- In 2019, well PC laptops are some of the best we've
ever seen, which is something we'd expect.
At the same time, I'm finding them a little bit
boring as well, which is why I'm super excited to see
Vaio send me this thing.
The SX14, it's my first Vaio and it's weird as heck,
but I also love it a lot.
Today I'll tell you why.
Stay tuned.
(upbeat synth music)
All right before we get started, I wanna talk a little bit
about the Vaio brand, it's super interesting.
It's not Sony Vaio anymore.
Sony sold off their main share of the company in 2014.
They still actually own a little bit of the company,
but it's a minority stake.
And Vaio sells laptops in the United States, Japan,
and Brazil, and in fact they're always manufactured
in Japan too, which is one of the reasons why it drives
up the price a little bit.
But in exchange for that, you're gonna get a really
high quality machine that's also very sturdy.
More so than the quality of the materials would've
led you to believe.
It's also similar to a buy on Nikon camera
that's made in Japan.
It just has that really extra finesse to it.
Now I've never actually owned or used a Vaio laptop,
so this is a whole new experience for me
and I'm actually kind of impressed by it.
I really get the exterior here in the Vaio SX14
and it's pretty stunning.
Now this is a new color for this year, it's brown.
But it's a little bit more than brown.
I would say it's closer to a brown burgundy.
Looks really, really handsome though.
It's not an aggressive color.
Now this also comes in red,
which I do consider super aggressive.
It's very, very red, it also like costs an extra
hundred bucks, but I like this brown one a lot.
It also has this nice kind of gold trim,
it's just very classy, elegant and a little bit muted too.
But if none of this suits your fancy, that's okay,
you can get a jet black version as well,
or a traditional silver-gray, so you have a lot of options.
All right, let's give a tour here of all the ports,
of which there are plenty.
So on the left-hand side here, you get a headphone jack,
two USB type A and a Kensington lock,
plus yes you get a barrel charger now.
You also get a little LED to let you know it's charging.
You don't have to use the barrel charger if you don't want
to though, but it's a pretty small charger,
with its own USB A port as well,
so it's kind of nice and you get the ventilation here
for the single fan as well.
Looking at the right-hand side and it's a dream for I/O.
Look at all this stuff, this is absolutely insane
on a 14 inch laptop.
You're talking a full SD card reader,
how many of us have wanted one of those,
let alone a 14 inch laptop, that's insane.
You also get a USB type A, USB type C, so it's 3.1,
so will do display out charging and data.
It is not Thunderbolt 3 however, but that's because
we have all this other stuff yet.
That's where those PCI lanes go,
they can't do it with Thunderbolt 3 there.
You do have HDMI as well.
Look at this, a full ethernet jack and VGA.
How weird is that?
But if you work in an office, or a lot of conference rooms,
you know VGA is super common for overhead projectors.
It's just everywhere still, so that's why it's here.
If you're a consumer this makes no sense.
If you're a business, it definitely does.
I'm looking at the bottom of the laptop,
and well, it's kinds clean, you do get a ton of screws
here, so if I remove all of those,
does this bottom come off?
No, the keyboard deck comes off and reveals the inside.
It's kind of a pain to get to.
I don't think many people are gonna open it up,
but you technically can, you can upgrade the SSD
if you wanted to.
You can also add an LTE modem if you want to.
Apparently in Japan, they sell it with LTE,
but not in US, that's a bit of a bummer.
But I think you can add one afterwards,
if you were really wanting to.
Now on the bottom, look here towards the front,
you also do get two stereo speakers.
They're okay sounding, not the best.
It's gonna be a weak spot on this laptop,
it's definitely gonna be the audio,
but if they work in a pinch, it's all right.
Then one of the neat things about this laptop
that Vaio has been doing for a while
and also Asus does this too,
so it does this ergo lift kind of thing.
I don't think they call it that, but...
Basically when you open up the laptop,
it's going to lift it up and give you a nice angle.
I love this design.
It's kind of a combo between a Surface Pro,
with a laptop.
It has a lot of benefits too, including you get now
an angle for typing at which is good for your palms.
It's also good because it lifts the screen off,
it allows more cooling on the underside of the laptop.
You also don't get a bottom chin anymore,
because it's being obstructed here by the laptop.
So this actually solves a lot of problems.
