Bye bye Sony Vaio...

[Hulk]

http://www.trustedreviews.com/opinions/sony-vaio-won-t-be-first-pc-industry-casualty


It was nice knowing you.

 

[rsutoratosu]

yeah, a lot of smaller player are going away.. why keep losing money...

 

[Hulk]

It's kind of a shame because Sony did make a some good models. I think the biggest problem was the crazy number of models. It was hard to distinguish among them feature-wise. This should be a lesson to other manufacturers. Keep the naming and models simple and easy to understand. Limit the overlap, maximize manufacturing efficiency.

 

[gdansk]

Sony ended with the Z, anyway. I am not sad.

 

[Riceninja]

just when i was looking at a vaio pro 13, too. guess its samsung ativ for me.

Sony stated that it is no longer designing and developing new products in the VAIO series, and confirmed that manufacturing and sales will wind down after the latest batch of notebooks go on sale globally.

 

[gorcorps]

It's kind of a shame because Sony did make a some good models. I think the biggest problem was the crazy number of models. It was hard to distinguish among them feature-wise. This should be a lesson to other manufacturers. Keep the naming and models simple and easy to understand. Limit the overlap, maximize manufacturing efficiency.

IMO their biggest issue for most of their life was a price premium over competition without much indication of what (if anything) you were getting for the extra money.

 

[Bateluer]

Saw this earlier on another tech site. My dad loves Sony VAIOs.

Microsoft takes a lot of the blame for the across the board decline in PC sales though. Windows 8 was supposed to be the savior of the PC and notebook market in the face of sales of tablets. Instead, the OS was so bad and so poorly received it only accelerated the decline. There's no incentive to spend money on a new Windows 8 based PC or notebook when the OS is nigh unusable and your current machine works more than fine for everything you want it to do.

Given some of the issues I've encountered in my Acer V5 122P, which isn't a bad machine hardware-wise, I wouldn't be shocked in the least to see Acer scale back their product lines at minimum.

 

[pw257008]

your current machine works more than fine for everything you want it to do.

Microsoft can't do anything about this--if they had made W8 just an improved version of W7, this would actually be more true, not less, and internal improvements to the OS (and there were many in 8) will actually prevent old hardware from going obsolete rather than hasten it. The only way for MS to make people need a new laptop is to bloat the OS ala Vista, or add new features. The first route is obviously stupid, and the second one seems to have floundered with 8 (at least in popular opinion and according to your post).

 

[Bateluer]

Microsoft can't do anything about this--if they had made W8 just an improved version of W7, this would actually be more true, not less, and internal improvements to the OS (and there were many in 8) will actually prevent old hardware from going obsolete rather than hasten it. The only way for MS to make people need a new laptop is to bloat the OS ala Vista, or add new features. The first route is obviously stupid, and the second one seems to have floundered with 8 (at least in popular opinion and according to your post).

Point of order, Vista wasn't any more bloated than 7 or 8. It was just designed for hardware available in 2005-ish vs what XP was designed for.

But, the rest was accurate. The only Killer app for Windows 8 is Metro and it pretty much kills the experience.

 

[ShintaiDK]

The PC division continues with a new owner. Sony just lost huge amounts of money on PS3, TVs, PC and so on. Sony essentially only makes money on smartphones right now. Its a company in dire need of reformation. But at the same time looking like a dinosaur unable to change.

 

[NTMBK]

Sony killed their aspirations of a premium brand a long time ago with a sea of cruddy low end VAIOs. They should have done an Apple; have a handful of premium models, one aimed at each market niche, with top notch quality on every single one. But they joined in the mid-2000s race to the bottom and destroyed their brand, along with almost every other PC maker.

Everyone has at least one friend who's had a shitty Sony laptop that fell apart after a year. Same for Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, Toshiba, and HP. They're associated with garbage products. Intel's "Ultrabook" initiative was their attempt to turn this tide around, but it was hardly a resounding success.

