A few weeks ago I noticed some foreign exchange students at my university who were huddled around a Panasonic laptop. This wasn’t one of the Toughbook models that are sold in the US, but a newer Japanese model. Seeing this rare laptop out in the wild combined with the recent wailing and gnashing of teeth concerning the MacBook Pro piqued my interest in the current Japanese PC market.
It really feels like the Japanese electronics industry lost most of its appeal and cachet, with the sector now being lead by American and Chinese companies. I love the design of the Panasonic laptop, though.
Link missing in the article.
Sorry about that. I added a link to the article. Here’s the product page (in Japanese): http://ec-club.panasonic.jp/pc/lx/
I still have and cherish my 2010 Vaio Z.
It had a dual core i7 620M processor, 8 GB of RAM, dual graphics, and up to 512 GB (or 1 TB?) SSD storage (I had chosen the 500 GB HDD model because it was cheaper).
This new Vaio Z must be the most underwhelming design I have ever seen in a “premium” Vaio model. There’s almost nothing “Sony” or “Vaio” in it. I know the brand was sold, but I expected its signature styling to stay.
There’s nothing outstanding in its specs either. Same max 8 GB of RAM, slightly better display resolution, integrated-only graphics. I supposed 6 years would entail some evolution. What a disappointment.
Vaio Z was Sony’s ultraportable powerhouse before ultrabooks even existed, not just another mid-spec slim laptop with long battery life. This concept has been washed out (I can see some fruit company analogies).
Last year I switched to a 15 inch rMBP and now Apple is disappointing me as well…
You DO know, don’t you, that it’s been YEARS since Sony sold the VAIO name, right? There is nothing “Sony” about your current PC.
I wrote “I know the brand was sold, but I expected its signature styling to stay” just to avoid this kind of reply.
Sure, there’s nothing Sony in Vaio anymore, except that one might be excused for supposing that designers that were part of Vaio division would have been transferred together with other assets to the new company.
Sure, there’s nothing Sony about my current PC – as I have just written, I have been using a MacBook Pro for a year.
Edited 2016-11-08 17:28 UTC
Maybe English isn’t his/her first language.
I really liked the Toshiba laptops I had back when wireless was new. They had a volume dial, not software on a button. My last one switched to software like every other laptop and that was the end for me .
tbuskey,
It’s such a tiny detail, yet I hate it when products lack physical volume controls (which is all of them today). IMHO the analog sliders were better. Not because they were “analog”, but because the controls were physically manifested.
My current laptop uses FN-Up FN-Down for volume control, which is not so bad but it only works once windows has loaded and you are logged in (it doesn’t work at all in linux). Sometimes I want to bootup the laptop quietly at night and there’s absolutely nothing I can do to turn down the volume before I log in.
These are called tactile input methods in gaming circles. It’s interesting to see Nintendo doubling down on tactile input for their new console the Switch.
I think touch screens in cars are dangerous due to the lack of tactile controls. I prefer the physical keys on older style radios and my steering wheel, since I can feel for the buttons, instead of taking my eye off the road.
The same is true for keyboards – which is why we haven’t seen successful touch based keyboards yet. Until they can simulate the tactile (viewless) benefits of physical keys with haptics, physical keys are here to stay.
On topic – in many cases it’d be nice to have a wheel control for volume, but I never liked how the controls on my laptop or standalone speakers didn’t track to the soft controls in Windows. If they aren’t going to be synced (or if they must use crappy third party software) then I’d rather just get rid of the hardware. Also, hat kind of hardware tends to wear out or break faster than the rest of the laptop.
CaptainN-,
I’m usually not on my laptop at home, but that’s a good idea.
Edited 2016-11-08 20:35 UTC
I know this isn’t optimal, but if you really need to quiet your laptop during boot at night – plug in in headphones. 😉
Edited 2016-11-08 18:04 UTC
Some of my older laptops had the FN keys or extra keys on the keyboard were controlled by the BIOS, or appears that way to me since if I went to the BIOS screen I could adjust the screen brightness, screen blanking time-out and sound volume thru the BIOS settings.
The beauty of those old machines I could run BeOS and later Haiku-OS and still control functions thru the keyboard that the OS did not have drivers to handle.
Bought a brand new Toshiba Z20T at low cost this year.
