Z sales? how are they going? price drop?

does anybody here know if Z sales are going well or not?
To me it seems that they are not selling that many of these. They are almost anywhere in the used market and on ebay all the Z auctions end up either with no bids or they don't meet the reserve price.

with the economy in the trash can we expect some sort of price drop or thanksgiving sale?

I am in no hurry so I keep my eyes open, but does anybody have any statistics?

 

The US economy sucks *** right now. I know so many people, namely my siblings, who have had very seemingly stable jobs, and out of nowhere are laid off because of companies closing/moving.

Anyway... to my surprise, I have not seen any VAIO Z laptops at my university. I've seen the CR, TZ (one of these) and many dells and mostly HP laptops. Even outside of school, I have not seen one person with a VAIO SR nor a Z anywhere!

I hope, for the sake of consumers, the prices drop for the holiday season, or else Sony can kiss its sales goodbye.

 

i really hope sony does some nice sales for either thanksgiving or christmas because i am so ready to buy! What kind of sales does sony usually do during these days?

 

All I can say is I find it extremely hard to sell my Z sofar.

This may be due to the slow economy or to the Z. I find it strange because in my opinion this is the best laptop I've ever worked with.

 

there aren't any new laptops in this range coming out, and so far the e4300 and the x300 are in the same price range. that doesn't help.

 

how bout the new MB? or Studio XPS that would come out in Nov.

 

the new MB has a better GPU but the problem with that is to do boot camp you have to go and buy a copy of windows and that may be pricey.

 

As far as I know both Sony Z and MB score 2200ish on 1280*800.

Anyway, if somone's interested the Z I have here goes on sale today for 1300. I'd rather not go the ebay way, but if I don't sell it today before 21.00GMT I will. I want a Macbook myself. For the looks only, bc in every other way the Z is superior imo. Yes I'm a sucker for design and glossy screens And at 1300 euros I'm making a small profit on the Z.

 

mb? what brand is that?

 

it means MacBook

 

I don't know, but personally I think the Z is one of the best equipped laptops available today...and if this board is any indication, the Z is the most popular of the Sonys. Just look at the number of hits on the Official Z thread.

 

torino? ciao! c'e' qualche italiano qui allora.

anyways I don't like apples

 

What I also find odd is relatively few reviews seem to have been published. Conspicuously missing are those from the likes of PC Magazine, PC World, www.trustedreviews.com... If these don't get reviewed, how will they sell?

 

wait a second, so your saying you can run a fully functional windows vista/xp on a mac ?

 

it's been like that for a while

 

As a general rule of thumb, your not going to see tons of sony laptops anywhere. They are not a major marketshare holder in the USA for notebooks, they aren't even on many lists for market share(typically listed under "Other Manufacturers". HP(and compaq...i guess), Dell, Toshiba, Apple, and Lenovo are the big players.

Vaios are offered through my university store at my alma mater, but sony doesnt seem to push for the educational nor the business crowd, which is where you pick up huge chunks of market share. Just look at HP/Dell vs. Apple, apple has a HUGE amount of consumer sales, especially in the academia crowd, but no one uses them for business...thank god.

The Vaio BZ is awesome, but it's not enough to have one business specific(the Z and Sr are "options but arent made specifically for business like the BZ which has features that rival a thinkpad) option thats sold via b2b channels, vs. dell, lenovo, and hp which literally have hundreds of thousands of machines sold via b2b and educational channals. Your not going to find a school in the US that gives each of its students a new sony vaio every 2 years, but you will find plenty that do so with thinkpads or latitudes...

Sony pushes for the bang and olufson crowd(TT, Z, SR) and the richie-rich types with its 4k HDTV 26 inch desktops(that you can hang on the wall), so most people who buy sonys, buy fancy pants sonys, and their "budget" systems that sell at brick-and-mortar superstores, like the NS and CS are just as nice looking as the mac's, but they are appealing to the mac crowd that would rather go buy...well a mac.

So long story short, The Z is kind of in the same playing field as the macbook air, and lenovo x301. Most people buying these arent buying them in huge quantities, nor are they being bought by your typical joe "six-pack" haha.

I love sony products. As you can tell by the huge increase in sales on the ps3 over the last year, when they push their products, despite price, they do sell. Sony needs to get their game together... because honestly computers like the SR and Z can be huge sellers...

 

Yeah through bootcamp. Macs basically have the same hardware as PCs so you can easily dual boot. With some software like VMware you can even run Vista/XP on top of OSX. Its pretty neat.

On another note, I'm also surprised at the lack of marketing Sony has been pouring on the Z. Besides the small amount of reviews on the net the only forums besides notebookreviews.com I have seen people discuss about the Z is the singapore forms of Hardwarezone.com. (Both are pretty huge threads though)

 

Somebody on engadget or gizmodo was rockin a Z while testing out wimax.... and one of those actually did a review on the Z as well if im not mistaken...

