With a little help from my number one folf, I have come across what very well might be the God of Laptops. Something which, for a striking change, I might actually want to purchase.

See, normally trying to find a laptop is like deciding whether I want to poke out an eye, or have my legs broken. I don't really want either of those things to happen. So many laptops these days are just absolute trash, which when you spend at least $1000 for anything decent, is just unacceptable. Plastic? No, sorry, plastic scratches, breaks, discolors and feels like a child's toy. Optical drive? Um, why should I devote a third of the volume of my computer to something which is never necessary after OS installation and can be imitated with an external USB DVD drive? High-resolution screen? Backlit keyboard? Good performance and battery life? It's like you can only pick half of the things you want in a laptop, and instead of saying "I want something which is fast, portable, elegant, and sturdy" you have to say "Wellll, I have a gaming desktop, so even though portable gaming might be nice if I go to a con or on a trip, I don't really neeeed it..." and make sacrifices. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at the problem. But this laptop, this is something different.

Sony Vaio Z series. Think what you will about Sony, they're going somewhere that nobody else seems to explore.

Start with a 13.1" screen, slightly smaller than I have now. Good size. Make it 1080p. Wait, what? Yeah, 1920x1080 with LED backlighting. You know the resolution your 60" TV has? You can carry that around on a 13.1" screen now. I've yet to see that sort of thing on any other device. Around that, build a case from carbon fiber and aluminum, making something which is light, strong, durable, and attractive. Add in a backlit keyboard with ambient light sensor and your standard suite of ports on the side--USB, Gigabit, HDMI, VGA (bleh!), that sort of thing. Speakers too. For good measure, toss in an integrated 3G connection, GPS capability, and of course 802.11-n for wireless. And have an option for no optical drive, so you aren't wasting over a third of the internal volume on something you never actually need to use. So basically, with the exception of a 3D-capable/OLED and/or multitouch display, this thing has all the I/O you could really hope for. Which is sexy. If this was all the device had going for it and it was just standard processors and other parts, I'd be set to buy it already.

But let's look at the real guts. 2.66-3.33 GHz dynamic overclocking (dual core) i7 processor. Nvidia GT 330m discrete graphics with 1 gig of dedicated RAM (up to an extra 3 shared with system memory). 4-8 GB of DDR3 @ 1066 MHz, which actually makes my desktop jealous. Toss in a 120/128 GB solid state drive for good measure, to eliminate spinning parts from the computational side of things (there's probably still a fan inside for cooling). Performance-wise it's somewhat of a monster for its class. It'll play Crysis, L4D2, FEAR 2, Far Cry 2, and other ____ 2 games just fine (Mass Effect 2 and Bioshock 2 might be included in this list). Sure, if you opt for the native 1080p you'll take a performance hit, but the fact that you can run a modern game at close to 30 fps on the highest settings and 1080p, well, that's something you can't even get from consoles these days, and those fuckers have power bricks that weigh more than this thing. Battery-wise you're looking at 3.5-4.5 hours for video playback, 6-6.5 hours for document composition, somewhere between that for web browsing I assume, and 30 seconds for gaming (I kid--I don't know, but does ANYTHING get decent battery life when doing mobile gaming with respectable graphics? No.)

Let me try to recap and put this into perspective for you, just to make sure we're on the same page here. Performance-wise this thing has slightly more CPU oomph than the highest-configured 17" Macbook Pro and 20-50% more GPU performance, specs comparable in every other way (although the screen is 1080 pixels tall instead of the MBP's 1200). And it does this with the size, weight and battery life of the Macbook Air.

There are a few caveats, though. The only version they sell in the US with a 1080p screen is configured all the way up to $4500 (it's a true beast, quad SSD RAID 0 totaling 512 GB of storage space, Blu-ray burner, the works). Don't get me wrong, the 1600x900 version in the store was amazingly fine and beautiful, but there's something sexy about being able to play 1080p content at native resolution, and the resolution support for games would surely be better. They sell a 1080p upgrade for ~$75 in Europe, but to configure it up to what I would want (I'd settle for 4 GB of DDR3 and install my own 120 GB SSD as cost-saving measures) it's going to be $550 more than the American version, ignoring a) the shipping cost, b) worrying about what happens if it breaks, and c) finding someone in the UK who I trust enough to give $2500.

And that's another caveat for both models. The American model would be $2343 with tax and shipping, the UK model would be closer to $2900. Either one is very expensive for a laptop, but when you compare the performance to a Macbook Pro with an SSD, 8 gigs of RAM and 3.06 GHz dual core, you find that the Z offers a good 20% more performance with half the weight and $1000 savings. Regardless of how badly Apple overprices their uber-premium hardware, $2343 isn't a trivial amount of money. But given that I tend to use my laptop on and off for an average of 8 hours a day, every day, for three years... it actually feels a lot more reasonable.

Still, can you think of a more capable mobile device under 6 pounds? It's my belief that it's okay to spend more on something you'll truly love for years, and it's far preferable to saving a few hundred bucks, maybe a thousand, and winding up with a device that pisses you off constantly. This laptop, unlike every other single one I have ever seen, embodies that belief.

Some shots of the Z, to show how pretty it is [link]. When you're looking at it, remember: this thing probably makes your desktop jealous.

Edit: Let it be known that  rinorex is a self-professed troll. Please disregard his comments.