Vaio

VAIO (バイオ) is a brand of personal computers and consumer electronics, currently developed by Japanese manufacturer VAIO Corporation, headquartered in Azumino, Nagano Prefecture. VAIO was originally a brand of Sony, introduced in 1996. In February 2014, Sony created VAIO Corporation Inc., a special purpose company with investment firm Japan Industrial Partners, as part of its restructuring effort to focus on mobile devices. Sony maintains a minority stake in the new, independent company, which currently sells computers in the United States, Japan, India, and Brazil, and maintains exclusive marketing agreements in other regions. Sony still holds the intellectual property rights for the VAIO brand and logo. As of 2022, Vaio operates its stores in several countries, such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and the United States and so on. Originally an acronym of Video Audio Input Output, later amended to Video Audio Integrated Operation, and later to Visual Audio Intelligent Organizer in 2008 to celebrate the brand's 10th anniversary. The logo, along with the first of the VAIO computers, were designed by Teiyu Goto, supervisor of product design from the Sony Creative Center in Tokyo. He incorporated many meanings into the logo and acronym: the pronunciation in both English (VAIO) and Japanese (バイオ) is similar to "bio", which is symbolic of life and the product's future evolution; it's also near "violet", which is why most early Vaios were purple or included purple components. Additionally, the logo is stylized to make the "VA" look like a sine wave and the "IO" like binary digits 1 and 0, the combination representing the merging of analog and digital signals. The sound some Vaio models make when starting up is derived from the melody created when pressing a telephone keypad to spell the letters V-A-I-O.