Why are VAIOs so expensive?!

I bet you can find stock of multiple notebooks in mint shape from multiple brands but Asus, Sony, Apple, Toshiba and Samsung will hold up the best overall.

The next tier down I would say would be Dell though. Lenovo, HP, and others aren't rated that well.

The Sony VAIO SB's look like good long term purchases that will hold up.

But notebooks are just computers and nothing more.

Notebooks like Sony are big profit for Sony and they generate a lot of sales to boot with high profit margins.

And a heads up: Don't buy your VAIO S from Quibids.com. They had an S (not the SB though) in a penny auction site thats essentially an illegal non regulated gambling operation. They have been advertising on TV and its amazing how these commercials are legally allowed to be peddled on TV. I don't know how this slipped through the cracks and was able to get air time. Firm seems to be based elsewhere.

 

Lenovo is rated highly, as long as you stick with their ThinkPad series (the ThinkPad Edges' don't count). The ideapads and essential laptops aren't as good, but thinkpads have always been known for their reliability.

 

Depends on the model of the Thinkpad and the year. Old thinkpads were known to be extremely reliable but I don't know how the latest models will fare.

2007 Lenovo was said to be tops in reliability but it seems like the recent reviews are worse.

Can anyone confirm this?

http://smidgenpc.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/squaretrade.bmp

As you can see in this chart Lenovos are rated worse. This doesn't have anything to do with durability or accidents. It has to do with actual failure rates of the existing hardware.

Lenovo Technical support is 2nd only to Apple however. But Hardware failure rates for non accidents or durability related issues seem to be higher than the others from what I can tell.

 

Meaningless, as it doesn't control for the huge differences between the ranges manufacturers offer.

You go on about 'HP not being rated that well' (although your opinions don't seem to be based on much at all); maybe true of the plasticky Pavilion stuff, but the Elitebooks are some of the best laptops you can get.

 

There is a quality difference within one brand as well, this is true.
Nevertheless my own experience pretty much confirms these statistics! This is approximately how I would rate the quality of those brands I have used and owned among the listed!

Small differences here and there, but shortly - yes, I can confirm this based on my own experience.

 

That also doesn't take into account who buys warranties and for what.

If you buy a $300 laptop would you spend $150 on a warranty for it? Probably not as likely and you would for a $2000 laptop?

 

Buy warranty? What does that have to do with anything!?

 

Most Ive seen on a Credit Card is a one year extension of the warranty and accidental purchase protection. So VAIO comes to 2 years warranty with extension.

But service warranty extensions do not pay because you can repair the unit for less than the warranty will cost.

Has anyone seen a Credit Card which offers more than 1 year extension of the warranty?

 

Squaretrade, the company who published those reliability results (linked by adamj023), is an aftermarket insurance company. You know, those warranties Best Buy and others always try and sell you for you Ipod, phone, and computer (among other things).

 

SquareTrade is a very legitimate organization.

About SquareTrade | SquareTrade News | SquareTrade Background | SquareTrade Jobs | SquareTrade Warranties

They have been covered by very high credible publications.

It may be cheaper to buy directly through SquareTrade via the website than at the store, but they are a 5 Star Grade A insurance firm who does what they are supposed to do.

 

I'm not trying to discount their stats, I'm sure they are legitimate for them, the problem is what they are pulling their numbers from


Say you buy a $300 computer and got the warranty, after 2 years, that cheap computer breaks, are you REALLY going to bother finding teh paperwork and sending it in or just buy a shiny new computer that runs better? What if that computer was a $2000 computer? Chances are the more expensive one would get repaired, while the cheap one was trashed.

If they never see that $300 computer, it counts as being reliable, while the $2000 computer gets a mark against it.

 

You guys are obviously discussing the situation in USA which is only one limited part of the market!

Laptops in Europe (except UK) come with min 2 years warranty by default and additional insurances are rarely offered/sold.

The mentioned statistics pretty much correspond to a few others I've seen that come from statistics only, so insurances have nothing to do with that.

 

The insurance may be US based, but many models are sold world wide with only minimal changes.


For the most part, I agree with the stats, they coincide with my experience with customer computers even if I'm not sure if Toshiba ranks quite that high, but it is up there.

As mentioned the specific models can vary greatly. Lenovo being one of the widest varying ones out there. Lumping a T or X series in with some of the newer, cheaper systems is just plain unfair to those lines as the T and X are wonderful systems while others could almost be considered junk.

