Do you remember Vaio?

Back in the nineties and 2000s

Sony absolutely cranked out weird but cool designs.

Over the last few years though

things have been a little bit quiet on and Vaio front

ever since they went independent in 2014.

That is until today with the brand new Vaio SX14.

Take one look at this red and yeah it looks dope

however the rest of the build quality

sadly does not quite notch up with the looks.

Now sure it feels lightweight

however it just doesn't have that same premium feel

as you would expect when you're paying

upwards of $2000 for a brand new laptop.

It's sturdy enough but put it side by side

with one of my favorite laptops of 2019 so far,

the ASUS ZenBook S13, it's really no contest.

The only advantage here of the Vaio hardware

really is just that lightness but besides that

this beats it in pretty much every other aspect.

Speaking of the ZenBook they do share

a very similar keyboard design.

So not only do they have nice chiclet keys

but importantly they also have a lifted design

so essentially when you close the laptops they go flat.

Okay, that's actually not what I thought was gonna happen.

(coughs)

But when you open it up you get a little bit

of an extra lift on the keyboard

and this goes a long way in making it feel

a lot more comfortable,

especially for longer typing sessions.

Now I might sound like I'm being a little bit too negative

about the Vaio but there are some legitimate strengths,

starting with the ports.

This has more ports than any other Ultrabook I've ever seen.

So on top of three USBs, 3.0 ports

there's also not only a USB-C

as well as HDMI but there's ethernet

and there's even a VGA port

on a brand new Ultrabook in 2019.

Yeah, that's a Japanese businessman's special.

Like I was saying earlier the keyboard does have a nice feel

and you also do have a fingerprint sensor on board

but what I'm not a huge fan of is the touchpad.

Now, yeah, it's nice to have the physical buttons

but this is just way smaller

than pretty much any modern laptop

and it does date these Vaio just a little bit.

Now, by default it does come

with a fourteen inch 1080p display

but this red model is the hiring version

with a full 4K panel.

Now I'm usually not a huge fan of 4K displays on Ultrabooks

'cause I find they usually have

a little too much of a trade-off as far as battery life goes

but I will definitely admit this does look nice,

super sharp, super crisp.

Unfortunately though the battery life

is not the strong suit of the Vaio, at all.

Paired with a small battery

this just feels like a throwback.

Now admittedly I do use the computer fairly hard,

so I've got the brightness cranked almost all the way up

and high performance mode on

but even so I'm only getting

about three and a half hours on a charge with this guy.

Pretty much every other Ultrabook out there,

even when you're completely cranking it out,

should give you at least five to six hours,

so that's something that I'm not super thrilled about.

It's just, it's definitely probably,

the weakest part of this Vaio,

just being totally honest, I mean its fine,

it's usable if you're near an outlet

but it's just really weird in 2019

to have a laptop with that little battery life.

Thankfully performance is modern at least.

So not only do you have

the latest 8th generation Core i7 on board

but this guy's also outfitted with 16 gigs of RAM

and a super fast one terabyte PCIe SSD.

There's not doubt that this looks dope in red

but when you take it as an entire package

the SX14 just falls behind.

Not only is the battery life poor

and there's some weird design decisions

but most importantly it is really expensive.

This thing starts at 1300 bucks

but if you wanna get the maxed out version in red

that's going to cost you $2300.

Put that side by side with the ZenBook

and it's really no comparison.

I will take this pretty much any day

however that got me thinking.

Vaio used to be the undisputed champ

when it comes to weird and premium laptops

so what exactly happened?

So as you might be able to tell

some time has passed 'cause we're waiting

for some old school Vaios to show up straight from Japan

but there's some really, really cool stuff here.

So first of all we have the Vaio X505.

Now at first glance this could totally be a laptop

that's being sold today

however it actually came out in 2004.

Yes my friends, we're got a Japanese copy

of Windows XP loaded up on this bad boy

and it's kind of awesome.

Considering that this came out four years

before the MacBook Air it's actually not that far behind.

Now, yeah the 10.4 inch display

isn't massive by today's standards

but one of the cool things is that you actually

get some king of interesting thinness.

I mean this is honestly thinner than most laptops

you can buy today and this was way before the days of USB-C.

I mean, look, this is literally the Wi-Fi antennae

or the Wi-Fi card.

Now my Japanese skills aren't quite good enough

to figure out how to get this thing over to English

but it does have a whopping 1.2 gigs of RAM

which I think actually someone paid to upgrade.

