The domain may have given a hint, but my first thought upon seeing the pictures was "this looks like a very stereotypically Russian/former-USSR design" --- it does not even try to be elegant or beautiful at all, but has a very practical and functional aesthetic.
It is actually almost physically painful how much I want this thing. "Software dev" for me takes on quite a few roles from debugging hardware/IoT devices in the field, to programming lighting shows or interactive art installations. This thing might seem like overkill, but for me and lots of people who do a job like mine, I actually don't think it really is.
Funny, to me it just reminds me of a standard laptop from a few years ago. I have a consumer lenovo from a few years back, and it has all those ports except the USB-C.
Sadly, the trend has been to copy Apple. Even Lenovo has been taking some Apple design cues into Thinkpads.
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).
I prefer using the keyboard nub on my ThinkPad myself, and have the touchpad disabled. If I'm typing, it's easier to use a nub. If I'm not typing, then I'd probably prefer a touchscreen for more accuracy.
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.
I’ve used one on other people’s macbooks.
I think my objection is mostly aesthetic. It just seems so gaudy and excessive or something along those lines.
Out of curiosity, what can you do with that large touchpad that you can't do with one with half the surface?
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.
What laptop is that? Because this laptop has a lot of very weird ports (I'm leaving out USB-C):
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.
I meant the original post reminds me of a standard laptop from a few years back. the one linked on habr.com is quite unique and interesting. But the Vaio SX12 linked in the original post just has a standard amount of laptop ports (3 usb-a, 1 usb-c, Ethernet, VGA, SD card, HDMI, headphone/mic).
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!
I like how almost all the ports are on the right. You will not want to use a mouse with this machine if you're a righty, there will be at least one cable in the way.
The previous poster was referring to the cables on the right getting in the way of using a mouse to the right of the unit, not that you couldn't use any the right ports for putting a mouse in
I am rightly, but a few years ago I tried to use the mouse with the left hand. To my surprise it took just couple of days to adjust. Clearly with the right hand I could press buttons faster, but the precision of mouse positioning was just as good.
...and if you press a button, a baggy drops out full of null modems, gender changers, level shifters, diagnostic LED blocks, a wrench + diagonal cutter for inappropriately placed nuts, and a male and female 0.1" header adapter.
Tellya what, on my old Toughbook I had done a shit-ton of modding, and when I removed the 56k modem, I repurposed the RJ11 jack on the side to bring out an internal (TTL-level) serial port from the CDPD module connector. With some inline resistors to current-limit any stupidity I might get myself into.
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.
Some old UPSs and industrial machinary use RS232 connections. This can be solved by other means (e.g. USB to RS232 adapters), but virtual com ports are not helpful there.
I use virtual comports (with an FTDI adapter) every day to control industrial instrumentation, and I'm honestly curious to know specifically why they are not helpful in your case, so I can be prepared in case any of my clients experience the same issues.
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?
Our assessment was that latency would be a problem for $client. Eventually, it turned out the "just throw ancient hardware at it until it dies" was far more efficient then going along with it.
Most projectors ( the installed base ) only accept VGA.
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.. )
Right, the projectors themselves aren’t VGA-only (because of course they’re not—-when did you last see a VGA-only monitor?). But the room infrastructure often still is, so there’s only a VGA cable coming out of the wall.
VGA is incredible to have, yes, even in 2019. As a sibling comment says, it's "for the people who actually have to solve problems". Nearly all projectors, even new and expensive ones I've used, do not have HDMI. So there's an adapter. But maybe the damned fragile thing is broken, or it's missing, or it doesn't adapt to what you have (mini display port? USB-C? Who even knows!) or it requires power, or God knows what.
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!
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.
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.
It'd have to be designed with lots of error correction for degraded channels, which most often it isn't. Analog solutions work until the point you physically can't hear or see things through the noise.
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.
Bah. VGA needs to die. The number of times I needed to do a presentation and find out they only have a VGA projector....for a product with a GUI that just is not designed for that low resolution (on purpose.) To be honest I do not think I own anything that is not 4K anymore that is a daily use item. I still have retro computers, etc. but every TV, monitor and modem system is now 4K.
