New VAIOs Made of Carbon Fiber

Shawnzyoo noted that Sony has released their new series of VAIO TX laptops. In order to make them stronger/lighter/thinner, they are now made of carbon fiber. No plans to release it in the US yet, so start learning Korean if you want this one.

Re:korean?

[gunpowda]

First line of TFA:
Sony Korea announced two new VAIO TX series notebooks...

How is this different than the CF TX for NA?

[cullman]

http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity /eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_BrowseCatalog-Start;sid=uat PyV9-gjlPUxwo6HVFwhBwahpn-XnwTyA=?CategoryName=cpu _VAIONotebookComputers_TXSeries&Dept=computers [sonystyle.com]

Carbon Fiber, same specs, goes on sale here next week - no Korean required.

Keyboard is Korean

[Dj-Zer0]

Guys

Maybe you need to fdisk and replace the keyboard.. or stick some stickers along to make the keys english. Not that you need to but makes it easier at times

Re:Who cares about NA, is it available in Japan ??

[siufish]

RTFA: This new VAIO TX series will be introduced to the market in Korea this year. We only dream to see these in North America sometime soon. I suppose it's not in North Korea...

Re:Keyboard is Korean

[Barnoid]

Dude, have you ever seen a Korean keyboard? Probably not.
It looks exactly as an English one, except that the Korean keys are printed in the lower right corner of the keys and it features an additional 'Korean/English' input mode key between Space and Alt Gr.

Re:Learn Korean?

[ducleotide]

the sony website [sonystyle.com] is taking pre orders, i'm guessing it'll be released in the US soon.

This is already in Japan - it's the Type T VAIO

[Anonymous Coward]

This was out in Japan first - it's the Type T VAIO.

http://www.jp.sonystyle.com/Style-a/Product/T/inde x.html [sonystyle.com]

Depending on how good your Japanese is, they do say it is made of multi-layered carbon fibre.

Re:"AV mode"?

[jandrese]

If it's anything like the latest Asus motherboards, the whole media player thing is handled in the BIOS. All it does is turn on the sound card, set the mixer settings to something reasonable, and send a "play start" command to the CD-ROM. It doesn't need an OS because it's not doing anything sophisticated. The whole thing is probably 200 bytes or so, and most of that is the interface.

Maybe the article says that...

[BJH]

...but it was presumably written by someone only familiar with Sony Korea, as Sony (the Japanese parent company) has already released the same model [sony.co.jp] in Japan.

Re:Yet another reason not to put it on your lap...

[CottonEyedJoe]

When carbon composites fail, they do so spectacularly, as opposed to Al, steel or Ti which usually just crumple a bit. They are also prone to directional issues. A teammate of mine slammed on the brakes hard in a race to avoid a crash and the lateral forces on his fishtailing rear wheel snapped his Zipp 303 (a carbon rimmed bicycle wheel) in half. The wheel was stronger than an aluminum rim in one direction, but weak under minor lateral forces that an Al rim would easily have weathered. As for laptops on your lap.... Carbon isnt known for spontaneous failure under no load at all... Unless you're sitting on it I wouldnt worry. BTW, what is it with cyclists and good beer? Nothing like a bomber of Dreadnaught to recover after an 80 mi race.

Re:Learn Korean?

[highwind81]

its parent language, Chinese

errr... what makes you think that Chinese is the parent language of Korean? Chinese [wikipedia.org] is Sino-Tibetan language. Where as Korean [wikipedia.org] is considered to be unclassified, or Altaic language or language isolate.
I hate ignorant people...

ASUS has CF notebooks already

[poity]

ASUS, one of Sony's main notebook manufacturers (Sony doesn't make their own laptops), already make use of carbon fiber chassis in some of their own ultraportable/thin-and-light models, which have been available in North America for a few years.

One particular model I have is from their M6 series, which has since been replaced by their updated Z70 series, both with CF chassis.

What's even better is that since ASUS notebooks aren't sold retail, they come at nearly half the price for similar functionality, performance, and aesthetic quality as a comparable Sony.

Check out www.asus.com for online reseller links

Re:I'll Let Them Try It First

[jgc7]

CFRP (Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic) is better thought of as a very strong plastic rather than a substitue for metal. Because plastic works fine as a laptop case, there should be no worries about carbon fiber.

