Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
I was having a hard time finding a Flip 15A, and discovered that it's because Sony is getting out of the laptop business. After I made that post, I discovered a store near me that still has some in stock (model SVF15N25CXB) that I think will meet my needs -- most importantly, I believe it has the active digitizer.
My question is: is it a bad idea to buy a new Sony-branded laptop now that they aren't making new ones anymore? Will it be hard to find parts once I'm out of warranty? Will they continue to update the BIOS if (for example) something needs to be changed to properly support Windows 9? Or am I better off going with an established brand, like a ThinkPad Yoga or Surface Pro?
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Short answer: it's not a good time to buy a Sony laptop or computer of any kind. They have been fully out of the Vaio computer business for 4 months or so and the Vaio brand and a small subset of the line are still being made for the Japanese market only by an investment group that bought the Vaio name, product designs and inventory from Sony. This is a well--mourned event around these forums as it was announced at the beginning of the year. An irony IMO is that they had one of the most versatile (excepting power/gaming machines) lines than they had for some time and quite a few of the models were near or at the top of their respective product categories in the view of many. The Flip 15A is a unique product in terms of being a convertible with an active digitizer and a 15" screen.
This said, I believe all your concerns about support, parts, driver updates and the like are well founded and unless you can get a steal of a deal I would not recommend your buying a Sony Vaio product. If you find a model, like the Flip 15A, just ideal for your use case and no good option in the market, and the price is right, and you have 14-30 days to put the machine through its paces and ensure there are no flaws out of the box, and there no publicized software or driver bugs which, IMO, are not likely to be remedied except by the user community, then and only then, could I make the case for buying one of the last model runs of Vaio by Sony. Keep in mind, my provisos for making such a purpose as stated above total around 7! But even if there are some potential issues, if they're small enough and there are workarounds, well, personally I'd love to own one more new Sony Vaio
One more thing to consider: In the past 4 years I have purchased two Sony Z's - a Z1 and a Z2 - and have never needed service (and if I had, Sony would more likely than not have refused to cover something under warranty or returned my machine in worse shape than I sent it out - and have relied entirely on community-written driver updates so, for practical purposes, Sony could just as well have been out of business for four years and my excellent experience with among the finest laptops ever made would have been fine! -
Heh, you posted this a few hours after I bought one
I got the Geek Squad refurb from Best Buy. It's the top model except for "only" a 1080p screen (and my wife doesn't care about pixel-count) -- i7, 8GB, dGPU, 1TB + SSD, etc. I think $750 is quite a deal for that. We have a 15-day return period (once it gets here) and after that, 1 year warranty from BB and 1 year from my credit card.
Like you said, it's kind of a unique product and she really wanted to "have it all" -- active digitizer, and powerful enough for moderately-heavy InDesign, some games, etc. I'm holding out hope that we made the right call. -
Is it a bad time to buy Sony?
Discussion in 'VAIO / Sony' started by Ghengis, Aug 20, 2014.
