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Hide your wallets: Sony's expensive new Vaio Z reviewed

The updated Sony Vaio Z has an unusual new feature -- an external docking station with a discrete AMD GPU built in.

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Dan Ackerman Editorial Director / Computers and Gaming
Dan Ackerman leads CNET's coverage of computers and gaming hardware. A New York native and former radio DJ, he's also a regular TV talking head and the author of "The Tetris Effect" (Hachette/PublicAffairs), a non-fiction gaming and business history book that has earned rave reviews from the New York Times, Fortune, LA Review of Books, and many other publications. "Upends the standard Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg technology-creation myth... the story shines." -- The New York Times
Expertise I've been testing and reviewing computer and gaming hardware for over 20 years, covering every console launch since the Dreamcast and every MacBook...ever. Credentials
  • Author of the award-winning, NY Times-reviewed nonfiction book The Tetris Effect; Longtime consumer technology expert for CBS Mornings
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Dan Ackerman
CNET

Sony has a reputation for building excellent high-end laptops (and even the company's less expensive models usually have a snazzy feel), but the Vaio Z is truly the top of the Vaio line, starting at $2,000 for a thin 13-inch with decent specs and a sharp design (our review unit was $2,749).

The latest version of the Vaio Z adds some very unusual new features. While the laptop itself looks and feels like a standard luxury 13-inch (its competition would be the MacBook Air or Samsung Series 9), it includes a separate docking station about the size of an Amazon Kindle e-book reader. That docking station includes a few extra ports and connections, as well as an optical drive (upgradable to Blu-ray), but more importantly, it has an AMD Radeon 6630M GPU built in.

The Vaio Z Series is available for preorder starting today at the Sony Style website.

Read the full review of the Sony Vaio Z here.