The majority of projectors in use (even if they do have HDMI) don't support 4K. Even if you buy a new projector you have to put some effort into getting something that supports 4K (unlike say a TV where it's basically standard). I imagine there are even newly built conference rooms / lecture theatres that don't have 4K projectors for cost reasons.
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.
Sorry, I mixed two items here. Projectors need to take HDMI and support 1080P. Instead half the time I get handed a VGA cable and stuck at 1024x768 or worse 800x600 I should have separated the two rants. :)
Totally. I remember building a LPT to IDE adapter to connect an IDE drive to my PDP-11 clone computer around 1994, and my friend wrote a driver for it... it worked!
Hah, how could anyone forget them? lp0 on fire and daisy chained dongles (back when dongles were dongles), those were the days :)
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.
> Nearly all projectors, even new and expensive ones I've used, do not have HDMI
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've had to plug in to quite a number of projectors; I've owned ~5 myself in the last few years. I've used projectors in conference centers, at YCombinator events, startup spaces, universities... Maybe 5% (and that is generous) had HDMI. Almost all of these were high end projectors, in pretty nice spots (in the US/Europe.) Furthermore, as someone else noted, if it's a mounted TV or projector, even if it does have HDMI I've never seen it be accessible.
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.
Just last week I presented a project on a TV from my 2017 MacBook Pro. I used a USB-C to HDMI adapter to connect to the HDMI to VGA connector to the VGA cable to the TV. I had to reconnect it three times and open and close the laptop to get it to work properly.
Sometimes the tv is mounted and only a vga cable is left around to interface with. Good luck plugging in the hdmi cable into the tv mounted in a cabinet.
The TV is new, it might actually be a huge monitor. There just was no HDMI cable in the room. The TV still has a VGA connector (and cable!) on it though.
Add to that the software support issues. So many times the adapter will disconnect/ make weird colors / refuse to set the right resolution etc. Reminds me how many times i lended my thinkpad because “the adapter doesnt work”
In the corporate world, it's stunning how many portable and built-in projectors, or board-room TVs, have only VGA. Basically I always need to have a VGA dongle in my laptop bag unless the laptop has the VGA port itself.
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 think it is aimed at the Japanese corporate market.
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?
As well as the large number of existing installations that others have mentioned, VGA has a couple of advantages: You can send VGA signals over long cable runs (I installed a 50m run 20 years ago for example) and it's simpler than modern interfaces.
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.
The problem with some VAIO machines tends to be cooling.
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."
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.
Ok good to know. Fan control is super important, the only one managing this well with different and really working profiles seems to be Dell. Lenovo just started to get better there (with the S940 which is quiet but because of heavy throttling and no options for profiles, however better than the way around).
Well then a number of destinations on Google and bing need to upgrade their marketing because review sites and ecommerce site have it as Sony Vaio. As of late 2018.
But what does it matter. Vaio was always an overpriced under equiped piece of hardware anyways. It was the monster cable of laptops.
I always wanted one of these but times have definitely changed. The article says that the Crusoe is used to boost battery life, then lists it as 2.5hrs.
As the proud owner and user of both a VAIO P and UX, I really hope they start looking at some of the smaller niche products again as they’re some of my favourite possessions. Even if they are occasionally impractical, being able to carry a laptop in my pocket with full sized ports for diagnostics is absolutely something I and many in my work community would be willing to pay for.
If you’re a fan of that form factor you need to investigate GPD (Game Pro Devices) and One Netbook, both of whom produce miniature PCs; GPD started with the GPD Win, a pocket console-sized PC with a 5.5” screen optimized for running Windows 10 games, then branched out with the GPD Pocket and Pocket 2, 7” screen subnotebooks (the first was a maxed-out netbook-spec PC, the second gen upgraded to an i3 processor) and now the micro PC, with VGA and RS-232 and a VESA attachment point (it’s intended for sysadmin/ops users who need to bolt a tiny PC to whatever they’re working on). One Netbook are a bit more consumer-ish, but do convertible notebook/tablet machines in the pocket size range. And both companies are now doing subnotebooks with 8-9” screens and beefier CPUs, in the 500-700 gram range.
