These look so retro and left field now, but back then it felt like the future. Minidiscs were so cool. No skips, writable, small, high tech.
It was expensive and not as easy to just use everywhere like tapes were though.
Unfortunately Sony back then had a habit of building new proprietary formats all the time. Their memory card thing, the UMD the replaced the minidisc, etc. A fine product but it would have been better as an open standard!
Why not a MiniDisc drive in the laptop?
Minidisc has always been my fav music media. I had a Sony 4x CD and MD deck, so could copy friend's CDs onto minidisc at 4x speed, which was pretty impressive in the late 90s/2000.
Came with title text, no skipping, tiny size, no scratching the media, easy to copy. It was the perfect mix of tape, CD, and mp3.
That yucky soft lavender color on early generation of Vaios really turned me off. Also side note, it's neat to throw in hex code to LLM and get a description of colour.
Ah the nostalgia.
I miss Vaios.
[dead]
Another charming laptop from the Vaio series was Vaio P, launched in 2009: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Vaio_P_series
Note the lack of a touchpad. It was notoriously impractical and still very much desired; here is a review/summary from 2016 with more details: https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/30/13473970/sony-vaio-p-201...