VAIO announces tiny laptop with tons of ports
theverge.com
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While Macs are good, it's better to have more variety and different design compromises to choose from. Especially, if you run Linux as only a tiny proportion of sold models will have trouble-free hardware. So I applaud this move by VAIO.
The same frustrating thing happens in the smartphone market. Practically no small phones left. Interestingly, the Xperia Compact is one of those few. Also by Sony (VAIO is part-owned by Sony only).
Does it turn you off because you feel that you would touch it whilst typing, or is it something else?
As long whatever I'm doing doesn't require precise movements, then a touchscreen is good enough, and easier to use. If it's something harder to touch with big fingers (say position in code), then I'd probably rather use arrow keys anyways.
To gi e you some context, I always traded touchpad surface for three physical buttons. They're very convenient when working in Linux. All I need from the touchpad is pointer movement and scrolling.
2 micro USB-B ports, one with quick charging 3.0, one with USB OTG so the laptop can be used as an external mouse and keyboard for a different computer even when not booted.
2 ethernet ports, one with power over ethernet supporting 3 different standards for POE.
5.5x2.5mm power connector, fullsize SD reader, micro SD reader, 4 USB-A 3.0 ports (one always on), mini DisplayPort, full HDMI, 4 3.5mm audio jacks (in, out, mic, headset), VGA, DB-9 connector supporting many modes, HD Mini SAS, USIM card tray, PBD-12 pin connector, tripod mount, mount for attaching to a wall via screws or via magnets or mounting to your arm.
And on the power supply there are 8 ports.
In short: Most existing monitors support VGA, and probably a good deal of those actually use the port.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
VGA can do 1440p, but it's rare on these monitors, so I didn't count the 4.71% 2560x1440 users.
Does anyone make a backlit PS/2 keyboard, or are the power requirements too high?
Even those keyboard switched to USB eventually. The only recently made and currently available with backlight PS/2 keyboard I found is the "Zowie Celeritas II" gaming keyboard (the manufacturer's page says USB+PS2, the reviews say it ships with a usb TO ps2 adapter). However it's pretty expensive, and the red leds might not fit your taste.
Just last week, my team had to attend a meeting where our manager was going to project a presentation on a TV, sadly the HDMI port of the TV was not working so everybody's Macbook and it's dongles were useless. My manager had to resort to transferring the presentation file to my HP Probook and using it to present, which thankfully still sports a good set of ports (the only gripe I have is the lack on DP/mini DP).
I also have a 4k tv on my wall. It also has VGA.
we're talking about the presence of the connector, which let people actually use these screens - even when its not with the full resolution
That said, my point was that 4K computer monitors are rare (despite some communities of enthusiasts), and nearly everything currently in use has a VGA port.
But the worst are the ones with Apple TV or Chromecast. Very convenient for residents that went through the installation and setup process, not so much for most of the other people.
I fully understand that there’s a network engineering / hacker group that goes place to place hooking into all manner of legacy hardware, and that this laptop is a welcome sight to those who have been left behind by the push towards simplicity.
However, the implication (in other comments) that VGA is a necessary laptop port for the mostly desk-to-conference crowd is a bit absurd. Docks are fine.
Maybe five or ten years from now (given long lifetimes of equipment in question) it would be surprising to still have a VGA port.
I agree that docks and adapters are perfectly fine, at least for me and my use cases. But it's not unreasonable for some users to desire direct support for a widely used port. I've had cases where adapters went bad and created issues - the most serious one was a mini-HDMI to HDMI adapter which caused display artefacts. But I've never yet had a VGA adapter cause issues. To each their own I guess.
VGA is the most surprising one to still see. I wonder what the reasoning behind that is. I can't really see them targeting the corporate market.
VGA is old it's analogic and works. The target demography for this laptop are the people who actually have to solve problems that people with laptops with one port create. So they have no tolerance for more problems. ( This is a caricature, but.. )
There are a number of times I've had to present something, and the "non-VGA" laptop crowd was unable to, for various reasons, but a VGA port will cut the crap and get you an image on screen no matter what. It's wet? Stepped on it? Bent pins? It'll still work, dammit. Maybe your slides will have a blue tint, but you'll get em up there.
I'll give a personal example. I was at a party and the movie dude didn't show. Only thing available was a banged up projector from the 90s with analog only inputs. Everyone had new fancy laptops with no VGA. Someone had a totally destroyed old laptop with water damage, screen falling off, but you know what it had? Most of a VGA port. I bent off a few pieces of a paperclip, shoved em in there, pointed that old projector at the side of a house, and filled the night sky with sixty feet of glorious analog pixels.
