Notebooks

Something has occurred in the laptop industry that should make the consumer angry.  We are being sold PCIe 4.0 laptops and ultrabooks that aren’t truly PCIe 4.0.  Don’t get me wrong.  You may be considering a purchase, or have purchased a brand new Ryzen 5 or Intel Tiger Lake that is just that but you have to ask… Have I …

Listing any product as the worlds best is just asking for trouble.  I did just that a few years back when I made the switch from PC to the Apple MacBook Air. The MBA achieved those accolades thanks to Samsung who supplied Apple with their PCIe SSD, even before equipping their own ultrabooks.  The industry has since forgotten to educate …

The practice of using unbranded peripherals in computers is common.  Apple does this and carries things a step further by demanding that components, such as the SSDs, are proprietary to a specific build only. Not only can the SSD in Apple’s new Mac products not be upgraded with third-party SSDs, but also, they can’t even be switched off with SSDs …

SONY ULTRABOOK PRO 13 CONFIGURATIONS DIFFER A few weeks back, we published our review of the Sony VAIO Pro 13 ultrabook where we discovered that there were two different configurations of the VAIO being shipped, that with a SATA 3 M.2 SSD and that with a native M.2 PCIe SSD.  Not only did the system that we received contain a …

Apple has today announced a ‘MacBook Air Flash Storage Replacement Program‘ for ALL MBA systems purchased between June 2012 and June 2013.  The program speaks specifically to flash storage replacement and ONLY affects 64GB and 128GB MBAs containing Toshiba SSDs.  The SSDs are being replaced as a result of the potential SSD failing during future use. The specific models of …

A few weeks back, we posted an article that stated our opinion of the new Apple MBA as being one of the top ultraportable laptops available today, and quite possibly, untouchable.  The backlash from Sony fans was amazing, many clearly noting that we hadn’t tested, or included, the new VAIO 13 Pro as a comparison system in that report…and they …

Not so long ago, I was the leader of the pack when it came to speaking against the Mac crowd.  I couldn’t have spoken enough about such things as Mac pricing, Apple’s proprietary nature when it came to upgrading with their ‘return and replace for an arm or a leg’ SSD upgrade, or even how OSX just wasn’t an easy …

If you’ve been hanging around TSSDR or Technology X lately, you will have noticed that Apple shipped us a brand smacking new MBA, complete with a Samsung 256GB NGFF PCIe SSD that spits out performance as high as 825MB/s. Since our initial MBA reports, we have had the opportunity to do what we do best and install Windows 7 on the …

In just over a week since its release, the MacBook Air has redefined storage speed and become the first to introduce the world to the reality of the new PCIe form factor.  It appears that when it comes to money, both Apple and Samsung can shed their differences with the new MacBook Air pulling off SSD performance of 700MB/s in …

Sony’s new VIAO touchscreen T14 arrived last week, complete with hybrid hard drive and Windows 8.  Frequent readers of TSSDR understand my opinion of both, an opinion that was initially hard to contain with their teaming up in what appears to be an attractive ultra design. Swapping out the hard drive for an SSD was a given. Stepping outside the …