Thanks for spotting the weight difference. From other websites it does appear that they might have different weights to each model.
I’ve pinged staff to find out.
How hard would it be to put Ubuntu or Chromium on this?
Does this ultrabook work like a regular laptop or does it have a locked bootloader like many phones have? I don’t trust Sony not to have this thing locked up and be stuck with Windows Aint speak-n-spell crap for life.
I bought the T 13 back in April (the i7 model with 8 GB and a 256 GB SSD) from the Microsoft Store for $1,000 (most places were selling it for $1,300 at the time).
In general it is a great system - very fast, portable, and seems to get good batter life (several hours of light use).
But! The screen is frankly lousy. The resolution is a step back from the 1600x900 on my three-year-old Dell Latitude (which cost about the same at the time). It is washed out in terms of color (I’ve tried changing settings to improve things, but nothing seems to help). The glossy coating (common with touch-screens) is really annoying in certain lights.
Talking to people over Skype they say the web-cam is not terribly clear, but it seems to work okay. I wish it were better.
Someone posted that they’d jump on a T 15 deal (the one with the Full HD screen), and I have to admit if I found a deal on that I’d buy one for my wife, who needs an updated laptop with a CD/DVD burner. (Hint, hint, Woot?)
EDIT: Oh - one thing I forgot to mention, and which was a factor in my decision to buy this system. When the battery inevitably stops holding the charge the battery is user-replaceable by unbolting a panel underneath. No problem!
Why is it that they can manage to put a 1920x1200 touchscreen on a 10.1" tablet and sell it for $250 (yesterday’s woot), yet they are still using 1366x768 10 year-old resolution standards for a 13.3" and 14" tablet that costs $650. How much can it truly cost for a higher resolution touch panel on this- maybe $50? Who would not be willing to pay that difference at this price point? That’s my rant- I’m done. As far as today’s laptop goes- price seems a little high for what you get by about $100- at $550 it would be a decent deal.
I love it when companies install odd amounts of memory which disables the dual channel feature of DDR3. If you buy this, your first action should be to remove the 2 GB memory module and put in an appropriate 4 GB module. You should get significantly improved performance.
These are both nice laptops. A bit of a premium for the Sony name + nicer than average design.
both have touch screens (good for Windows 8).
both have 128 GB SSD drives for faster boot and file access (OK as long as you don’t archive your life on the laptop).
13.3 & 14 both more compact than the typical volume 15 inch laptops.
13.3 rated 5.5 hours vs 4.25 hours for the 14 (13.3 has bigger battery + smaller screen).
13.3 nicely light weight - but you give up the DVD drive. External drives are cheap.
As others have mentioned, the screen resolution is a bit lacking at 1366 x 768. But vs that resolution on a 15 inch laptop these pixels are compressed into 13.3/14 inches so it isn’t as bad as on a 15. We’ve become spoiled by hi-Rez tablets!
These latpops are light on USB ports (only 2).
Chicklet/low profile keyboards take some getting used to for some folks.
Webcam at 1.2 MP is not great, but that is the case on most laptops. If you don’t Skype it won’t matter.
All in all I prefer the 13.3 model - the compromises are more acceptable for this compact size and reasonable price.
Ideally, you would want a 4GB stick of RAM that runs identical memory timings to the on-board RAM.
If you buy a faster one, it’s wasted money because the system would only run the memory as fast as the slowest channel and the memory timings in the BIOS are probably locked down anyway.
If you buy a slower stick, it probably won’t work because the BIOS would try to run the add-in RAM too fast and cause instabilities.
Too bad memory timings are almost NEVER specified for pre-built computers, but if you have one you should be able to run “memtest86+” or a similar utility and find that information (remove any socketed memory first so you’re testing ONLY the memory soldered to the motherboard to get its true timing).