back to article Vaio returns from the dead wearing sharper suit, bolts in neck

Sony Vaio is making a comeback overseas, with plans to relaunch the brand on Windows 10 devices in the US and Brazil later this year. Last year, Sony axed 5,000 workers worldwide and offloaded its loss-making PC business to private equity firm Japan Industrial Partners (JIP). Chief executive of JIP Yoshimi Ota told the Wall …

  1. djstardust

    Sony screwed it all up .....

    I had Vaio laptops for many years and they were all excellent. Top if the range kit, including the Vaio U70 which was the world's first tablet PC (Apple .... are you listening ......)

    It all went pear shaped when they tried chasing the mid to bottom market and churned out a whole load of plastic crap. If they had stuck to the higher end of the market things would have been a whole lot different.

    Sony are losing money on pretty much everything and only the PS is keeping it alive. A dinosaur of a company who constantly make poor business decisions and try their best to piss off the customer.

    1. ItsNotMe
      Facepalm

      Re: Sony screwed it all up .....

      @djstardust "I had Vaio laptops for many years and they were all excellent."

      Really? Let me tell you a little story about Sony & Vaio computers.

      I had a friend many years ago who was a personal assistant to Howard Stringer for a very long time. Long before he was Sir Howard Stringer, and going back to his days with CBS. Every time Stringer moved around the corporate world, she was taken with him. Well except when he had to move to Japan. That's when she tendered her resignation.

      When he first went to work at Sony, I got a telephone call one day from my friend asking me if I could recommend a laptop computer for her. I said to her "But you work for Sony, and Sony makes laptop computers. Why not get one of theirs? I'm sure Howard could get you a fairly good discount." :-)

      Her reply to me was "No one who works here at Sony uses Sony computers. They are lousy computers, and the Tech Support is non-existent." I almost fell off my chair I was laughing so hard. Told her that my recommendation was an IBM ThinkPad...she bought one...and was very happy.

      1. Christian Berger

        Re: Sony screwed it all up .....

        "No one who works here at Sony uses Sony computers."

        There's also a nice portable "offline editor" from Sony out there from the time before you could do this with plain vanilla PCs. It was a home-VCR sized box with a laptop docked on top... that laptop was, of course, an IBM thinkpad.

        Seriously, Vaio seems like a deliberate train wreck. They seem to deliberately obscure their hardware so you always need vendor drivers for them. So what you get, essentially, is a device you cannot even use with the next version of the operating system it came with, let alone other operating systems.

    2. User McUser

      Re: Sony screwed it all up .....

      chasing the mid to bottom market and churned out a whole load of plastic crap.

      And it was such *lousy* plastic too; flimsy and brittle and usually textured for some dumb reason. Some models even had textured *trackpads* which irritated me to no end.

  2. CAPS LOCK

    So just as rubbish as the old Vaio's but more expensive...

    ... is there anything private equity firms aren't good at?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: So just as rubbish as the old Vaio's but more expensive...

      You never used a top end VAIO did you?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: So just as rubbish as the old Vaio's but more expensive...

        No because for the same price your could buy a dozen high end Thinkpads and they weren't filled with all the Vaio "tools".. Txxp series ( that little p made all the difference)

        My last boss had a ton of money and always came back with the latest and greatest of the Vaio range from the smallest to the largest. I hated him for that because it was just one endless problem after another, especially the drivers grrrrrrrrr. In the end he started buying Dell's and was surprised to see that they were better than the Vaios because they didn't break down or have half as many problems. Strangely enough he refused to buy a Thinkpad, I think it was because I used one and he didn't want to be seen doing the same thing as the lower echelon IT guy...

        ( Ok maybe not a dozen Thinkpads but the relation quality/price was terrible the Vaios).

    2. P. Lee

      Re: So just as rubbish as the old Vaio's but more expensive...

      so, someone saw Dell's plan and thought it was a good idea?