I'd expect more support for VGA in a place like this. It doesn't just guarantee your slides will get up on screen, it's a real hacker's port, dammit!
This is also the advantage that analog signals have over digital ones: HDMI is basically all-or-nothing (especially when HDCP DRM decides it's doesn't like something), but analog VGA degrades far more gracefully.
At one of the places I used to work, the HDMI-VGA adapters seemed to die surprisingly frequently, and also got very hot even when they worked.
BS
Oh yeah, the i2c interface disguised as DDC is my favorite part. With a few wires, you can interface any i2c eeprom with command-line tools.
But projectors, oh yeah, I hear ya. VGA came out in 1987 and rapidly became ubiquitous. I think the Intel Skylake in 2015 finally shipped without integrated VGA, that's as clear a mark as you'll find for the closing of a chapter.
And the coolest thing is, except for a few weird VGA-on-EGA-connector attempts in the very early years, VGA has always been one single standard connector for the entire 28 years of its existence. And it's not gone, not by a long shot. That decades-long legacy means it's the standard you're going to include if you want your shit to be compatible with as much as possible.
Until my very most recent Thinkpad, I've had VGA the whole time, and got quite accustomed to mocking the portless people (principally Mac folks) when they'd show up without their adapters. "If your machine doesn't have the ports it needs to survive in the world, it is incumbent upon YOU to carry the adapter dongles", I'd sneer at them. "Your vendor invents a new port every few months, I'm not going to stock all those adapters on your behalf."
Welp, the march of time is inexorable, and I'm now the schmuck toting around a Mini-DisplayPort-to-VGA dongle that just takes up space in my bag and I know someday I'm gonna leave it out because I haven't used it in forever. That will therefore be the day I'm faced with a room full of Director-level people I need to impress, and the wrong variant of HDMI-DVI-Thunderport-Nano-MHL-whatever. And I know that damn projector still has a VGA port, just in case.
Oh and then you need a laptop that supports it. If you laptop is more than a few years old, it probably can't output 4K60.
You can still do that with HDMI, but VGA makes it very easy with some jumper wires.
Yeah, if you’re not using VGA ports you’re not solving problems...???
Too young to remember the PC parallel port? That was the hacker port.
That said, I think the parallel port died out not too long ago. I remember the serial port went first (2003?), then a few years later (2005?) the parallel port went, which caused a number of people to think their parallel ports were serial ports. I know nearly anything with XP had both, and most things with Vista had neither, though; they both did die pretty fast.
I can’t remember the time I saw a projector that didn’t have an HDMI port. Are these in a niche you frequent? The consumer and semi-professional ones I run into at libraries, Meetup spaces, and offices all have HDMI and sometimes DisplayPort. They sometimes have VGA or one of the ones that look like VGA but have more pins.
I think new consumer projectors are far more likely to have HDMI than professional projectors though. A quick look at Amazon confirmed my suspicion that HDMI is a heavily advertised feature for consumer projectors and is almost always important enough to be in the title. Companies, meeting centers and universities are all likely to order from a non-Amazon source. Which is good, because on Amazon I just had to scroll my way through weird advertisements for "VANKYO", "GUDEE", "Dr. J", "DHAWS" and "OKCOO" (adorned with ugly "2019" badges like terrible spam Android apps) before making my way to a single legitimate projector brand.
Even for consumer projectors, though, I think HDMI is fairly recent and will take some time to get out there. When I was shopping for a new consumer projector two years ago, there weren't any with HDMI that fit my modest demands for brightness and quality, but that seems to have changed.
A paperclip would have been much easier.
Outside of corporate world though, it's still frequently the lowest common denominator. Everything else has simply existed less time and been part of fewer machines. If not VGA then what - HDMI? DisplayPort? USB-C? Choices explode and you never quite have the right port / cable / dongle...
I work in tech in Japan, and you would be surprised how often we have to use VGA-only screens when giving a presentation outside of the startup bubble. I would say that about 2/3 of my clients have a VGA port on their bulky laptops. So VGA definitely make sense for this market.
A VAIO like this one would be on the expensive range compared to the Dell or cheaper Lenovo I commonly see though, but maybe the bulk price is be quite cheaper than the retail price?
An HDMI connection has to be negotiated (including HDCP) and - for more than ~5m of cable - you will need to convert it to some other standard for the long run (and negotiate HDCP at each end). The conversion will probably be a proprietary system running over ethernet cables and will be a black box when it comes to trouble shooting.
