Toshiba Formally and Finally Exits Laptop Business (theregister.com)
- Reference: 0134471667
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/20/08/07/1959246/toshiba-formally-and-finally-exits-laptop-business
- Source link: https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/07/toshiba_sells_last_dynabook_shares/
> [...] As the 2000s rolled along Toshiba devices became bland in comparison to the always-impressive ThinkPad and the MacBook Air, while Dell and HP also improved. Toshiba also never really tried to capture consumers' imaginations, which didn't help growth. As the PC market contracted and Lenovo, Dell and HP came to dominate PC sales in the 2010s, Toshiba just became a less likely brand to put on a laptop shopping list.
>
> By 2018 the company saw the writing on the wall and sold its PC business unit to Sharp for a pittance -- just $36 million changed hands - but retained a 19.9 percent share of the company with an option in Sharp's favor to buy that stock. Sharp quickly renamed the business to "Dynabook," a product name Toshiba had used in Japan, and set about releasing new models and reviving the brand. Which brings us to June 30th, 2020, when Sharp exercised its option to acquire the 19.9 percent of Dynabook shares it did not already own. On Tuesday, Toshiba transferred those shares and announced the transaction on Thursday.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/07/toshiba_sells_last_dynabook_shares/
So sad (Score:2)
My dad worked for TAIS tech support and engineering in the 80s and 90s. Got my first IT job consulting for them in the late 90s as well.
Never buying from Toshiba again (Score:2)
Trying to RMA a hard drive. Their website didn't work to enter a new RMA, eventually got an RMA entered using the phone and email.
It's been over 2 months since the hard drive arrived at their site, as shown on their RMA portal, yet I have heard nothing more from them.
Re: (Score:1)
In 2010 I bought a Toshiba laptop. After 6 months the hard drive started to fail. I tried to get a replacement, since it was clearly still under warranty, but Toshiba insisted that I had to ship the entire laptop to them.
What the fucking fuck? I have to ship my laptop 2500 miles and wait ... who knows how long .... just so they can swap out a hard drive??? The entire process, including restoring everything from a backup, takes 15 minutes. I know because I said "Fuck You Toshiba" and just bought a new
Re: (Score:2)
This, not many years ago, where I worked, the replacement laptops where Toshibas. Replacing Thinkpads. I said no and kept an old Thinkpad as long as could. Everyone who decided to get a new Laptop took a Toshiba.
Well, they had nothing but hardware issues, eventually after 2 years the company went back to Thinkpads. I guess when a pointy hair can't run Excel, they realize the extra cost if a Thinkpad is worth it.
drivers (Score:2)
What I remember is that Toshiba computers always required specific drivers that you had to download for Windows. And of course didn't exist for Linux. That got old fast and we just changed to a more convenient brand.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah. I had one of their last XP laptops and it needed a compatibility shim to even boot into XP correctly because the BIOS was actually incompatible. They then announced they'd only be releasing updates for a small number of those machine lines to be able to run Vista, and the one I had was not one of them; you'd forever get a bluescreen on boot saying that the BIOS was nonstandard and incompatible.
That turned me off the brand real fast.
Re: (Score:2)
> ...according to you OSS zealots the Linux coders would come to the rescue for any drivers needed...and would be BETTER?
> No, it wasn't the laptop that was inconvenient, it was your chosen OS...Linux.
Found Satya Nadella!
He's not as smart as Waldo and not nearly as much fun, but still...
Toshiba used to be THE laptop to buy (Score:4, Insightful)
Back before the big price crash of laptops in 2001/2002, I remember Toshiba was pretty much the only brand of laptop you'd look at. I fondly remember buying mine 6 months before the price of laptops halved.
My last Toshiba was hot garbage (Score:2)
bought for my kid's college. $1200, missing 8gb of RAM and had so many bugs and problems I gave up and let bought a Macbook so they could focus on school work.
To Toshiba's credit they kept patching the thing. My brother uses it as a "break me" and it had bios updates to fix the crashes caused by the Acceleratameter a good 3 years out from buying it. Mind you it would've been nice if it didn't crash in the first place, or if it hadn't taken 3 years for them to fix it...
This isn't a one off either. A
Good...holy shit doe they suck (Score:3)
About 12 or so years ago a client of mine needed a new CDROM drive on his laptop because his went south for some reason. So figuring that since we were in the days of having interchangeable parts, I bought him a really nice drive and when I installed it, the laptop complained that it wasn't a valid drive or something like that. I spent a good week or more trying to figure out why it was bitching since the drive worked fine on my other laptops, and then I read that Toshiba was really into vendor lock-in and they required 2 pins to be jumpered or it wouldn't recognize the drive as valid. So I had to take the drive apart and very carefully solder a jumper and the put the whole thing back together. It then didn't complain and I got it back to the client. I then told him to avoid Toshiba like the plague and he and his company did exactly that as they never bought Toshiba again. Looks like I was indeed a small part of their demise, and thankfully so. This is exactly why I don't work on or own anything made by crApple.
My 16GB Satellite L870 is still going strong (Score:3)
Just put a 1TB SSD in it and it's still a workhorse for me.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, Satellites were the bomb!
Z20T faless (Score:2)
Shame there fanless tablet PC's where underrated for late night browsing / reading but a little on the pricey side but with excellent battery life, need a laptop to last 16+ hrs on a flight.
Real reason they faded from existence is drivers and support. If i wanted to deploy 1000+ Win 7 laptops i could use dell or HP tools in Microsoft SCCM to automatically create custom images, bios settings and driver packs for any given business model, but for Toshiba i had to individually download drivers for each model
Bye Felicia (Score:3)
We banned Toshiba at work over 10 years ago. Piss poor driver support, nasty bios issues, and absolutely horrific RMA service.
If you had a laptop go bad under warranty, it almost took the threat of a lawsuit to get them to fix it.
Warranty-based engineering (Score:2)
Toshiba had some good laptops (so to speak) in the early 1990s. But by the mid-1990s they succumbed to warranty-based engineering. When the 3rd one in a row had the power supply connector fail _1 week_ after the warranty expired, and no repair shop in flyover country would work on said connector because 1 degree overtemp with the soldering iron would destroy the rest of the motherboard, that was the end for me. I went on to specify and buy over 1000 laptops in the next 10 years - zero of them Toshiba.
Toshiba Tecra 740 CDT (Score:3)
Oh man. This brings back fond memories of the old Toshiba Tecra 740 CDT I had in the late 90s. The 13.3" screen was great. And it had a screamin' Intel 166MHz Pentium and 16MBs of RAM.
Those were the good days.
Re:Toshiba Tecra 740 CDT (Score:4, Informative)
Of course that was back in the APM days. After ACPI arrived, Toshiba was one of those manufacturers that intentionally crippled device support for Linux on its laptops by supplying a DSDT (Differentiated System Description Table) that disabled sound and network support if the kernel told the firmware it was linux during boot.
The fix was to fiddle with grub so the kernel installed a patched DSDT with values for linux copied from the Windows entries . In other words, all Toshiba needed to do was to treat Linux the *same* for everything to work flawlessly.
If you know what you're doing, getting around this isn't rocket science, it's just a PITA that bites you on the ass every time you update your kernel. Toshiba *intentionally* made getting Linux to run properly on its laptops something newbies wouldn't be able to do.
Around the time I was dealing with this, Toshiba was also caught fraudulently claiming that their TVs were Energy Star compliant. So good riddance. They're not a company you want to do business with anyway.