      On the mitigation side, I think we're seeing the effects of the GFC & QE. Inflation goes up, salaries are not keeping pace. It's the economic re-adjustment to the volume of debt and losses we've incurred. Rather than let the banks / governments go under, we (the public) are paying their debts by having our income reduced in real terms by inflation. If you accept that the banks are too big to fail, it's pretty much the only politically acceptable way to deal all that bad debt which has been accumulated.

      I can see some value in the "too big to fail" argument, but I think that implies we should actually prevent them getting to that size, rather than insuring dodgy business practise. Banking collapse isn't brought on by some nebulous thing out there called "the world economy" its brought on by poor business acumen and practises by banks in assessing risk, and it is encouraged institutionally by knowing that the taxpayer will bail them out when it all goes wrong. If we can't or don't want to break up large financial institutions, perhaps we should have an escalating scale of required reserves as an institution grows. Certainly, that hampers "growth" but it also dampens the effect of a crash. Our problems stem from the depths we sink to in hardship, not failing to reach stratospheric heights during times of plenty; and no, the good times do not make up for the bad. The increasing rich/poor gap demonstrates that trickle-down is barely real. Certainly we need better regulation, but I fear that the corrupting of politics by money means that won't happen. /off-topic-rant

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Man, I loved my PCG-R600HEK

    We did great things together

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I was rather partial to the dark grey metallic VGN-SZ series.

      They had one series which ran stupidly hot (to the point of melting the grille underneath the machine), but for the rest they were very good machines for both Windows and Linux, provided you first removed the crapware they came with.

      They were not exactly cheap, which made it easier to switch to Apple Macbooks later :).

    2. Uncle Slacky Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      My daughter's two-year-old S13 is still going strong (with Mint). Wish they were still available...

  4. x 7

    restarting Vaio amounts to necrophilia

  5. DJO Silver badge

    Still got one chuntering away as a dedicated flac player, great little machine.

    1. Frank Bough

      Re:

      What an ignominious end, doing the job of an iPod.

      1. DJO Silver badge

        Re: Re:

        Got an iPod too, never use it. The Vaio is easier to control across a network and has a slightly larger display that can be seen across a room and has more storage.

  6. GlenP Silver badge

    My worst experience with them was when the MD of a sister company decided to buy one from Dixons without consulting anyone (they had no IT people of their own and at the time only a loose relationship with anyone else in the group).

    All was fine for just over a year until he screwed it up sufficiently that only a flatten and reinstall would cure it. Except that it was apparently a Dixons/Currys special, brought in in bulk directly from Sony Japan and built with whatever cheap components were lying around (half of which were unidentifiable).

    Absolutely no driver availability whatsoever. Sony UK denied any responsibility, Dixons wouldn't provide support as it was out of warranty and Sony Japan couldn't care less.

    Shame, it was quite a nice machine when it was scrapped (couldn't even be bothered to repurpose it with Unix or whatever as it was always going to be a nightmare).

  7. Fazal Majid

    Is there really a market for status-symbol Windows PCs?

    A few years ago Apple wrested away an astonishing 90% market share in personal computers over $1000. It seems anyone who cares enough (or wants to be seen with a machine the peons are not entitled to) already gets a MacBook of some sort. Vaios had some exclusives like carbon fiber chassis, but recognition is probably not good enough for them to be a Veblen good.

    1. Gordon 10
      Unhappy

      Re: Is there really a market for status-symbol Windows PCs?

      I don't think there is mores the pity. 4-5 years ago I had a Vaio Ultraportable that was the dogs. 8hrs battery life, every port you would ever need, AND a CD/DVD drive AND 3G WWAN AND an SSD all in a compact 11" package. I got it discounted to around £1k but retail was nearer £2k. It truly was the best laptop I have ever had. I tried and failed to Hackintosh it. - if I had I suspect it would still be in use to today.

      I now have an 11" MBA that is also fab and cost less that £1k which does everything I need it to - but not everything I want it to :) Therein lies the roots of Apples success and Sony's failure. The MBA was more than good enough for everything except the a geeky bit of my soul.

