SOny Vaio Z with dockable graphics

Sony's VAIO Z finally arrives in the US, goes up for pre-order starting at $2,000 -- Engadget

The new laptop sports a tower that docks with Light Peak, has usb slots and a slot loading disc drive and a Mobile GPU. The laptop itself weighs 2.5 pounds and has intel integrated graphics, starts at $2000.00. This is pretty cool stuff, and if we are lucky you'll be able to put a stronger card in the dock. Also should be noted, ps3 can stream ps3 game footage to vaio laptop so you can continue you playing in another room.

EDIT: Other note, the laptops fans are down facing..... on your lap. Kinda silly but I guess with removing the GPU from the mix, it probably doesn't get that hot.

 

I dont believe you are going to be lucky since the gpu is soldered to the board in the PMD, and its not lightpeak

 

The new Z is a disappointment. $2k for a laptop with an IGP then extra for a dockable station... whatever.

 

The fact that the dock is an extra $600 and has a middle of the road GPU with no way to upgrade it is an abomination. More overpriced Sony nonsense.

 

well at 2k it comes with the pmd, I do agree that it should have allowed for a more powerful gpu in it, since the space allows for such thing.

I do however think that sony should have followed the apple thunderbolt on this one

 

They state lightpeak in the article several times, its sonys take on the technology, but they do say lightpeak. Regardless, The dock station is easier to replace and cheaper than a whole laptop, every year or two years if you would like to keep up with the curve. Thunderbolt is lightpeak btw, just a different name.

 

this discussion has been going on the sony z thread for ages, but to sum it up, it aint lightpeak, intel had 2 partners in the development, apple and sony, apple went with thunderbolt, while sony went with whatever they call it.

The point being, there are things being developed for thunderbolt, and more than probably if the sony implementation is not spread to lower end consumer models, its not going to fly.

Simply because USB is not to be used like that, thunderbolt is not to replace USB and its not to be used in a USB port per demands of USB consortium, add that thunderbolt is a port for high I/O consumption. We have never seem custom options like that to be used time and time again on sony, they use it on one model, it fill its purposes and thats it.

There are too many cons regarding that option, and I dont see a pro, in the end its a wait and see thing, who gets to be standard, a chip that its ready to be plugged, sanctioned by intel and there are products released and more being developed, or the sony implementation that although was developed in conjunction it doesnt appear to be sanctioned officially, thus its why on sony press releases it gets called by another name and based on lightpeak.

Another thing that you want to remember is why notebooks are still shipped with the VGA port, because people like something that simply works, you need to support whatever is still being largely used in the market, we dont want to carry adaptors, its always easy to forget, sometimes it wont work at all. We want simple we dont dig complicated. We want standards.

Sony already said that they aint developing anything more for that port.

Sincerely if it wasnt for that port fiasco and the extreme delayed delivery I would have bought that instead of my mbp, the good thing is that with the savings Im getting tons of upgrades for my mbp, included in that budget a desktop card with either the sonnet epgu or the one from PE4hl, its heavier yes, but the battery life sold me right on the day I bought, with my usage I can get up to 10h of battery life, and Im basically writing lines of code and creating images on photoshop

 

haha alright thanks for clarifying on the whole light peak situation,

 

Why does Sony always have to create their own stupid formats?

The only time it really worked was Blu-ray. Betamax, Memory Stick, UMD, Minidisc, Atrac. Big failures.

 

it was indeed a problematic move for sony, and in all probability, and Im hoping also, that the sony implementation dont become any kind of standard (not that the chances are high, far from it), since it would dilute the thunderbolt environment leading to the fragmentation of the products, thus leading to less traction, thus leading to the early downfall of the port.

But yeah one thing that I didnt mention is that thunderbolt is basically a pcie interface, thus connected directed to it, and connected to the south bridge, so it doesnt matter what port you use it to implement, it will still use the basic component that is the thunderbolt controller, however to use several connectors is, as I said, idiot, it wont promote the thunderbolt, and making it more and more difficult to make the port gets traction.

Aside that its supposed to be next year when several OEMs can use thunderbolt on their pcs, since this year there was a exclusivity agreement with both apple and sony.

So the key question is: how do I make something into a standard?

1) I need to have something that uses the port and is interesting to people (NAS and high bandwidth uses, like egpus, soundcards, and other extensions)
2) I need to keep it simple, this is aimed at professional uses, not mainly consumers, they dont need that kind of bandwidth that the port offers, USB3 is there for them
3) I need to have a cool name so the IT guys can "trick" their managers into getting it.

Beaups reminded me that this aint to replace USB3, but its to be a professional geared solution, much like expresscard in its late life or even early for that matter.

Hell you need RAIDed SSDs to bottleneck this thing! you arent going to use it to move little files, and the cable aint that cheap to produce too.

Usage scenarios involve a centralized NAS with cubicles around, and several other ring like solutions, involving printers and other stuff, this might be good for graphics professionals (and kctech is going to kill me by having said that)

 

Makes me think of fire wire, sure a few things support it, but ultimately in the end was a huge failure

 

indeed one of the uses could be to retire firewire entirely, all my pcs had it, with the notable exception of the last one, however I never owned anything that used firewire.

firewire is more for professional photographers and other multimedia users

thunderbolt is a more professional orientated than consumer.