A ThinkPad-X220-sized laptop would still be absolutely acceptable both in size and weight, and could have all (or at least, most of) the ports that one could need.
And swappable battery, keyboard, ram, disk etc.
The moronic thing is to kill bigger laptop lines.
But I travel a lot and can’t use work’s laptop for my things, so I asolutely need something below 1kg to not kill my back with 2 heavy laptops, I don’t mind 12”, I’d like to also draw in it with a stylus, and I can’t use an ipad for offline programming... so the convergence of laptops to tablets is something I like.
The 17-15inch sized laptops are transitioning into the computer appliance category
Was seriously thinking of getting a new Apple MacBook if they refreshed it but that's no longer an option.
I'm still waiting for the convergence to properly happen. One of my biggest issues is that none of the tablet/keyboard combos work nearly as well as a laptop for grabbing and banging away on my lap as is common at conferences.
But this doesn't mean that a whole industry must drop all of the features (ports, in this case)
I guess I should move to 15+" when I finally move completely to business class. Until then, I'll prefer to travel light.
And I really miss my first-gen Acer Aspire One.
Yes. The sales force of almost very company I've worked at can be described this way. And their computing needs are pretty basic. A browser, email, word and excel mostly does it for them. They also need to be able to connect to a variety of I/O for presentations at different sites.
This may not be a coder laptop, but it makes a ton of sense for sales.
> Have people grown so weak they can no longer carry one in their bags?
On this point, the answer is also yes. I got that weak after an bad accident. My wife got that weak after falling 25 feet and shattering herself. Don't assume that all users of laptops are young and strong.
20 years ago I was running an e-mail client on my laptop. Now most of the client runs on Google's servers.
That's why they spend extra money on smaller computers, because they represent the next step towards the ultimate elimination of physical computers, which is what people want.
https://jamesclear.com/ultralight-travel
These days I travel with only a 19-liter backpack. It doesn't matter if it's a day trip to San Jose or a 3-week vacation in Europe. That pretty much eliminates all of the stresses, costs, and inconveniences that luggage has a way of inflicting on you when traveling. My last multi-week vacation to London, Amsterdam, and Paris with only this relatively small backpack was a revelation. I'm never going back. For me you can't make a laptop that's lightweight or small enough.
You can find their stuff via Indiegogo (while kickstarting — they seem to use it to generate publicity rather than for primary funding) or on Geekbuying.com and other retail channels.
Tiny, includes RS-232 port among others.
Downside, you'll need a gold mine to pay for it.
I wonder if I’m the only one: I just placed an order for my first Windows laptop in 11 years. The Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 7.
Apple’s overthin design, heavy aluminum, bad thermals, throttled chip, soldered parts scam is over for me. Love macOS but fact is Windows is nice now and I’m back to the fun days of weird and wild hardware. Feels great.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxocVricANg
You've probably only seen an old video about the old models of the Macbook Pro. ;)
Same for phones. My previous one was a Samsung Note 2: plastic, slightly bent back. Then I tried a Xiaomi MI A1 and (after sending that one back) a Huawei P10 Lite, metal and glass respectively. I hated metal more, but both are awful. It's flush with any table, hard to pick up, even harder if the screen is on and you don't want to touch anything, and it slides out of your hand if you want to use it one-handed in anything other than a near laying down flat position while still operating the screen.
People say (about plastic, both in laptops and in phones) that it gives a premium feeling. It doesn't to me, but it's also just terrible UX wise, so they can keep it.
And i wouldn't oppose to an aluminum design, as someone who is not very careful with the things.
Bit of a blanket statement. I’m totally happy on my 11" Macbook Air still. Full-screen browser on one workspace, full-screen Sublime on another and full-screen terminal on the third. Trivial to cmd-tab between them, and the portability gains massively outweigh any benefits of having all windows open at the same time, especially if I have an external monitor available at most workspaces.
I think the 13-inch Macbook Pro is a fairly good counterpoint. There are plenty (millions) of people who use them as their primary computer every day. Personally I tend to have mine plugged into a monitor, but I also do plenty of work on it freestanding.
Citation needed. A normal size is 14" from where I sit, that's what most ThinkPad T series laptops had been for a very very long time. Yes there is a T5x0 series but the T4x0 always had more variants and the Anniversary Edition 25 is also 14". Also, a 14" laptop is small enough to fit across a carry on, a 15" can't do that.
Once you're plugging it into something, you won't be using the laptop screen anyway.
