PC makers continue to roll out thinner, lighter laptops… but something that often gets lost in the shuffle is an abundance of ports. The new entry-level MacBook Air has just two Thunderbolt 3 ports and a headphone jack, for example, as does the Acer Swift 7.
Apparently VAIO didn’t get the memo though, because the Japanese PC maker has just unveiled a 12.5 inch laptop that weighs less than 2 pounds, but which makes room for more full-sized ports than many 4+ pound laptops.
The new VAIO SX12 laptop goes on sale in Japan this week for about $1,100 and up. There’s no word on if or when it’ll be available internationally, but the company does sell some of its products in the US.
The VAIO SX12 supports up to an Intel Core i7-8565U Whiskey Lake processor, up to 16GB of LPDDR3 RAM, and up to 1TB of PCIe NVMe solid state storage. It has a 12.5 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel display with side bezels less than 5mm thick, and an HD camera above the screen.
The laptop measures about 11.3″ x 8″ x 0.7″ and weighs as little as 888 grams (1.96 pounds).
But it’s the generous port selection that’s probably the most remarkable thing about this little laptop:
- HDMI
- VGA
- Gigabit Ethernet
- 1 x USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C (10Gb/s)
- 1 x USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A (10Gb/s)
- 2 x USB 3.0 Type-A (5Gb/s)
- SD card
- 3.5mm audio jack
The laptop comes with a USB-C charger and VAIO says it takes about 3 hours to get a full charge.
Other features include an optional fingerprint sensor and optional support for 4G LTE.
The starting price of about 1100 is with a freaking Celeron. To get to a Core i5 with 8GB of RAM you’re looking at around 1600, and over 2k if you want 16GB of RAM with the i7.
There’s low availability of such a machine, so this will definitely be a successful product as long as they price it right. The only omission is ThunderBolt 3, but I guess the USB 3.1-C is close enough for everything besides eGPU applications.
Hopefully, the battery life is average, making this laptop have no real downsides compared to the competition which champion the stupid dongle-life mantra.
#donglelife
Reminds me of the Volkswagen coelacanth commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MunowVfXOuY
It celebrated that they still had a full-sized spare when other cars had gone to “donut” spares.
This laptop has so many full-sized ports I thought at first it must be a Photoshopped joke. Ethernet? Full-sized SD card? Great day in the morning!