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.
Replaced by tablets (and phones). Now the demand for convenience has been siphoned off, laptops can settle into their natural form-factor (i.e. keyboard, adequate sized-screen).
What are the practical and functional use cases that benefit from a clit mouse vs, say, a trackpad? Genuine question, I've seen them on older laptops but I always assumed they were purely vestigial from a time when trackpads were no good.
No movement of the fingers off the homerow. It's really actually very useful if you get a good one, though having no middle mouse button (I'm looking at you HP Elitebook I have to use for work) is a horrible mistake.
* It never by mistake registers your hands as a click or a movement.
* Your skin can be extremely wet or dry without consequence.
* You can continue a motion without being limited by the size of the trackpad, because you don't modulate the position directly, but its first derivative. This removes tension between being precise and having the range.
* It separates motion and clicks by having dedicated hardware buttons, often three of them. (Middle button click on most trackpads is tricky, and middle button drag, impossible.)
* Wheel emulation is generally fine, again without moving your hand off the keyboard.
There are downsides, too, of course.
* No multiple-finger gestures, like the pinch.
* Harder to make extremely flat.
* Does not mimic the mobile phone. I think this is the kicker: a trackpad is more intuitive for newcomers and casual users. Trackpoint is preferred by pros who are much less numerous.
Honestly, I disagree with your last point. There may be some "pros" who prefer the clitmouse but I consider myself a "pro user" in that I use my laptop(s) every day for work and for personal stuff, and I greatly greatly prefer a quality trackpad. Apple in particular ships laptops with excellent trackpads.
If all you've used is the garbage trackpads that get shipped with most Dell or Lenovo laptops, then sure I can see why a clitmouse would be preferrable, but having used them all I can say that after using my macbook's trackpad I have zero desire to go back to the pointer, and mine is the comically-large one on the touchbar macbook pro. It's enormous, but even so I've never had a spurious click or mouse-movement with this machine, and that's not hyperbole.
If I need reliable pointing for a particular workflow beyond what a trackpad can deliver, I have a bluetooth mouse. Or a desktop computer with a corded mouse. The trackpoint/clitmouse pales in comparison.
I don't mean to say that the trackpoint is overwhelmingly preferred by pros, and other forms of coordinate input (trackpads, trackballs, mice, etc) are not. If anything, pros is likely the group with most diverse and special preferences.
I tried to say that people who prefer trackpoint are mostly pros, not newcomers.
There certainly are many pros of various kinds who prefer the trackpad; in fact, I would say that in any given group (however we define "pros" and "amaterus" when it comes to laptops:), most people will prefer trackpad.
But I am to this day convinced it's simply the learning curve - until the day I see a video or a person using trackpad that doesn't make me cringe in the same way that a two-finger key-hunter does.
I can understand that this seems patronizing, I struggle to put it in a way that doesn't seem personal, but for years I have witnessed colleagues who claim to be excellent with trackpad, they love it, it's great... and then they take 3-5 times longer to get things done as they go swipe... swipe... swipe oh there I am at the other end of the screen... swipe... swipe... oh there's the button:-/
Kind of off topic, but is there a standard way to emulate a wheel with a track point? I have a desktop keyboard with a track point and the lack of a wheel is a bigger nuisance than I expected.
You may have to activate this, but generally, press the middle mouse button, then you can scroll with the track point while the button is pressed.
Problem on windows is that you have to choose between the middle mouse button click and the scrolling. You need additional software to have both, at least for the lenovo driver.
Bonus point for the track point is that you can also scroll to the side.
Am I the only person that consistently has trouble with trackpoints? Every time I try to make a large movement I get halfway across the screen before the thing decides it's drifting, tries to correct, and sets its new zero at the edge of physical travel. Then I have to take my finger off it, wait thirty seconds for it to re-zero at physical neutral, and try again, this time remembering to zig-zag so it doesn't think that my inputs are spurious drift.
