VIZIO Thin+Light CT14-A2 Pro Reviews

Overall, the Vizio CT14-A2 is a distinct pleasure to use, but it’s not perfect. I would still like to see a built-in memory card reader. The lack of an ethernet jack isn’t a deal breaker, and we’re likely to see more of these compact systems that eschew wired connections. The keyboard and touchpad are quite usable, though there’s still some room for improvement in pointing behavior. The display is good, not fabulous, but its size and resolution are welcome. Perhaps most disappointing is the overall sound quality of the speakers, given Vizio’s background as a consumer electronics provider. Still, the whole is definitely greater than the sum of the parts. Vizio’s first entry into the PC business makes a bold design statement, getting many things right, and the misses are near-misses, rather than thuds of disappointment. The whole affair feels solid, looks good, types well, and performs like a champ. What more could you want in a PC?

The Vizio Thn + Light 14-inch (CT14-A2) is fast, bright, and nice to look at. But a couple of stumbles hold it back from reaching our top scores.

But do we hope to see more laptops from the company in the future? Yes indeed. It's an intangible feeling—and it's not quite the feeling you'd get from a deluxe Bose or Bang & Olufsen product—but Vizio has succeeded in making its first ultrabook feel like a stylish consumer electronics product, not just another PC. In a world of generic laptops with fingerprint-magnet cases, the sleek and pristine Thin + Light rates a second look. That said, we're not sure it's your best bargain among Vizio's 14-inch-laptop lineup. The cheaper CT14-A1 model has a 128GB SSD and the 1.7GHz Core i5-3317U processor that's found in a slew of 13.3-inch ultrabooks—a perfectly fine CPU for productivity and most multimedia tasks—but the same larger and nicer screen as the CT14-A2. It's also priced at $849.99, which puts it just $50 above 13.3-inch ultrabooks such as Sony's VAIO T and Lenovo's IdeaPad U310 with slower (albeit larger) hard drives with solid-state caches as opposed to true SSDs.

Taking a bold step into the PC market, the Vizio Thin+Light CT14 is a fresh take on the 14-inch ultrabook, held back by some first-gen jitters.