 

I doubt that you are going to see really good deal on Z during Thanksgiving because there are just not enough of them in distribution -- AFAIK, only BestBuy carries Z520 and no other retailers carry Z. Amazon sometimes cut price very aggressively when it tries to clean out certain inventory -- they have a 33% off on a TZ(198?) last winter -- so it may be your best bet.

The thing is, Sony does control production run on some of its products so they are not sold in large quantities. The reason is to cater the desire to be "unique" of its more upscale customer base...

 

just curious, why are you selling it? (although I noticed you're still selling it, so maybe a private message would be a better reply?)

 

I got the Z at a very low price from a computershop that I often come. I did not really want to buy a Z but at this price I thought why not.

I often buy and sell laptops for the fun of playing around with it.

The Z is almost the perfect laptop. Its just that the design isn't as good as Apple. Otherwise I'd keep it.

I'm surprised by myself that I might buy an inferior laptop mainly for the looks. But it has some bonusses as well: touchpad, glossy screen and probably a bit more quiet.

 

I'm not sure if the Z is very loud or my SR is just very quiet due to my tweaking, because from my personal experience with apples(the brand spankin new mb and mbp aside), they are very loud when under load....

 

If anything, the price will probably go up.

 

You should keep it PhilFlow ...

I'm sticking with mine I've looked around at everything and it's nice to have a premium notebook to work on .....

my IT/web designer went and got one at the Sony Store yesterday, (got $100 off).... after he and I screwed around with Lenovo's hassle in the ordering process ...

I think the Z one of the best out there right now .... great multi purpose notebook .... with quck plug HDMI port and docking station options too it's an easy desktop replacement ....

my second choice would be the LG P300/310 ... it's seems odd that I'm finding the 'best' notebooks in 'non-traditional' brands ... ie: not Lenovo, Dell, HP, Toshiba .... they're yet to introduce a 'stunning' machine in every respect.....

 

phil,
how are apples better designed than the Z? the Z is actually lighter. Let's not take the OS into consideration.

 

You prefer the macbook's design over the Z's???
Funny how subjective taste is...
I personally would have gone for the macbook without thinking twice if it looked half as good as the Z.

 

I meant in a subjective way, looks.

Probably 13". Maybe 2.0 or 2.4 depending on what the auction brings in. I find it hard to justify 300 euros for keyboard lighting and a 2.4 CPU.

 

Indeed it is subjective. I like minimalistic and thin. I like the glass 'no border' screen. I love glossy screens with shiny black borders.

I think my Nokia 6300 has a great design. It shares many similarities with the MB.

I wonder if I'll ever regret selling this Z. I'm afraid I will. Oh wel that's life.

 

Looking at this thread, i'm just glad i didn't pay £1749 for it. When i ordered it for £1661, i still wasn't sure so i cancelled the order.

I then saw it and played with it in a Sony Store.

Getting mine from Sony Style Tax\Duty Free, was a bonus and then managed to haggle even more money off.

Thought i could still sell if for the price i paid, but maybe not now.

Oh well, i'll just wait for BlueRay and SSD to come down in price and biggers sizes and upgrade.

 

right now I am just jumping from one crappy laptop to another. I am just borrowing whatever I can from my university. So I had a dell d620, not bad. Now I have a humongous D800 that weighs 7LBS!!! I am not taking it anywhere.

But I can't justify spending $1700 on a laptop that will not hold its value at all. So I keep my eyes open in the used market, sooner or later someone will sell, or maybe after xmas and with the economy in the trash, prices will go down. At the moment there's no other laptop I really fancy. I like the x300, but it's ugly and has a crappy video card. The e4300 it's expensive and turned out to be a disappointment. So there's no real competitor, at least for me.

 

QUESTION: Regarding alternate OS's: Is running Vista on a MB giving full access to the hardware or is it like Vmware, where the hardware is emulated? What I mean is, with Vmware your video card is software emulation and you couldn't play a 3d video game. So if you used another program on a MB like Boot Camp would it be a full on Vista install?

 

As far as I understand it, Boot Camp just allows you to install Vista (providing you have an install disc and valid license) like any other PC. The Boot Camp bit just provides any necessary drivers for Windows and means you keep the Mac EFI intact, so enables you to nicely dual-boot into either Windows or OSX. If you want to use Windows and OSX apps in the same session without rebooting, I think the neatest way would be Parallels or similar, but to get full performance out of Windows you'd need the dual boot method via Boot Camp.

 

Thanks for the answer. So with Boot Camp Vista uses the hardware as if it was the only operating system, cool.. That makes the MB a serious option. I have been reading the thread comparing the MB to the Z.

 

please don't hijack thread.