Have you tried a different trackpoint cap? Some people find a different shape (flat vs domed) makes a difference. But some people just don't get on with trackpoints.
Trackpoints give me RSI almost immediately. I've not had this problem with other forms of input for a long time.
The only one I liked was the Toshiba Libretto, which had it on the side of the screen bezel so you could work it with the finger most adapted for fine movements - the thumb.
I always have loved ThinkPads because of the pointer thing. I got used to it and it’s comparable to a MacBook trackpad for me in comfort and productivity.
Trackpoint/clit-mouse is awesome.
It has a higher learning curve, but far more speed and control than a trackpad. Basically, I have not yet met a trackpad user who is not painful to watch as a trackpoint user.
- You can have pixel-level precision
- You can have fast movements from edge to edge of the screen
- You can use it without moving your fingers away from the keyboard
- You can use it without moving your elbows or arms around
+ It is therefore great for small laptops, small spaces (in airplane seat, on a bench, etc)
Basically, far from being vestigial, my boss has been advised that a trackpoint-equipped laptop is a "condition of employment" for me.
Ha, the trackpoint is a necessity for me too. I have acquired various Thinkpad USB and bluetooth keyboards so that my desktop and home media computers also have it. I feel a bit baffled if forced to use a trackpad on someone else's machine. I've been doing this for almost 20 years, since I first learned on a Thinkpad T20.
However, I also use Fedora Linux almost exclusively, and have suffered through several shifts in the drivers and input systems. There were times that my desktop trackpoint became much harder for me to use, as the behavior of the cursor went haywire. I was never able to find configurable parameters to put it completely back to normal, but instead had to also retrain my fingers a bit.
I find that I am much more "fluent" on my laptop with a 1080 screen. On my desktop with side-by-side 4K screens, my efforts are a bit spastic. I have traded off precision so that I can get the cursor around all that real estate without coffee breaks in the middle of long movements. But, trying to grab window corners and other small targets can be a bit hit or miss as I over-shoot.
Properly keyboarding technique has your keyboard at the edge of your desk, that's not acheivable when your keyboard is on the far side of an 18 acre touchpad.
Ultra premium compact laptops is what they have been known for since the early 2000s. I remember oogling over one around that time for similar reasons as this one.
Ports are good and what Apple does is ridiculous but it is also about which ports.
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.
Yeah, I am not sure what is so special about this. I expected some truly unique ports. My 13.3" Fujitsu Siemens S936 has no USB-C (age) but all the others plus a smartcard and a sim card slot. 12.5" is not exactly a magnitude smaller.
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.
I just got an X1 extreme, and although windows 10 pro really underwhelmed me (not very responsive, poor battery life, etc), putting linux on this thing has been an absolute dream. The battery life easily matches my old macbook air, and the performance is fantastic. From what I've seen over the past few weeks while getting moved into my laptop, the carbon series has even better support from the linux ecosystem than the extreme does.
Not OP, but for me I hate it whenever anything metal touches it. Jacket zipper, wristwatch band and/or clip, perhaps a ring for married people, it's awful. Yay for plastic.
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.
I would like X1 to be a little thicker actualy, perhaps have the same ports as the X series. Or maybe i would like a 13.3 inch X series. lenovo could expand in that region
And i wouldn't oppose to an aluminum design, as someone who is not very careful with the things.
God in heaven it actually has separate mouse buttons too. I forgot how sick I am of having to crank my thumb three inches to the right just to make sure I'm going to right click.
It's a requirement I have of any laptop, and they're tragically hard to find. It's the main reason I like these modern VAIOs and will probably get one.
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!?)
VAIO was spun off from Sony, though they still retain a stake. I don’t know how much of your previous experience translates over, cuz I honestly don’t know how much of Sony’s laptop design aesthetic was retained in the new company.
That’s just a long winded way of saying, it might be worth a fresh look, if you feel up to looking into them.
237 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadhttps://habr.com/en/post/437912/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19052688
see: http://wondermark.com/344/
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.