It is quite decent hybrid with correct build quality and a few likeable details for my kind of “professional” use as a good keyboard, VGA and HDMI connectors, a wired Ethernet port, a plain 19V power supply, replaceable M.2 SSD, long lasting battery…
And once you got used to CPUs as the Core-M, you won’t tolerate Pentiums and Celerons anymore.
And quite good Linux compatibility !
(VGA is useful both for the gazillions old screens laying around for free and for meeting rooms equipped with VGA video projectors. No dongle !)
Edited 2016-11-08 21:57 UTC
ThinkPads also had separate volume (and mute buttons) – not too sure about {T,X}x40 and newer.
I have T420s and his buttons work even when OS is frozen.
Also ThinkPad T430 and newer started to remove Home cluster from the keyboard layout
Last time I was in Japan was about 3 years ago, but at least around that time, all that I could see where small, cheap local laptops everywhere. Nothing to drool about.
It seems that the japanese market is quite peculiar, compared at least to the EU/US:
– cheap laptops are sold as ‘electronic device’ for super low prices
– lots of connectors for technologies which where already obsolete over here (vga ports, cdroms), few connectors for more modern standards
– developers are given cheap laptops with small screens and can not complain (eye suicide for a generation is in march)
On a side note: japanese are notoriously risk averse people. They spend lot of time evaluating technology, and always hone it to perfection before accepting it for daily usage. This also means that once they settle in on one tech, they will rarely abandon it before a couple of decades. In 2014, they where still on RHEL 4, and starting to use Symfony 1 for web apps, when the rest of the world was on RHEL 6 and Symfony 2…
I think what you are seeing, increasingly as every year passes since the bubble burst an increasingly internally facing Japanese market. Its causing more and more of the Galapagos Effect. Where Japan and only Japan uses specifications or makes.
Think Kei Cars and Flip Phones.
It’s sad. I am a big fan of Japanese hardware design. When they get it right its wonderful. Some of the old MSX designs by Sony and others are so fun. You see the odd glimpse, like the borderless Sharp phone. I wish they would get their mojo back. Korea and China just don’t seem to have the same quirky sensibility. Though Nokia did.
Bright people there. Can a whole Nation be stress burned?
More a case of the whole nation physically aging. You get a bunch of complacent old geezers heading companies, playing it safe, until their retirement.
Then you have aging corporate values. People there get promoted simply by attaining the “correct” age, or sometimes an incompetent halfwit will get promoted just because he got married, while the competent guy slogs away because he prefers being single.
Add to that an almost non-existent startup/entrepreneurship culture because the old fogeys I mentioned prior are also found heading banks, so they still subscribe to the borg-like collective “zaibatsu” culture of times past, refusing to hand out loans/capital to any “deviant” who refuses to get onboard the corporate slave train.
You mentioned some interesting social issues that I’ve never heard of. Do you happen to know of books or articles that discuss those issues in depth, preferably in English? I’d love to read them.
Edited 2016-11-09 15:31 UTC
I’m not the original poster, but I’d like to add my 2c saying that I have found “An Introduction to Japanese Society” (3rd edition) by Yoshio Sugimoto to be a very interesting read.
“…because he got married…”
CEO’s daughter?
Replay the so-called election in the states last night and you tell me.
“Replay the so-called election in the states…”
Even Politics -believe me, please- are blood and flesh…
Things went so OUT OF SCRIPT that Ugly Things of USA Policy Hubris showed repeatedly.
Yeah.. I work for a JCM (starts with an ‘F’). We make some pretty darned sweet laptops, especially in our corporate range and we use them about the company. I could possibly count on two hands the number of times I’ve seen one of our systems or or even nicer servers and storage systems out in the wild.
Dunno why.. but they’re just not around. Pity. Most locals here when I mention who I work for say “Aren’t they an air-conditioner company?” ..then are extremely surprised to find out we still do mainframes through laptops. Market awareness and supply chain anyone?
uridium,
One of my jobs is working on a commercial 3270 emulator as well as mainframe web enablement. If we had private messaging I’d ask if you were familiar with them
There are a variety of Japanese laptops available in Australia. However they are typically premium corporate devices sold through specialist supplies.
I have a ~16yr old Vaio C1 “picturebook” that still works the way it did when it was brand new. I’ve gone through dozens of laptops and desktop and somehow that little laptop won’t die.