Now as you might imagine,

a laptop like this was not exactly cheap,

even in Japan back in 2004.

I mean what what the actual price on this guy?

- [Man] Three thousand

- $3000 new, and that was back in 2004. (exhales)

Yeah but hey it's okay,

you've got a ten gigabyte hard drive, you'll be just fine.

Update, I was wrong, 20 gigabyte hard drive,

that's where it's at right there.

It's also surprisingly light at just about two pounds

and a lot of that is just the battery in the back.

A big part of that is because it is made out

of a composite carbon fiber.

Now when you look at this kind of stuff,

sure $3000 was a lot back in the day

but you were legitimately getting something

that was way ahead of its time.

Whereas the current day Vaio, I mean it's not a bad laptop

but you're still paying a premium price

for something that's really not in that same kind of league

of wow this looks like it could be made today

if you ignore the fact it doesn't have a touchpad

and has a little nipple.

Now as cool as this is we are just getting started

with some of these awesome old Vaio designs.

Next up is the PCG-505 from 1998.

Now, yeah this looks a bit on the thicker and heavier side

compared to stuff that's modern

but again this was the late nineties.

This was absolutely tiny compared

to what most people we're (coughs) carrying around.

Now sadly, this model doesn't actually function,

although it would be cool if it did

but we can take a look at the hardware

and see just how far ahead of its time it was.

So not only do we have a USB-A port,

which, believe it or not,

for the late nineties was very impressive.

We also have a series of other ports

including my favorite, a little modem

that kind of pops into the side here.

And on top of that if we pop the little side of the screen,

we have a good old stylus.

Now I know a stylus is not a touchscreen

but you could use this in conjunction with the touchpad

to write the world's tiniest, little notes.

Now if USB and FireWire aren't your thing,

you could also get this giant dongle for it.

Now this adds a ton of additional ports

including you have PS2 you have VGA.

Where is this plugged in?

Wait, no it doesn't go in there.

Oh actually, wait, oh I'm stupid.

The cool part about this is that this was very much

in an era where laptops

were nowhere near as good as desktops

for most categories, right?

They were way more expensive,

they usually had terrible battery life,

terrible performance but this was a major step forward

toward a super portable laptop

that could actually get real work done.

It also had a Wi-Fi card on the side.

Actually I have one here, don't I?

So with this now we are online

not even having to use our super cool modem.

Probably one of the craziest models

that Vaio ever brought out was this the UX180P

and no my friends this is not a giant side kit,

this is a full fledged Windows XP computer.

Now if you wanna talk about ahead of its time

this is absolutely it.

Now again keep in mind we're talking about 2006 here.

We have a touchscreen with a stylus.

It has not only Wi-Fi but also built-in cellular.

There's even a fingerprint sensor

in both a front and rear facing camera on this guy

and we're talking about 2006.

Now this is not exactly a blazing fast system

with a Core Solo Processor and half a gigabyte of RAM

but when you consider just the level of spec

you're able to get in something this small

it's really impressive.

I mean seriously, fingerprint sensors

are still a good thing to have on laptops, alright.

They are by no means ubiquitous in 2019

and especially when you look at stuff like cellular networks

again, that's something that is not standard whatsoever yet

and yet this weird little computer from 2006 totally had it.

I mean that, that's innovation dude,

like there's no way of getting around that.

This was so far ahead of its time.

At least it came pre-loaded with Norton 2006

so I'm sure that'll be very helpful

for our ancient Windows XP install.

Also fun fact, this was product placement central in movies

back in the late 2000s.

Not only was it in National Treasure

but it was even in Paul Blart: Mall Cop,

you know, that famous American movie

that everyone is totally in love with, right?

So the next item is the Vaio P

which came out, for the record,

ten years ago in 2009 and I believe it probably shipped

with XP or maybe Vista at the time but someone,

whoever had this before us, loaded up Windows 10 on it.

Man, you're gonna have to use this for a week, you know.

- [Man] What?

- This is gonna be your new laptop for the next week.

It runs Windows 10,

it has full up to date security patches and all.

What actually is this thing even running?

We've got a blistering fast, single core Atom processor,

two gigs of RAM as well as a 60 gigabyte hard drive

but I mean it does legitimately run Windows 10.

I cannot believe someone did this.

Like, I mean, that's so, like.

It's actually, I will say one thing,

a lot of these computers from this era,

they shipped with Windows XP

and they were Windows Visa compatible