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!
Once you're plugging it into something, you won't be using the laptop screen anyway.
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?
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.
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.
But what does it matter. Vaio was always an overpriced under equiped piece of hardware anyways. It was the monster cable of laptops.
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.
Downside, you'll need a gold mine to pay for it.
Am I wrong? Did they never leave? Did they come back? Or are these just rebadged Chinese laptops?
Also, mandatory: in Russia, clit mouse is blue.
* The hand does not leave the hone row.
* It never by mistake registers your hands as a click or a movement.
* Your skin can be extremely wet or dry without consequence.
* You can continue a motion without being limited by the size of the trackpad, because you don't modulate the position directly, but its first derivative. This removes tension between being precise and having the range.
* It separates motion and clicks by having dedicated hardware buttons, often three of them. (Middle button click on most trackpads is tricky, and middle button drag, impossible.)
* Wheel emulation is generally fine, again without moving your hand off the keyboard.
There are downsides, too, of course.
* No multiple-finger gestures, like the pinch.
* Harder to make extremely flat.
* Does not mimic the mobile phone. I think this is the kicker: a trackpad is more intuitive for newcomers and casual users. Trackpoint is preferred by pros who are much less numerous.
If all you've used is the garbage trackpads that get shipped with most Dell or Lenovo laptops, then sure I can see why a clitmouse would be preferrable, but having used them all I can say that after using my macbook's trackpad I have zero desire to go back to the pointer, and mine is the comically-large one on the touchbar macbook pro. It's enormous, but even so I've never had a spurious click or mouse-movement with this machine, and that's not hyperbole.
If I need reliable pointing for a particular workflow beyond what a trackpad can deliver, I have a bluetooth mouse. Or a desktop computer with a corded mouse. The trackpoint/clitmouse pales in comparison.
I don't mean to say that the trackpoint is overwhelmingly preferred by pros, and other forms of coordinate input (trackpads, trackballs, mice, etc) are not. If anything, pros is likely the group with most diverse and special preferences.
I tried to say that people who prefer trackpoint are mostly pros, not newcomers.
I can understand that this seems patronizing, I struggle to put it in a way that doesn't seem personal, but for years I have witnessed colleagues who claim to be excellent with trackpad, they love it, it's great... and then they take 3-5 times longer to get things done as they go swipe... swipe... swipe oh there I am at the other end of the screen... swipe... swipe... oh there's the button:-/
Problem on windows is that you have to choose between the middle mouse button click and the scrolling. You need additional software to have both, at least for the lenovo driver.
Bonus point for the track point is that you can also scroll to the side.
Have you tried a different trackpoint cap? Some people find a different shape (flat vs domed) makes a difference. But some people just don't get on with trackpoints.
The only one I liked was the Toshiba Libretto, which had it on the side of the screen bezel so you could work it with the finger most adapted for fine movements - the thumb.
- You can have pixel-level precision - You can have fast movements from edge to edge of the screen - You can use it without moving your fingers away from the keyboard - You can use it without moving your elbows or arms around + It is therefore great for small laptops, small spaces (in airplane seat, on a bench, etc)
Basically, far from being vestigial, my boss has been advised that a trackpoint-equipped laptop is a "condition of employment" for me.
However, I also use Fedora Linux almost exclusively, and have suffered through several shifts in the drivers and input systems. There were times that my desktop trackpoint became much harder for me to use, as the behavior of the cursor went haywire. I was never able to find configurable parameters to put it completely back to normal, but instead had to also retrain my fingers a bit.
I find that I am much more "fluent" on my laptop with a 1080 screen. On my desktop with side-by-side 4K screens, my efforts are a bit spastic. I have traded off precision so that I can get the cursor around all that real estate without coffee breaks in the middle of long movements. But, trying to grab window corners and other small targets can be a bit hit or miss as I over-shoot.
So is the one on my work machine, which is a DELL, so...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaio#Etymology
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.
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.
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.
That’s just a long winded way of saying, it might be worth a fresh look, if you feel up to looking into them.