Sony in talks to sell loss-making Vaio PC business | Hacker News Reader

Sony in talks to sell loss-making Vaio PC business

reuters.com

30 pointsnzonbi30 comments

I had two Vaio laptops. The first one was my first laptop, it was really cheap, around 400 EUR, and worked wonders. When it was time to upgrade I needed a Mac so I bought a MacBook Air. I gave the Vaio to my father and he's been using it everyday since. It's been six years and it still works perfectly, not a single issue. Sometimes I still play with it, it's fast enough for me, almost too fast for my father.

The second Vaio I had was bought my by line manager at the time so I could work with C# for a new project. It was a high end one, probably more than 1000 EUR. It was an amazing machine. At the time, I have never seen a screen like that and I was surrounded by Macbooks, really great quality. Maybe it was because of its pixel density, can't quite figure out why it felt so good on the eyes. Also, the keyboard and the sound, things I usually nitpick about, were very good. I quit that company some years ago but I know that one is still being used when needed. I would say that machine was very on par with the Macbooks even after a couple of years. And then came the SSD (and also my Macbook Air).

It's sad if the Vaio label goes away.

My experience with the Vaio brand is pretty much the polar opposite from yours. I bought a high end 1.5 kEUR Vaio laptop a few years ago and it's still with me. It had the best perf/EUR when it comes to CPU, GPU and memory out of the options I had back then and the monitor resolution was good.

But the build quality is just crap. The case is cracked, the touchpad is just awful, the connectors are in silly places. Now the battery has died so if you unplug it, the machine powers down immediately.

And the cooling is just inadequate for the CPU + GPU, albeit it has a Sandy Bridge and a Fermi and neither of those are known for their power efficiency. The fan is yelling like hell all the time, despite the fact that the interior of the machine is just a huge copper heat sink that weighs a ton.

I wouldn't buy another Vaio.

But all our experiences can really be taken as evidence of is that they had a huge lineup of different models.

To be fair, all laptop batteries die, and many laptops have inadequate cooling (this 2011 17" Macbook Pro certainly does).

Maybe relevant, Steve Jobs wanted to license OS X to Sony for their VAIO line.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/5/5380832/sony-vaio-apple-os-...

http://nobi.com/en/Steve%20Jobs%20and%20Japan/entry-1212.htm...

Sony exemplifies why PC vendors are crap. Too many models, no intergenerational continuity. With Apple, they take a design and iterate it for years. The Macbook had been working the same basic strengths for almost a decade. I buy one and I know that in a couple of years, I can buy the new model and it'll be a solid upgrade. With Sony, its a crapshoot. The Pro 13 looks like a solid machine. With great battery life. In 2 years, there won't be a followup that has the same basic strengths. It'll be a new machine that is a total crapshoot. Good chance there will be some major regression and I'll have to find a new vendor. Heck, the can't even build on strengths at any given time. While the pro 13 had high battery efficiency, the similar flip 13 has terrible efficiency.

I buy Windows computers from HP and Dell and hardly notice the difference between the two companies. I don't worry that they might stop producing PC's, because I am sure somebody will.

It's not just about getting some sort of PC. It's about finding a PC that hits the sweet spot for me and being able to rely on getting new ones that have roughly the same characteristics. I got MacBook in maybe 2006, and now eight years later I've got a MacBook Air. The Air is a very similar machine (emphasis on long battery life, light weight, and physical durability, same 13.3" screen size, island keyboard), just better in every way (lighter, longer battery life, etc).

With a PC, I have no such predictability. Say I build my workflow around the Vaio Fit 13 with its flip screen and N-Trig pen. Two years from now, am I going to find a similar model to replace it with? Or will I have to get a Lenovo with a different sort of keyboard and different hinge mechanism, etc?

I love my Vaio-Z, but it's a bit like a Lamborghini - pretty and sleek, but not all that practical. It has a blazing graphics card but the fan noise could rouse a coma patient. Even worse, after a year it simply started shutting down because cooling wasn't working particularly well anymore, and the fan never goes below medium speed, even when idle. The RAID-SSDs failed too, and are extremely expensive to replace, so I had to put a new SSD in the optical drive bay.

