Carbon fiber, people. That’s the ticket right there. It’s the miracle substance that allows Sony to stuff super fast components into a 13.1-inch laptop while keeping the weight at around 3.2 pounds. And while most ultraportable notebooks favor style over substance, the impending VAIO Z Series due from Sony in March will feature an Intel Core i7 CPU, NVIDIA graphics, 1920×1080 screen resolution, and the ability to stack four solid state drives in a Raid 0 configuration. Again, all at just over three pounds.
The line has been announced in Europe with a release window sometime in late March. It’d stand to reason that we’d see something similar here in the US sooner or later as well. The notebooks will be available in various configurations – here are a couple possibilities:
It’ll be interesting to see what Sony’s able to do as far as battery life is concerned. Those Core i7 chips suck quite a bit more power than the ultra low-voltage and Atom CPUs that we’re used to dealing with. Pricing, of course, will be a factor as well. Four solid state drives aren’t cheap but, hey, maybe there will be a configuration with a single drive.
We’ll find out more as we get closer to the actual launch — hopefully some info about US models as well.
Sony Press Release [Sony Europe via SlashGear]