I really like it, I know some people have an issue
with it, but overall, I think it's a pretty clever design.
All right, opening it up and you can see here,
a pretty nice design.
So a lot's changed here.
This used to be a 13.3 inch laptop.
It is now 14 inch, from edge to edge.
16 by nine aspect ratio and you can see they did that
by making these bezels really thin.
If you've seen previous Vaios, they generally have thick
bezels all around and while this year, they actually look,
I'm gonna say, handsome.
Now you may notice a thicker bezel here at the top.
You do get a full webcam and microphones.
But one of the reasons, as I've mentioned in previous
videos with HP, that this is kind of thick,
is that they put the WiFi antenna and Bluetooth antennas
up here at the top.
And you can't have it behind the display,
and the reason they do that is obviously,
the higher the antenna is, the better the reception.
A lot of manufacturers will go for super thin bezels,
but then the antennas go into the base of the laptop,
and well, you compromise on radio frequencies there,
so this is a really good design, I think it works well.
Now looking at the display itself.
This is a 4K panel.
You can get it in full HD, but man, it looks stunning in 4K.
Do you need 4K in a 14 inch laptop?
I don't know, but it looks really nice.
It's also matte.
That's a weird thing to see, a 4K matte display,
but again, this is more oriented towards business users.
I think it looks really nice.
99% SRGB for color accuracy
and 79% Adobe for accuracy as well.
So this is a very good display.
It also hits around 500 nits of brightness.
Again 300 nits is the sweet spot for a laptop,
that's right where it's acceptable.
400 nits is nice, 500 nits is you can use this outside.
It's a really, really great display.
Looking at the keyboard deck here, you do get the power
button, look at that.
It's an actual button, I swear to God.
It's an LED as well, but that is the power button
to turn it on.
It glows green which contrasts kind of oddly
with this color choice, but I also kind of like it a lot.
So kind of a neat design.
Yeah, look at this keyboard, chiclet style,
not a lot of travel, probably about 1.1 mm, it is back-lit.
These are small keys, I was a little bit worried about this,
for some reason a lot of the Japanese manufacturers
use smaller keys.
LG in Korea does this too.
I actually really like this keyboard though.
I got used to it pretty quickly and it's very quiet,
it's very smooth.
I just enjoy typing on it.
You do get smaller arrow keys here
and everything is a little tiny, but it's actually very
nice for typing on.
You also get a tiny fingerprint reader here,
which works mostly pretty well,
occasionally it's a little bit slower or gets false hits
but it's not too bad.
I would prefer facial recognition, but it is what it is.
Now continuing the theme of tiny things,
look at this tiny track pad!
It's so small!
Why didn't they make it much bigger?
I have no idea, but it's a very small track pad,
with physical buttons here,
so the track pad itself does not click.
Now it is using precision drivers and besides the fact
that it's actually really tiny to use,
I actually didn't have any issue using it.
I would have preferred larger, but it didn't at all make
me frustrated, unlike say using an HP Spectre laptop.
(coughs)
All right, let's get to the nitty gritty of power
and performance here.
So it's running a Core i7 8565U, that's Whiskey Lake.
You can also get a Core i5.
You can use that full HD or 4K display,
eight or 16 gigs of RAM, up to a terabyte SSD.
We're running a western digital, which again I'm seeing
a lot of these western digital cards, I think they're
very good, you're talking around 3500 for read
and around 2500 for write, so it's a very good SSD
on there as well.
Now when it comes to the actual performance of the Core i7,
it does pretty well, but it doesn't perform quite as well
as the HP Spectre X360 13 inch,
or even anything from Huewei, the Matebook 13 or the X Pro.
It's because those laptops are a little bit bigger,
they're more thermo room and I think those chips are clocked
higher, with the TDP, that allows that chip to run
at a higher clock speed.
Now one of the benefits of this laptop,
is what's call Vaio True Performance,
so although this doesn't peak as high as some other Core i7
processors, it's able to maintain that speed,
for long durations, that is it's not going to basically
throttle down, so you can actually use this for more
things like video or creation and everything.
Now, you don't want to go crazy with it,
but it won't throttle down, that's kind of the big deal.