Needless to say, next time I'll be buying something a bit more practical, and likely for a lot less money.

I have a Vaio that had a loud fan speed problem. I found a post online that said to go to the Windows advanced power settings and set the CPU power to 99% to make it slow down. It actually worked. Something about not letting the Intel Duo core chip go into turbo mode, which keeps it cooler.

Yep that prevents turbo which stops it from shutting down. Crippling the CPU is a pretty annoying fix, though.

Switching to the onboard Intel GPU works as well, but that means foregoing hardware decoding which means a bunch of things run like glue. I actually ended up just replacing the fan which solved the issue for at least another year until I can get a new copmuter.

That's pretty much the same experience I've had with my Z, though the random shutdowns mysteriously stopped about a year ago. My Z is now 4 years old, yet still is incredibly fast and responsive. Aside from the stupid fan it has been stellar.

All you need to know about Vaios: Sony issues Thinkpads to its own staff.

AFAIK IBM doesn't use RSA to design either.

That really doesn't surprise me. I was given a brand new Sony Vaio VPC-J1 all in one. Had a niceish 20" 1920x1080 screen and an i5 so decided to try and use it for dev work.

Came stuffed with crapware and Sony-isms from the start. Did a rebuild with clean windows. Couldn't find any drivers for any of the Sony proprietary crap (Sony firmware extension parser, Magic Gate, WTF etc) so left them off as it worked fine.

After about 2 months the external PSU blew up. Sony couldn't provide a replacement under warranty for over 6 weeks so I got a dodgy Chinese PSU from Ali Express (took 2 days to arrive!). About 2 months later it started overheating and turning off randomly. Took it to bits to try and clean it and noticed that half the screws on the stand were no longer screwed in - all the threads were stripped. The stand collapsed shortly after resulting it being crudely propped on a pile of books. Turns out there was no dirt in the cooling ducts at all. Took the HSF off the CPU and there was only thermal paste on half of it. Sorted it with some arctic silver. About a month later the disk blew up. Turns out it was from a known bad batch of WD disks. Stuck a new disk in it. A month later it completely failed.

Total piece of junk. It lives in my cupboard as a reminder never to buy anything Sony and as a source of a mouse and keyboard for my daughter's Raspberry Pi. Even the keyboard and mouse suck.

ThinkPad user before and afterwards. ZERO problems ever.

They didn't when I worked there, Vaio's all round. That was 3 years ago though, at SCE (Playstation).

They didn't when I was there (until about 3 years ago).

Some people at the Design Centre had Macs but every other laptop I saw was a Vaio and that appeared to be global and common across divisions.

Vaios and Thinkpads target two very different groups of users. Issuing business laptops for business purposes doesn't really mean much. It's a catchy line but not relevant at all.

That would be a shame. I've had a series of VAIOs since the late 90s, and aside from the S series in the mid-2000s they've been stellar Linux machines.

The VAIO Pro I replaces my Z with in November is a fantastic machine and pretty much everything worked out of the box with Debian+Xmonad.

ITT: People post anecdotes about Vaio products without commenting on the actual article.

Shame. My mums Vaio Pro (in red) is awesome.

Will they also be selling the bucketloads of Vaio bloatware they force down your throat? Good riddance.

Retracting the above comment, considering 5k people are getting laid off...

What will we do one day if there's no more computer vendors left?

Panic!

Buy our computers for utility instead of fashion.

SONY had a lot of fashion, but some technical qualities too. Soon we'll be left with neither fashion or utility.

Well I'm stockpiling T-series ThinkPads :)

Too bad the new ones have fucked-up keyboards.

Yeah agree. Not going past the T420!

Well it is a pricing/innovation problem. If we are steering towards just a handful vendors, innovation in the personal computing space will diminish even more. Not that there's a ton been happening lately anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com