Sony VAIO Pro 13: Exceptionally Portable
by Jarred Walton on October 16, 2013 12:00 AM ESTSony VAIO Pro 13: Excellent Battery Life
If the performance in applications wasn't particularly impressive, where Sony positively shines is in their battery life. We have our standard Light, Medium, and Heavy battery life tests, and even the Light test is reasonably demanding (loading four web pages every 60 seconds). We also run the LCD at 200 nits (87% on the VAIO Pro 13), so turning down the brightness will only improve these results.
This is also one of the tests where we can make cross-OS comparisons to Apple's MacBook Air 13. We've seen in the past that OS X gets substantially better battery life with MacBooks than Windows, but we're at least able to run the same workloads so the tests are more or less “fair”. Anand ran the MBA13 under both Windows 8 and OS X, and we've included both results in the charts below. For the VAIO Pro 13, we likewise have results using just the integrated 37Wh battery as well as with the extra sheet battery.
In terms of pure battery life numbers, with the extra battery the Sony VAIO Pro 13 comes in at the top of our charts, but even without the doubling of capacity it does well. In raw battery life, it trails the Haswell-equipped MacBook Air 13 (particularly when the latter is running OS X), and in the Heavy test it also falls behind the Acer V7 and the AMD Kabini prototype. That's only part of the story, however, as the integrated battery is pretty small compared to many of the other laptops in our charts.
Look at the normalized battery life and the VAIO Pro 13 is quite a ways ahead of any other (Windows) contender in the Light and Medium loads. Apple still does better in heavy loads, indicating that Apple is either more aggressive in getting down to lower power C-states, and in OS X Apple also posts an impressive result in our Medium workload. The Heavy load tends to not allow the CPU to relax much (It averages out to around a 20-30% CPU load throughout the test), so it's not too surprising that the MBA13 results are a lot closer to their Win8 results in that particular test.
Adding the sheet battery basically doubles battery life, which puts Sony way ahead of any other laptop we've tested in recent years (though it doesn't change the normalized results). It was almost painful to test battery life, simply because it took so long for the battery to go dead. With the Light dual-battery testing, I started the test, went to bed, came back the next morning and the combined battery charge was still around 50%. If you need even more battery life, you could purchase additional external batteries and swap them quite easily with no downtime, and since Sony has the laptop drain the sheet battery first, you don't need to worry about the integrated battery unexpectedly running out of power.
However you want to look at it, the Sony VAIO Pro 13 delivers on the battery life front. This is how every Haswell laptop should behave, at a minimum. Sadly, we have plenty of examples where this level of power optimization is clearly not in effect, but I'll save that discussion for an upcoming review (cough, Clevo, cough).
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Samus - Thursday, October 17, 2013 - link
Funny you mention the fan. Sony had a number of units recalled in 2010 for fan warping. Happy to hear service in the UK is up to par; it is garbage in the USA.br1an - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
Always been a bit disappointed by Vaio cooling. Shame that over in the USA you only get 1 year warranty - two is standard in the UK.rinneh - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
Totally not sharing this experience, had a budget vaio for years and my mom is still using it since 2007 and i had a vaio z13 since 2011 and it never skipped a beat and still work great, replaced it with a samsung ativ book 8 that doest feel as well constructed at all even though its 1kg more heavy than the Z13. The z13 survived all my trips from europe to japan without being even inside a laptop sleeve.tomascivinod - Wednesday, October 16, 2013 - link
Anand, my dad is looking at buying this laptop, but there has been issues reported about its wifi being bad, dropping signals, not getting them. Did you see this behaviour at all?Also, on all the display models I have seen instore, the trackpad seems to be loose in the corners. Did you notice this on your review sample?
Best review I have read on the web yet though, as always!
JarredWalton - Wednesday, October 16, 2013 - link
The touchpad doesn't feel loose, but it's hard to "click" in the bottom and top corners (basically it doesn't depress much). As I note in the review, the touchpad works okay but isn't the best I've used. As for the WiFi, I've noticed on quite a few Intel 7260 adapters (doesn't seem to matter matter if it's AC, dual-band N, or single-band N) that the WiFi will occasionally lose the ability to connect; turn on airplane mode (disable the WiFi) and then turn it back off and that fixes the problem. It seems to happen about once a week, roughly.juhatus - Wednesday, October 16, 2013 - link
A driver update from intel fixed the WiFi problems for me.Intel® PROSet/Wireless Software and Drivers for Windows 8* version 16.1.5
7heF - Wednesday, October 16, 2013 - link
fixed connection-drop problem. Not the range problem on the Vaio Pro 13.7heF - Wednesday, October 16, 2013 - link
Did you only use the pc quite close to a good APLook here: http://community.sony.com/t5/VAIO-Hardware-Network...
I have a Asus Dark Knight, and serious problems. If you look on pictures from inside the pc - or open it up yourself - you will see that the antenna ain't in the monitor - just two cables close to the motherboard.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, October 16, 2013 - link
I used the laptop around the house, but not long-range testing. I will have to look into that later, but at least for general WiFi I didn't have problems at up to 50 feet or so from my router.7heF - Wednesday, October 16, 2013 - link
Did you do performance testing of the wifi and compared to others, or only used it for web surfing? HD-streaming and large file tranfers?can be work a second look - or a feedback from Sony if they have new revision of the pc with a new antenna design.