Also, I wonder how wide of a range of years this is based on.
Several years ago, Apple could barely make an Ipod as reliable as a Dell computer but today Apple is generally reliable, unless you look at the Air, which has major issues with hinges. Which again comes back to specific models.

 

I sure do. I have adblock+, and i also tried turning flash off, didn't make much difference, probably because there is not much flash videos on sites that i visit.
And I'm not the only one who complained on SZ short battery life, so, i don't think that i have such 'unique' SZ. Obviously, on later SZs they improved this aspect.

As for my T42, it was initially louder too, but shortly IBM released new BIOS and it became much more silent.

 

I'm also wondering about toshiba. My experience with toshibas is not that great - I would place it somewhere in the middle... below Sony for sure. But the rest looks quite right to me too.

 

Before buying my VAIO F, I was looking at a Toshiba A505 and the yet to be release Lenovo z560. It was a toss up really. Each having a function I liked better than the other. I had stopped at the Sony store and looked at the lappy. When I went back a few days later to play a movie in it, it had gone down in price to what would be below my preferred Toshiba configuration. That clenched the deal for me.

Given that all three models were comparable in performance when configured properly, the VAIO stood out with a 1600x900 display over 1360x768 (or whatever), it looked nicer overall, and has the most gorgeous backlit keyboard in existence and is a complete and total dream to type on. The speaker quality is poor, and that was the reason Toshiba was in the running, but the Toshiba keypad was awful. The Lenovo was loser by default.

 

Actual configuration has nothing to do with quality! If you want the best configuration for the least money go for acer or any other crappy brand...

The factors that have to be taken into account when assessing the quality and features of a brand are:

• Buid quality
• Design
• Durability
• Special brand related features (for example small chargers, special technology of the battery, etc.)
• Technical support and warrantly reliability
• Reliability and stability of the configuration+design, incl. heat dissipation, FAN noise, etc.

Those are the main things that come from the brand itself. The configuration as such is not important - a matter of class and price.
And these are the points where other brands fail to succeed - noisy fans, heat problems, crappy design, quality of the construction that would last a few months or an year max, etc, etc.

 

PS2 was $300: http://www.gamesfirst.com/articles/shawn/sony_final/ps2release.htm

 

Everyone has an ace up their sleave. Sony has its Z series. For HP its the Elitebooks. Lenovo has those crazy half indestructible Thinkpads with the amazing ultrabase docks. These are the super desirables that they can charge literally anything they want for because they do something you can't get anywhere else, which means you can't put a price on it.

Everything else is made for the market. For example, Sony F series is really not substantially different to any other 16.4 incher other than having Sony's typically attractive industrial design. The EU 1080p Premium Display upgrade is nice but all other displays are just run of the mill trash like you can get anywhere else. It suffers from the same issues as many 16.4 inchers - its loud, hot and heavy, only Sony's version is still more expensive than the competition. It has worst in class battery life and a unique fan/whistling noise issue that has plagued the entire F1x series and survived 2 major hardware revisions.

If you could live with those issues there was alot to like in the F series but thats the same everywhere. I have yet to find a laptop that does everything right. Even the legendary Z series is more of an exercise in "what can be done with 1.5kg" as opposed to "what should be done with 1.5kg".

It is marketed as a professional notebook and yet has a terrible dock/port extender. It has a midrange gaming graphics card in it, not a Quadro and using it on speed setting defeats most of the portability because it nukes your battery life. Its like a Lamborghini of laptops. Completely mad. You can tell the engineers had a ball thinking of how many world firsts they could cram into a chasis the size of an a4 sheet of paper. The result is one of a kind but its form over function, money over sense, desire over practicality, Id over Ego. In 3 years it will depreciate substantially as all computers do.

With Sony you pay for the name, the aesthetic and the brand's history of world firsts. They are very good at making their products desirable.

Sony used to pour money into R&D developing completely off the wall, money is no object, Lamborghini desire machines like the X505 and TT (yeah, the $2000 netbook). Then they make up the numbers by selling ordinary overpriced headphones and what not. The company has always been this way. Its what makes Sony brilliant and completely rubbish at the same time.

 

@Hayte - Well put. As always.

 

I got mine for a cheaper price than any other haha they gave me a great student discount.