For many and many of the guys out there, and more and more gals, choosing your primary playing and working setup as in laptop is all but deciding about the holiest of the holiest. You can ponder and think about it endlessly. You can deploy some of the tactics described in your favorite nonsense blog. But you will have to choose ultimately. So, here’s our musings respectively, as of july 2010.
We really appreciate the technical environment of these days – 15 years ago you had to constantly upgrade your PC, spend money to no end, and even if you did, two weeks afterwards your little machine was out of date. You could then go on and read about the shiny new software out there, but you couldn’t run it at home. This way, one was left in a constant state of playing outdated games of wanting, and not having. Il y a a couple of years now, and we coulnd’t help but noticing that times have changed dramatically, and as is often the case in the tech world, in a good way. If one were to buy a new laptop, of course it would be around twenty times as fast as his 5 years old machine, and it would run the newest 3D FPS shoot’em up, but it would not do anything really different. You can upgrade if you want to, if you need something specifically, but you’re not forced to. This is paradise. You really get to choose here. Thank you so much world.
Furthering this, prices have dropped further, while the laptop industry sported pitifully razorthin margins even before. Apple’s flagship 15″ Powerbook was around 3000€ around the millenium, while it is around 1500€ these days. So have at it. Sony, on the other end, for some reason has always been charging insanely stupid fantasy prices on their computer products, which also have been constantly toned down in the past years. So, the current basic all around doitall, Sony’s VAIO E-series, is about 700€ and that is it. Beautiful thing, and it makes your pondering much easier, because if you were wrong and end up unhappy with your new hardware, you didn’t kill 3000€ there, but just like… a really big night out? You know what I mean.
So, moving on along all lightly, because of the light pricetag, Sony’s VAIOS always had their staple of annoying and uncalled for disadvantages. They still persist to these days. First off, they come with an incredible amount of bloatware. Useless shite. Dozens of trial versions to put on the sticker out there on the packaging. A VAIO starting center, where you can be all… vaioy? Not even they themselves know. But it adds to a slightly broken overall feeling. Also, you may hear about really strange things going on with the Sony support, which may get mad evil on your ass occasionally. Like telling you to simply go and buy a new piece of hardware. And third point here, the finishing, the look and feel, while being beautiful to look at, feels cheap, as you can push the chassis in with your finger, and me myself I leave marks on the parts beside the touchpad because of the heavy usage. When I take a look at a friend’s Macbook standing half a meter away, this gets painfully real.
But if you manage to overcome these obstacles, you get a i3-330M @2,13 GHz (you know, the kind of Intel that we’re a slave to), 3MB cache, 4 Gigs of RAM, and a 500 GB harddrive. The one caveat is running your favorite OS, ubuntu. As always, there is no guarantee here, as the VAIOs still come with some version of outdated Windows – one of the many reasons, by the way, why people jolting around randomly made up percentages of computers running windows are very, very wrong (my old VAIO had a Win preinstalled, of course without the CDs, and I’ve never even used it once. Still counts as a Windows-PC in use). And considering the screen’s 16:9 build, and native 1366×768 resolution by its ATI Mobility RADEON 5650 grafics card, one might run into serious problems. Strangely enough, all a thorough google search brought up was somebody reporting problems with his audio setting. We will have to see.
So, after all, the VAIOs wouldn’t be one’s first choice, and we’ve constantly told people asking which laptop to buy to go for an Apple or maybe Lenovo Thinkpad. But if you’re eating scripts of code for breakfast and enjoy talking about USB 2.0 for hours without noticing that you’re not furthering any great worldwide causes, philosophically speaking, you’ve got to admit that choosing your window to the world here, it is an emotional decision, and not one made by rationals. And Sony, evil as they may be, and as big a let down their Ginza flagship store really is, just nails it with us with their confusingly gargantuan array of models to choose from.
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