Vizio C14-A2 Ultrabook: Elegance in Minimalism

09.08.2012
If Walter Gropius could see the new Vizio C14-A2 Ultrabook, hed probably approve. It sports a sleek, metallic elegance, like many of the quintessential Bauhaus designs. And as the Bauhaus school would do, Vizio stripped out seemingly essential features, but the end result is a compact, lightweight, usable laptop that performs well and looks good. It also sells for a very reasonable $1199.

At first blush, the C14-A2 seems mostly distinguished by its lack of features. Just two USB 3.0 ports are included, one on each side. A lone HDMI port is on the right side, providing the only video output port. The system lacks a wired ethernet jack, and doesnt include a USB-to-ethernet adapter, as similarly thin . Perhaps the one absent feature that people might really miss, though, is a flash card reader.

Stripping out those features allowed Vizio to create a very thin, curvaceous laptop that looks equally good closed or open. The system looks thinner than it really is, thanks to its beveled, dark rubberized base, but its still very thin, at 0.63 inches. Vizio even left out keyboard backlighting in pursuit of slendernessthe hardware needed to integrate backlighting would have added 1.5mm.

As with the , the C14 and its larger sibling, the C15, is built using aluminum unibody construction. However, a black bezel surrounds the display, which tends to bring your eye to the LCD panel rather than to the surrounding bezel.

The keyboard is equally striking in appearance. The keys are big, every so slightly sculpted and beveled. The large touchpad is one in a new, unified style with no visible buttons, and supports multitouch gestures.