IMO, metal is the preferred material for laptop cases versus any plastic (carbon fiber reinforced or otherwise). While CFRPs have a higher tensile strength to weight ratio, they tend to be brittle. I would rather have a dent in the case than a crack.

Thinkpads have had this for years...

[yani]

Ever since the T20 most thinkpads have had carbon fiber re-inforced lids [wikipedia.org] and the T43/X41s [hothardware.com] have completely carbon re-inforced bodies.

Drop a Thinkpad and a VAIO and I know which one my money is on...

This is yet another story in the past year that makes me wonder if Slashdot really has just become an advertising venue, willingly, or through negligence.

Re:In Korea...

[focitrixilous P]

It was inspired by a story how young people prefer Instant Messaging to email, and old people still used email. Link: In Korea, Email Is Only For Old People [slashdot.org]

Re:safe?

[CausticPuppy]

Actually I believe it _is_ flammable and _I_ build race cars out of it. (http://me.unm.edu/~fsae/teams/2005/ [unm.edu]). However, my mind blanked and I forgot how high the temperature has to be before it will oxidize.

It'll oxidize at a very high temperature, but I think the oxidation stops as soon as the heat source is removed so you won't get a sustainable burn (but I Am Not a Materials Scientist). This may be another reason why it's useful in race cars along with strength and weight. Carbon brake pads don't readily ignite either, right?

At any rate, if anything in a laptop shell gets hot enough to oxidize carbon fiber, you probably have other things to worry about!

Nice cars by the way, those things must have a scary power to weight ratio. And I'm drooling over that Ford GT.

Vaio X505/CP

[lewiz]

Not only are carbon fibre laptops not knew, neither are carbon fibre Vaios.

Certain Vaio X505 models have carbon fibre models, including the X505/CP, which I am typing on right now. I think it's as much a gimmick as anything else, but it does look good.

You can find out all sorts of 505 info at http://www.siliconpopculture.com/sonytr/viewtopic. php?t=3889&sid=6456be6419d0fc2b769d268570aaeae1 [siliconpopculture.com] which is an interview with a lot of the designers. The X505 is sort of like what Yamaha did with the NS-1000M monitors way back when -- threw money to make the best/smallest monitors/laptop. I still have no idea how many got shipped but I've not seen more than one or two in use in England.

Some good photos are available at http://www.dynamism.com/x505/index.shtml [dynamism.com]

Re:Why not japanese?

[Bobartig]

Having studied both Korean and Japanese for several years, I'd say, yes, Korean is easier to learn. The korean alphabet consists almost entirely of straight lines which are easy to learn and reproduce. Pronunciation is very consistent, and when it varies, it is predictable because character positioning largely dictates pronunciation. Their alphabet is something like 14 consonants and 10 vowels. To make things simpler, they use different vowels for dipthongs and such, so each vowel only has one possible pronunciation (as opposed to our vowel system). So reading their written language is a series of consonant-vowel-consonant structures that are at least easy to read. So if you know 'k-a' and you know 'n', then you can trivially construct 'n-a' as well.

Japanese is also very systematic, having something like 8 primary consonant sounds, and 5 primary vowel sounds, but each combination of consonant vowel has its own character, for 40+ individual characters that seem entirely independent. Learning the character for 'ka' doesn't teach you anything about the character for 'sa' or for 'ko'. They also have a second alphabet, which is a simplified version of the first reserved for writing foreign words, proper nouns, and some names.

Both languages make extensive usage of chinese characters in their written language as well. The challege arrives in that in different contexts, chinese characters are substituted for native characters (either japanese or korean), but can have entirely different meanings and pronunciations depending on context. To further mire the situation, a single chinese character can replace different numbers of native characters, making the translation/reading process rather intense. For instance, the chinese character for mouth is used in japanese in the words for mouth, opening, door, gate, etc... but the japanese words were derived from ancient spoken japanese, so its replacing japanese character(s) with a chinese one of rather unsimilar origin.

Re:Learn Korean?

[Anonymous Coward]

oh noes, they're talking shit about you!! kekekeke [kuro5hin.org]