You might be forgiven for forgetting that Vaio is no longer a Sony product after the brand got purchased by an investment fund. And so Vaio became its own company, hoping to find success in the PC business where Sony couldn’t. And now Vaio is showing off its first independent product.
Behold the “Vaio Prototype”. Catchy name, we know, but luckily this product won’t come to market just yet. However it does show us what the new company is aiming for.
This laptop hybrid design is strangely similar to Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3, and according to Vaio it’s going after some of the same people. Featuring a 12.3-inch 2,560 x 1,704 (3:2) display, alongside a stylus and a quad-core Intel Haswell CPU this prototype, and its future market version, are supposedly designed for high-end, mobile, design-oriented, professional users.
According to Vaio they’re trying to reproduce Panasonic’s success story, by focusing on select users with specific needs that can afford very specific devices. And coming in at at least $1,800, its obvious this device isn’t designed for everyone. Though considering its similarities to Microsoft’s own devices, it’s hard to see who exactly this was designed for.