Sony has unveiled its new 13-inch VAIO Z laptop, an ultramobile along the lines of the Macbook Air — but this one’s got a twist. In a clever use case for the blazing data transfer speeds Thunderbolt supports, the laptop gets around the general lack of graphics and processing power in the ultramobile field by providing a Power Media Dock featuring an AMD Radeon 6650M GPU with 1GB RAM.
That means that this laptop, when tethered to its dock via Thunderbolt, is a more capable gaming machine than many of Apple’s desktops. With 8GB of RAM and a 2.7GHz Intel Core i7 processor, Apple fanboys might hope the move puts pressure on the company to beef up the comparatively weak specs in the Macbook Air product line — which tops out at 2GB of memory and a 1.86Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor.
According to Sony, the VAIO Z will be available from the end of July.
In other news, we’ve finally seen a reason that Thunderbolt is awesome beyond faster external backups.
Story byJoel Falconer
Joel Falconer is the Features Editor at TNW. He lives on the Gold Coast, Australia with his wife and three kids and can sometimes be found g(show all)Joel Falconeris the Features Editor at TNW. He lives on the Gold Coast, Australia with his wife and three kids and can sometimes be foundgamingorconsulting. Follow Joel onTwitter.
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