don't think that's so true. If Apple made it, I'd feel the same way, it's cool, but not worth it to me since I'm not on the road that much. There'd be the same amount of Apple users that wouldn't think it was so great. Besides, why spend all the extra money on a half an inch of saved space? If I want to spend 3 grand on a laptop, I'll get one with an optical drive.

[5300cs]

Oh god. People you are crapping on this thing simply because it’s a PC. If Apple made this you’d be screaming revolutionary. OMG Apple did it again! Those PC pukes can’t produce squat!

Here we go again with the pc apologists :rolleyes:

It's a very cool design, and I like it a lot, but it's windows and I think I could snap it in half with 1 hand. Also, Sony is chock full of proprietary junk, so Linux is a nightmare to install. I have a VAIO at home and it really sucks, and it's not the first I've had, but it is the last.

The school I work at just got some new VAIO desktops which are very nice.... but I ain't about to buy one.

edit: Here we go, this is what I'm talking about. Sorry, it's in Japanese. http://vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/PCV-HX81/