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: Is there really a market for status-symbol Windows PCs?

        It's got BSD, POSIX, and X11 if you install the app. How much more geeky do you need?

  8. Dave K

    I don't miss them

    I have mixed opinions about Vaios. On one hand, the hardware was indeed nice, and the chassis were very desirable and good looking.

    On the downside, Sony's support was appalling, software support was dreadful, and they were one of the worst offenders of installing bloatware. I've had brand new Vaios where the XP Start Menu was comfortably overflowing into two columns straight out of the box there was that much junk installed. And some of the bits didn't even come with installers.

    Therefore, from a support point of view, I don't miss them one bit. I tend to prefer ThinkPads as you get the solid hardware without all the crap.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I don't miss them

      And they decided to disable VT in the hardware, rendering Windows 7 XP mode pretty much useless.

  9. Mage Silver badge
    Big Brother

    relaunch the brand on Windows 10

    Well, they might as well launch it as Chrome book as that mess of a rushed out privacy slurping OS.

    Don't rich people want privacy?

    (I'm not confusing Upmarket with Celebrity?)

  10. Mage Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Vaio and Minidisk

    I thought Minidisk was a nice idea, then I discovered that neither the net MD player nor the Vaio with a built in Minidisk allowed you to digitally read your own recordings? On the Vaio it seemed you could only write to the built in drive? So I bought a Dell Inspiron instead in 2002.

    Sony made some nice HW, but crippled by media division and bad software?

    1. M man

      Re: Vaio and Minidisk

      somthing the new company wont have to worry about.

      Maybe it wont be the missed opertunity it was.

      I desired a vaio as a kid, then they got crap just as i get paid enough to get one.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Sony and W10. A perfect storm of nope. Possibly they can bundle it with a security suite from Ashley Madison.

    1. x 7

      "security suit from Ashley Madison."

      Is that some kind of kinky chastity belt?

  12. Dwarf

    Apparently ...

    I remember hearing a number of years ago that VAIO has a meaning. It breaks down to VA, which when viewed in top quality plastic on a laptop looks like an sine wave and IO indicates digital 1 and 0, thus VAIO is the perfect blend of analogue and digital. Conversely, this could also be marketing BS too ...

    I got a VAIO for Wifey many moons ago. I thought I was getting a metal framed one, but it came in silver shiny plastic. it wasn't bad as a machine, but the case cracked top and bottom with normal wear and tear. No plans to get another one.

    VAIO + Windows 10, what could possibly go wrong..

    1. TheProf

      Re: Apparently ...

      Video Audio Input Output

    2. Stratman

      Re: Apparently ...

      "VAIO + Windows 10, what could possibly go wrong.."

      In the (plastic) case of my SVE1512B1EW nothing, because it isn't on Sony's list of VAIOs which should have drivers available towards the end of the year.

      "If it's not on the list, we recommend you don't update to Windows 10"

      Linux Mint looks more attractive by the day.

      1. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

        Re: Apparently ...

        I just installed Mint on my VGN-SZ5 and it works perfectly.

      2. Stratman

        Re: Apparently ...

        "If it's not on the list, we recommend you don't update to Windows 10"

        And now it's on the list.

        I'm having mixed feelings about it. I'm not happy with the reported spyware sending I do everything back to mothership.

        Perhaps I'll give it a try before installing Mint.

  13. ben_myers

    VAIO - Impossible to repair

    I never bought a Vaio, but I've had them brought to me for repair or simply given to me to see if I could make some sense out of them. Service manuals? None for the unwashed computer repair person like me. Parts? Can't get them. Ease of disassembly/re-assembly? The worst. Quality of parts and workmanship? Awful and cheap, rivaling Acer-eGate-Machines. Market share? Tiny. Wonder why?

    Sony would do well to buy Thinkpads from Lenovo and rebadge them.

    No matter what, do not invest in Japan Industrial Partners (JIP).

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