My experience is that the fan controller is quite badly designed, and the machine ends up being noisy. The fan RPMs oscillate a lot, even under no load.
I hope it is not the case this time, and we end up with a nice laptop that can run Linux well. Options are limited, so an alternative with many ports from a quality manufacturer is more than welcome.
"Unfortunately, Vaio commits a huge blunder when it comes to the fan control. Ideally, the fan should not run at all while the device is idling. The opposite is true for the Vaio SX14: The fan always runs with 32.5 dB(a), which is definitely audible. Under load, the fan becomes much louder with 43.9 dB(a), which is annoyingly loud."
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Vaio-SX14-i5-8265U-FHD-Laptop-...
I really like some VAIO models, as I think quality is superior to Thinkpad. So I wish they took a bit more care with these issues. Their recent fanless convertible suffers from coil whine. Some online reviews discuss this too.
I'd buy a Purism in a heartbeat if it had dedicated touchpad buttons.
My only other suggestions are some Dell Latitude 7xxx models (e.g. 7390, 7490), or maybe a Fujitsu. None of the Lenovo touchpads count anymore (why are the buttons at the top!?)
To use with the TrackPoint. In fact, my X201 had buttons at the top and bottom.
to use it with the trackpoint or the touchpad. You can use your thumb for the touchpad and you'd be surprised how much better it is that way.
Two weeks ago a charger of mine finally broke on the hottest day so far (it was getting hot since day one, ~8 years ago, but this day finally did the trick), I ended up taking out the hard drive behind twenty screws and unplugging the laptop keyboard, because I didn't have a replacement charger. I wouldn't have had a replacement C charger either, but that would be different in years to come.
I guess more universal chargers is more better. Looking at you, work phone (Apple branded, and battery draining unlike any OS I've ever seen, so having only one charger is super annoying).
I like this departure from Apple’s custom of having as few ports available as possible.
One can dream!
Then in my bag, I carried an RJ11-to-female-headers cable, and a handful of jumper wires of various genders and a handful of minigrabber clips. And a butane-powered soldering iron, because you never know.
It was no Novena, for sure, but just having a TTL-level serial port made that a hell of a hacking machine. This was in the heyday of the WRT54G and similar, and I can't count the number of console ports I invaded with no more hardware than a wisp of wire.
Ah the days of connecting to the native cpu socket via ribbon cable.
Does your equipment require the higher voltage levels (I don't remember the last time I saw any that required the full 12V), or do you need all the handshaking lines, or is it a timing or latency issue?
Am I wrong? Did they never leave? Did they come back? Or are these just rebadged Chinese laptops?
Anecdotally, I'd pay essentially up to what I'd fork out for a Macbook Pro now. It just needs to work, the way Apple stuff works, without any headaches. The problem with Apple machines for me now is that they've done all these silly reductions in features that actively hurt my convenient use of it.
Edit, to clarify, I'm talking about a legit copy of OSX purchased properly, no piracy whatsoever. I just want the creature comforts of OSX on a machine with ports! (and MagSafe too, if possible)
Technically, by installing it on a computer that isn’t a Mac, you’re violating the EULA. So it doesn’t matter if you purchased it, it’s still illegal to use it for that purpose (but no one’s gonna stop you)
Psystar did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psystar_Corporation#Legal_issu...
For example: https://smile.amazon.co.uk/LETSCOM-Aluminum-Adapter-Charging...
The connector is also more robust than the effete HDMI/DisplayPort/etc. ones that have tiny pins, purely by being bigger.
A friend of mine has built a little raspberry-pi-laptop with an internal HDMI switch and a USB device-sharing gizmo, so he can use it as a portable KVM for sysadmin tasks. I wish that was more common!
If only it had a docking connector and hot-swapable battery.
That’s just a long winded way of saying, it might be worth a fresh look, if you feel up to looking into them.
But what does it matter. Vaio was always an overpriced under equiped piece of hardware anyways. It was the monster cable of laptops.
Nowadays, I tend to miss real Thunderbolt 3 ports on USB-C, better 2 than 1 and with 4 lanes. This is what they totally forgot. So I could connect to an ancient VGA projector but not to a common 2x 4k@60hz display setup? This doesn't make sense.
(The screen broke with a month, then I spent 3 months in a horrible support hell before finally getting refunded which wasn't even the outcome I wanted - I just wanted it fixed. Contrast with the macbook I bought it, it worked for several months, the hard drive died, I took it to a mac store and it was fixed within the week. The ecosystem around the computer matters.)