The 5 Most Beautiful Sony Laptops in History

When you think of iconic laptops, you might immediately think of the IBM ThinkPad, or the Apple MacBook. However, Sony used to be quite the leader in beautiful, cutting-edge laptop design—its VAIO series.

While every VAIO is a stunner in its own way, I think these five are the most eye-pleasing of the bunch, or at least the most interesting to look at.

5

VAIO X505 Extreme (2003): The Razor-Thin Before Apple Made It Cool

The obsession with thinner and thinner gadgets is nothing new. There’s always some sort of device in every generation that tries to set itself apart from the pack by making itself as thin as possible with current technology, even if that means serious compromises.

The X505 family started off as a Japan-only release in 2003, and then a year later the whole world got to have a go at the thinnest laptop ever at that point. Well, if you could stomach the $2,999.99 asking price—and that’s in 2003 money! At only 0.75 inches at its thickest point, the PCG-X505 essentially gave us the ultraportable form factor five years before the first MacBook Air.

The specs were modest, but you did get three hours of battery life according to independent battery life testing from the time. That sounds bad to modern ears, but keep in mind that it wasn’t that long ago that three hours was still pretty much the norm for a laptop. It’s only in recent years that laptops with all-day battery life have become common.

The specs were otherwise modest, but I can only imagine being a trendy millionaire in 2004, popping one of these open in a five-star hotel to check my emails using the included removable Wi-Fi card.

4

VAIO P Series (2009): The Netbook That Thought It Was a Handbag

Few VAIO laptops exemplify just how much Sony understands fashion and style, like the P-Series computers. This was a family of subnotebooks that came in numerous colors, and looked a lot like a purse in shape and size when folded.

There’s no touchpad, and instead there’s a pointing nub in the middle of the keyboard. The 8-inch display has a respectable resolution of 1600×768, and the guts were basically netbook-grade, but as with all netbooks this was “good enough”. That said, Sony opted for a more expensive Intel Atom variant with more performance and less power draw than typical netbooks, so it wasn’t just all about pretty looks.

3

VAIO Z Series (2000-2014): Business Meets Beauty

The Z-Series of VAIO laptops denotes Sony’s highest-end portable computers in the VAIO family, and these have always been real lookers with forward-thinking design elements. The last few models that came out sported second- and third-generation Core Intel CPUs, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. In other words, even today, this would still be a perfectly fine daily computer for browsing the web and doing light productivity.

It even offered decent battery life, though to get the maximum 13 hours, you had to attach a special battery attachment.

Even cooler was the Power Media Dock, which added a Radeon GPU, so you could dock the laptop at home or at your desk at work, and do heavy tasks like video editing or photo manipulation.

With that brushed metal detailing and slick angles and curves, there’s no way anyone would mistake you for a middle-manager in the 2010s walking around with this baby. Movie producer? Definitely.

2

VAIO UX Micro PC (2006): A Pocket-Sized Cyberpunk Dream

Some devices are just iconic, and if you had to imagine what a “hacker” computer would look like in the late 90s or early 2000s, the VAIO UX Micro matches that mental image exactly.

This little banger of a computer wouldn’t be out of place in any Cyberpunk fiction from set in any year. It has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a touch screen, front and rear cameras, and it packs a proper PC on the inside with a single- or dual-core Celeron. I bet you thought handheld PCs were a recent invention.

1

VAIO TT (2008): Leather, Carbon, and Class

Marking the end of the high-end netbook-style Sony laptops, the VAIO TT series is known for being overbuilt and using materials like metal and carbon fiber in its construction. The gold-colored model is possibly the rarest Sony VAIO model of all.

This little 11.1-inch laptop had some features you’d normally only find in bigger, bulkier devices—including a Blu-ray drive! It had an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, which was obviously much more powerful than the typical Intel Atom CPU found in netbooks like the one I had as a penniless student.

It also somehow fit numerous ports, such as two USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, FireWire, VGA, Ethernet, and a memory card reader, along with a headphone and microphone jack. Meanwhile, a typical Mac today gives you two or three USB-C ports and calls it a day.

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There are so many more stunning (and wacky) VAIO examples, but sadly Sony quit the PC business back in 2014, and the Sony VAIO Z from that year was the last laptop from the electronics giant.

It’s a real pity that Sony has withdrawn from so many areas, since it really made some of the best-looking phones, Hi-Fis, computers, and just about anything else you can think of that runs on electricity and has microchips in it. I could never afford any of these laptops at the time, but if Sony ever decides to give portable computers another go, I might very well be in line this time.