 

[Hulk]

Sony killed their aspirations of a premium brand a long time ago with a sea of cruddy low end VAIOs. They should have done an Apple; have a handful of premium models, one aimed at each market niche, with top notch quality on every single one. But they joined in the mid-2000s race to the bottom and destroyed their brand, along with almost every other PC maker.

Everyone has at least one friend who's had a shitty Sony laptop that fell apart after a year. Same for Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, Toshiba, and HP. They're associated with garbage products. Intel's "Ultrabook" initiative was their attempt to turn this tide around, but it was hardly a resounding success.

I agree with this 100%. "Race to the bottom."

 

[RossMAN]

Read about this yesterday when it was posted in the [ Nik rage ] wrong forum [ /Nik rage ]

I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner.

 

[Maximilian]

IMO their biggest issue for most of their life was a price premium over competition without much indication of what (if anything) you were getting for the extra money.

This.

Every time I saw a VAIO model of some kind it was always a stupid price.

 

[Cerb]

IMO their biggest issue for most of their life was a price premium over competition without much indication of what (if anything) you were getting for the extra money.

IMO, that was the 2nd biggest issue...because I never actually bought one, or recommended anyone buy one . The biggest issue to me was poor ongoing driver/firmware support, combined with proprietary firmwares all-around.

Want to install a new OS? Nope, can't use video. No official drivers, reference drivers won't see it, and INF editing results in crashes when trying to use it. Add the same for sound, network, and dock IO, etc.. Or, it needs a reload, and not all the drivers are on the site for download, but you have to have their special ones.

They made some excellent hardware, but I will not mourn their passing as a PC vendor. Every one I've messed with has been a higher-end one, and made very well, but such a PITA to service...

Sony killed their aspirations of a premium brand a long time ago with a sea of cruddy low end VAIOs. They should have done an Apple; have a handful of premium models, one aimed at each market niche, with top notch quality on every single one. But they joined in the mid-2000s race to the bottom and destroyed their brand, along with almost every other PC maker.

Everyone has at least one friend who's had a shitty Sony laptop that fell apart after a year. Same for Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, Toshiba, and HP. They're associated with garbage products. Intel's "Ultrabook" initiative was their attempt to turn this tide around, but it was hardly a resounding success.

And, half of it is people being idiots. Many people will pay for quality, when the quality is apparent. Early expensive ultrabooks were lacking in quality for the money, and it took quite awhile for that to start fixing itself. Even today, thinner and lighter isn't going to get people paying all that much more, in large numbers.

But just the same, if you are going t complain about how unstable and doggy your current notebook is (because the HDD is taking every bit of every bump, and the cooling isn't up to the TDP of the parts inside), but then buy the cheapest one on the shelf to replace it, you deserve it. But then again, it's a vicious cycle, because OEMs seem to want to push out crap like everyone else's crap, so solid midrange options are sparse.

 

[Throckmorton]

I bought a Flip 15 (or whatever they call it, their naming is convoluted and stupid). Then I returned it because it had a row of bright spots on the screen close to the hinge, about 3mm each. So did the replacement, and the 3rd one. The 4th one had the lightest spots but it booted about 5% of the time.

Good riddance to VAIO.

 

[Remobz]

I could care less about Sony. No sadness here.

 

[Aristotelian]

IMO their biggest issue for most of their life was a price premium over competition without much indication of what (if anything) you were getting for the extra money.

I would disagree with this, and a few other posters in this thread. I just had my Vaio Z (fully decked out) stolen last night from the trunk of my car. Before I bought it, I posted in this very sub-forum looking to see if anything could match it. Nothing could - I'm not talking about a single variable in isolation (weight; or screen; or battery), but rather the complete package that it represented. It was crazily expensive but would have lasted me many years, and its elegance was unparalleled, on my view. That sheet battery that I could quickly attach or detach underneath it was an engineering blessing, on my view. Great battery life, good screen, good speed. And even with the sheet battery, thin enough to fit in a sleek fashion suitcase.

None of you may miss these laptops, but I will. Hopefully my search (that begins now) will yield a better successor.