You had to hand it to Sony: the company’s laptops were always unique. Sometimes inventive, often stylish, always different from the competition. They usually cost more, too, which could be why they didn’t rack up many sales.

The new Vaio Z Flip, an ultrathin 13-inch laptop, is Sony on steroids. OK, technically it’s not Sony, because Sony sold the Vaio computer brand to a new Japanese company back in 2014. But the new Vaio Z is more inventive — and expensive — than ever before. At a time when you can buy a high-quality laptop for under a thousand bucks, the Vaio Z starts at $ 1,799. That means it’s competing with the MacBook Pro and Surface Book, two of the very best laptops we’ve tried. Why would anyone pick the Vaio over those machines?

It’s simple, really: Vaio fits the performance and features of that MacBook Pro into the svelte dimensions of a MacBook Air.

Despite being marginally thinner and a half-pound lighter than Apple’s 13-inch MacBook Pro, the Vaio Z Flip has the same class of silicon under the hood: up to a 28-watt, 3.3GHz Intel Core i7 chip with Intel’s latest Iris 550 graphics inside. The Vaio Z Flip offers enough oomph to play slightly older games such as 2013’s Tomb Raider at 1080p resolution, as long as the graphics are set to medium levels of detail.

Unlike most thin and light laptops these days, the new Vaio doesn’t look like it’s directly aping the design of the MacBook Air. Yet it feels competitive with that popular system, with a dark anodized aluminum lid and a matte-finish carbon-fiber base that insulates your legs from excessive heat. The aluminum deck extends around the edge of the laptop, making it feel thinner and making it harder to accidentally press the power button.

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The Vaio Z Flip.

John Kim/CNET

Like any recent high-end laptop, the Flip has a fantastic screen. It’s a 2,560×1,440-pixel resolution In-Plane Switching (IPS) panel that’s easy to read at most any angle, and doubles as a responsive touchscreen. Pictures, websites and games look great since the screen can display 100 percent of the SRGB color spectrum, delivering pure and vibrant color.

Plus, it has a trick up its sleeve, one learned from the original Sony Vaio Flip in 2013: flip a switch to unlock a hidden hinge, set horizontally in the center of the display, which lets the screen fold down into a tablet configuration. Sadly, the gap between the screen and chassis still makes it a little awkward to hold as a tablet, as it doesn’t fold down completely flat, and the glossy glass screen is extremely reflective.

Connections include two full-size USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI port and an SD card slot that lets you push the card all the way in so it fits nearly flush with the body (that’s rare in computers this thin, but makes it easy to expand the on-board storage). No dongles should be necessary, though one does come in the box: a VGA adapter so you can connect to those old projectors at work. Not only is the Vaio’s power adapter tiny, but the plug is smartly designed, too: it’ll pop right out of the socket if you trip over it, instead of yanking your laptop to the floor.