[mc32]

One thing likely contributed to their downfall was US manufactures moved operations overseas and many Japanese manufacturers kept production in Japan making them expensive to the Us market --that and Apple and others catching up in terms of "sleekness" and aesthetics. People would buy Vaios despite poor hardware because they were thin and looked cool.

[lvs]

For the new post-Sony US-market Vaio laptops, they're apparently "inspected" in Japan, but the manufacturing is now finally taking place in China -- like pretty much everyone else.

[coldtea]

>that and Apple and others catching up in terms of "sleekness" and aesthetics.

Wasn't Apple always ahead of the Japanese laptops in terms of sleekness and aesthetics?

[cstejerean]

No, not always. The Sony Vaio was attractive enough back in its day that Steve Jobs offered Sony to run Mac OS on them (which they declined).

[dopeboy]

Had to look this up because I had no clue.

> Most of Sony's executives spends their winter vacation in Hawaii and play golf after celebrating new year. In one of those new year golf competitions back in 2001, " Steve Jobs and another Apple executive were waiting for us at the end of golf course holding VAIO running Mac OS" recalls Ando.[President of Sony at the time]

> Ando liked Apple. He always felt Mac and VAIO were so close in philosophy. He especially admired the original iMac introduced in 1998. But the timing was bad for Sony, it is just about the time, Sony's VAIO gained popularity and it is just about the time that VAIO team had finished optimizing both VAIO's hardware and software specifically for Windows platform. Because of this, most of the VAIO team opposed asking 'if it is worth it.' And that was the end of story for this Mac-compatible VAIO.

http://nobi.com/en/Steve%20Jobs%20and%20Japan/entry-1212.htm...

[huxley]

A couple of things about these anecdotes to give some context:

Steve Jobs used a Thinkpad (a 560E I believe) running OPENSTEP for quite a long time after taking over Apple, because of his objections to using what he considered to be the primitive MacOS 8/9 OS. So Jobs had no problems with using non-Apple hardware.

The Titanium Powerbook and the iBook G3 Snow were already in the production pipeline when Steve Jobs met with the President of Sony, so aesthetics probably weren't the reason for trying to partner with Sony, perhaps Jobs may have already concerned about the PowerPC Alliance's ability to produce mobile processors and wanted an x86 partner to help pivot Apple away.

When Sony's president was shown a Vaio running "MacOS" what it was running was the preliminary build of Cheetah, MacOS X 10.0[1] without either the Blue Box (the classic Mac emulator) [2] or Rosetta [3] the "dynamic binary translator" (which didn't come out until 2006).

Cheetah was pretty exciting to us NeXT junkies but if it was running on x86, then it was quite limited in the amount of "Mac" software available for it, most everything that didn't start on OPENSTEP would have needed a lot of work to be recompiled and a lot of what would eventually be ported to Carbon would never have made the transition.

So it's understandable that the VAIO team wondered if it was worth it, since there was still a lot of uncertainty about Apple's ability to pull off the transition to Mac OS X.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_10.0

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_macOS_components#Class...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)

[phs318u]

Wow. Was not aware of that. Thanks.

For those who couldn't be bothered googling... http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/5/5380832/sony-vaio-apple-os-...

[Tepix]

No. I remember my wife bought a Sony Vaio N-505 back in 2000. An amazing machine with a magnesium case, very thin and very lightweight. Only the 10.4" screen was pretty crappy (but they all were back then).

Apple had the Powerbook G4 at that time which was a very high-end machine but much much bulkier of course.

[huxley]

Not quite at that time, the Powerbook G4 wasn't announced until January 9, 2001, at the time it was the Powerbook G3 Pismo that was Apple's main pro notebook.

I don't think the magnesium case played much a role in the weight difference between the 12.1" VAIO N-505 (3.75 lbs / 1.7 kg) vs the Powerbook G4 (5.3 lbs / 2.4 kg), so much as the bigger 15.2" screen and integrated optical drive in the Powerbook (which at the time was remarkably unbulky for its size)