In terms of fan, you're talking about this single fan
with a copper heat sink in there and it actually works
pretty well, and there are nice settings on there,
so Vaio gives you the option to clock that fan down
if you want to be in a silent room,
or you can even tie it to the AC power,
so if you're plugged in, you can set it to max performance,
that fan's gonna run basically all the time.
Or you can put it on silent mode when on battery,
so it gives you that option.
The fan is okay, it does make a wooshing noise
and it's a little bit of a high pitched noise as well,
so it's not quite annoying, but it's also not the most
quiet I've heard and Huawei Matebook X Pro,
does a much better job here.
Same with HP.
Now some weird things about this laptop.
Well, it's only got a 38 watt hour battery,
which is not a lot, but that's also because it weighs
2.2 pounds or 1 kilogram.
So you get about five to six hours of battery life,
which isn't terrible for a Core i7 with a 4K display.
But it's also definitely not the best out there
in the market, but I feel like the trade off there
is kind of worth it.
You're getting a super light 14 inch laptop here,
with a 4K display, so I think that actually falls
right within the line.
I would have preferred a larger battery of course,
but that's what you get.
So speaking of design here, this uses unidirectional
carbon fiber, and all sorts of new technology,
so this is a big theme that a lot of laptop
manufacturers are using, new material science basically.
And what that means is, this is a really rugged laptop,
in fact here's some video clips of Vaio testing theirs
and I have to caution you, this is pretty aggressive
stuff here folks.
And the things they do to this laptop to make sure
it doesn't break is kind of insane.
This is where I think Japanese manufacturers
take things to the next level, to ensure durability.
All right, let's bring it all in, so the Vaio SX14.
I really like this laptop a lot.
There are compromises, don't get me wrong,
but it's so kind of weird and different from anything
else on the market, I think it's really worth checking out,
especially if you're into business and productivity.
First of all, it's super light and compact.
I really love carrying this thing around.
It's just really nice.
The build quality's also exceptional.
Then we look at what I call the fundamentals.
Display, excellent.
Keyboard, very good surprisingly.
The track pad, okay, track pad is super small,
but I had no problems using it
and that's really a nice trade off.
Performance is also very good
and the fan, when in silent mode is very quiet
for obvious reasons.
I also just really like the feel of this device
and the looks too, I think this brown color's
actually pretty stunning.
But of course, not all of it is perfect,
so if you need something with really long battery life,
then this is not gonna be your choice.
Now five to six hours is pretty much okay,
if you use the barrel charger with it,
well you can recharge the battery 80% in an hour,
so that's not crazy bad, but a lot of laptops
are doing that these days.
Another weakness is gonna be those speakers.
I think Vaio can definitely do a better job here.
These aren't the worst I've heard,
but they're definitely not the best either.
If you really wanna use these for speakers,
well you may wanna look somewhere else.
Otherwise, headphones will get the job done.
Also about pricing, and who this is for.
So this starts at 1299, which is not cheap at all.
That's for the Core i5, full HD, eight gigs of Ram
and 256 gigs of storage though.
That's definitely in the high end for a laptop
of this class.
And it goes up to, well 2200 dollars for the one we have
here, with one terabyte, 16 gigs and a Core i7,
plus a 4K display.
And if you want that red, it's an extra 100 bucks,
at 2300 dollars.
So, it's definitely an expensive laptop.
But I think it's kind of worth it for some people.
It's extremely durable, it's extremely light,
it is very good for business users who need all those
ports and availability.
So if you're in the market for a really good 14 inch
laptop that meets all these requirements
and has these features and all those ports,
I think the SX14 is actually a pretty solid choice.
It's one of the most fun laptops I've had to review
recently and it actually says something in my opinion.
Like I said, it's gonna be available in the United States,
Brazil and Japan, so you should check your markets for that.
And if you want more information about this laptop,
make sure you go to the description below.
We'll also have more information about our
On Windows Center dot com.
If you want, leave me a comment, tell me what you think
and how you think they can improve it, besides the price.
Otherwise, if you liked this video, gives us a thumbs up,
and don't forget to subscribe.
Thanks for watching, take care everyone.
(upbeat synth music)
All right before we get started I want to talk a little
bit about the Vaio brand, I don't know, should I be looking
at the lens?
I always get confused here.
Does it look better, or where I look at the Sony...
That's what I've been doing but I feel like...
It doesn't look like I'm looking off camera
'cause it's kinda close?