A typically elite-priced brand courts Walmart shoppers

I was picked to write the "20 Most Influential PCs" feature for PCMag's 40th Anniversary coverage because I remember them all—I started on a TRS-80 magazine in 1982 and served as editor of Computer Shopper when it was a 700-page monthly. I was later the editor in chief of Home Office Computing, a magazine that promoted using tech to work from home two decades before a pandemic made it standard practice. Even in semiretirement in Bradenton, Florida, I can't stop playing with toys and telling people what gear to buy.

The VAIO FE 14.1 (not to be confused with the premium VAIO SX14) is a perfectly serviceable economy laptop, but its screen, build quality, and ho-hum speed keep it from cracking our top four or five.

Caviar at Costco? Tiffany at Target? VAIO is a notebook brand we associate with two things, elegant engineering and premium prices. The new VAIO FE series, however, consists of affordable laptops sold at Walmart, where the 14.1-inch FE starts at $699 and is $799 as seen in our test model here. It's a reasonably attractive slimline with a modern Intel processor, but wholly unremarkable. The same money will get you a nicer aluminum, rather than plastic, build from any of several vendors.

If you still think VAIO laptops are made by Sony, you're eight years behind the times. The move to Walmart represents a market expansion for the current brand owners, whose $699 base model teams a Core i5-1235U CPU (two Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 12 threads) with 8GB of memory, a 512GB solid-state drive, and a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) non-touch screen.

Our $799 review unit doubles the RAM and storage to 16GB and 1TB respectively, while the top of the line—which Walmart.com listed, confusingly, for both $949 and $799 when we checked—replaces the Core i5 chip with a Core i7-1255U. The IPS display and Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics are the same in all units; no high-res or OLED panel is offered. 

At 3.5 pounds, the VAIO FE 14.1 is half a pound over the ultraportable line. It measures 0.78 by 12.8 by 8.7 inches, a bit bulkier than the Acer Swift 3 (0.63 by 12.7 by 8.4 inches and 2.71 pounds). Available in black or rose gold as well as our model's silver, the VAIO is easy to carry but prone to flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck. The chassis as a whole could use more rigidity.

As you open the lid, its back edge folds down to prop the keyboard at a slight typing angle. Screen bezels are not particularly thin, especially at top (home of a webcam with a sliding privacy shutter) and bottom. The camera lacks Windows Hello face recognition, but there's a fingerprint reader in one corner of the touchpad. 

An SD card slot and an old-school USB 2.0 port are on the laptop's left side, along with an audio jack and the socket for the AC adapter plug. Three USB 3.1 ports, two Type-A and one Type-C, join an Ethernet jack and an HDMI video output at right. Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth are the standard fare for wireless connectivity.

The backlit keyboard earns points for having real Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys instead of making you pair the Fn key with the cursor arrow keys, and also for having the arrows in the correct inverted T instead of an awkward, HP-style row. The top-row function keys control volume and screen brightness but lack a few shortcuts often found there, such as airplane mode and microphone mute. 

The typing feel is shallow and a bit rubbery, but not uncomfortable. The touchpad would be midsize but two fairly large chrome buttons and the fingerprint reader reduce the available space, so it's on the small side. The pad glides and taps smoothly, but the big buttons feel flimsy.

The webcam offers the usual, marginal 1,280-by-720-pixel resolution with a 16:9 aspect ratio but a sharper 1,600 by 1,200 pixels if you don't mind a squarer 4:3 ratio. Its images look dim and washed out. At least they are reasonably clear, without too much static. 

If you press your ear to the speaker grille above the keyboard, you can make out surprisingly soft sound; 100% volume on the VAIO FE 14.1 sounds like about 30% on most laptops, hard to hear from just a few feet away. The audio itself isn't bad—there's no bass, but the sound isn't tinny or harsh, and you can make out overlapping tracks—but you'll definitely want to use headphones. A THX Spatial Audio software utility makes tunes sound less hollow, and it offers music, movie, game, and voice presets and an equalizer. But it certainly doesn't deliver symphonic sound or any 3D effect.

Like the audio, the FE's 1080p display is mostly a disappointment. Contrast is decent, and white backgrounds aren't too dingy if you tilt the screen back fairly far to a viewing sweet spot. But viewing angles aren't as wide as we're used to from IPS panels, and the overall effect is dim, with bland colors.

For our benchmark charts, we matched the VAIO FE against our current budget laptop Editors' Choice honoree, the $519 Lenovo IdeaPad 3 14, and the Asus VivoBook S14. Two other 14-inch portables, the Acer Swift 3 and the Dell Inspiron 14 7415 2-in-1 convertible, represent the higher-priced spread at about $1,000 each. You can see their basic specs in the table below.

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. 

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The VAIO cleared the 4,000-point hurdle that indicates fine everyday productivity in PCMark 10, so Word, Excel, email, and browsing will be no problem, but it was an underwhelming performer in our other tests, near the back of the CPU benchmarks. It managed a silver medal in our Photoshop test, but its low-quality screen disqualifies it from serious image editing or digital content creation. 

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

The Core i7-powered Acer was the only laptop to make it out of the cellar in these tests; economy notebooks' integrated graphics are more or less guaranteed unable to play demanding games or offer much entertainment besides solitaire and streaming video. The VAIO ran with the pack, but it's a very slow pack. 

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window) ) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

It was only good enough for fourth place in our five-way contest, but the VAIO FE's 11.5 hours of unplugged life is plenty for getting through a full day of work or school. Its display color quality was fair at best, though only the Acer did better, but its peak measured brightness of 265 nits is down in bargain-Chromebook territory—we're not happy with any laptop that can't muster 300 nits, and not really satisfied with less than 400.

We're all for democracy and happy to see more options for Walmart shoppers, but the VAIO FE 14.1 joins the superstore's budget-class Gateway and EVOO house brands instead of threatening Dell, Lenovo, or Acer. Nothing about it is bad enough to disqualify it from budget buyers' consideration, but it's up against some better-built, better-performing competitors, as well as some deeper-value models, such as the Lenovo IdeaPad 3 14.

The VAIO FE 14.1 (not to be confused with the premium VAIO SX14) is a perfectly serviceable economy laptop, but its screen, build quality, and ho-hum speed keep it from cracking our top four or five.

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I was picked to write the "20 Most Influential PCs" feature for PCMag's 40th Anniversary coverage because I remember them all—I started on a TRS-80 magazine in 1982 and served as editor of Computer Shopper when it was a 700-page monthly. I was later the editor in chief of Home Office Computing, a magazine that promoted using tech to work from home two decades before a pandemic made it standard practice. Even in semiretirement in Bradenton, Florida, I can't stop playing with toys and telling people what gear to buy.

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