19Jun Vizio’s interesting looking MacBook air Clone
A Macbook Air with a core i5 processor, 256GB SSD, 4GB of ram, and a screen resolution of 1440 by 900 will set you back about $1500. But the biggest selling point for me and some others I’ve talked to is that the Air is only 0.68 inches thick, unfortunately the price for the above specs has always seemed a bit high to me.
Thankfully in the onslaught of Ultrabooks released this year, Vizio has announced their new line of “thin and light” laptops. There are a few interesting things to note about Vizio’s entry into ultra thin laptops. The first thing that got my attention is that the laptop has no bloatware, just a clean instillation of windows. The next thing you’ll notice is that there are no stickers or distinguishing marks other then a very tiny Vizio label at the bottom right hand corner of the screen. The last major thing to note is that the laptop has better specs at a lower price.
The model that caught my eye is the Thin and Light CT15-A2. At $1249 you get the same list of specs as the Macbook air above, (including the 0.68 thickness) in a 15 inch package but the processor has been upgraded to an i7 and the screen resolution is 1920×1080 giving you more room for editing. You still have a similar aluminum unibody design and 6 hour battery life so at lest on paper there aren’t many compromises for the price difference.
So far, everything I’ve read has been positive, which means this might move to the top of my ultrabook wish list. Right now these Vizio laptops are available for pre-order on Amazon with expected shipping sometime next month.
June 19th, 2012 at 7:41 am
Thanks for keeping an eye out for us Windows users.
June 20th, 2012 at 1:59 am
Mmm, could you run OSX on this?
June 20th, 2012 at 6:07 am
It shouldn’t be to hard to get a hackintosh installation working on something like this. Since the chipset and graphics are identical to some of Apples other products you shouldn’t have to many driver issues to deal with.
June 21st, 2012 at 12:04 am
that would be a great hackintosh to carry around, specially for FCPX on the fly. thanks for the answer( an the site ) Deejay.
June 21st, 2012 at 11:43 am
Do you know what kind of graphics card this has? I guess that would determine how well it would work for editing, right? Or do you think you could get by with an integrated graphics card for video editing?
June 21st, 2012 at 12:53 pm
The Graphics card isn’t amazing, it’s a integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000, same as the Macbook air. Good enough for editing, but no cuda acceleration. Basic timeline editing on something like that works fine, but if you want to use a lot of after effects composites, you might need to do the heavy lifting with another computer.
June 22nd, 2012 at 2:16 am
Thanks for the heads up Deejay. It’s a nice, lighter weight option, for sure.