Toshiba formally and finally exits laptop business | Hacker News Reader

Toshiba formally and finally exits laptop business

theregister.com

311 pointskiyanwang154 comments

I worked for Toshiba America. The story is the CEO at the time told his underlings "I cannot report such earnings to our shareholders". His executives then went ahead and cooked the books.

Beyond that, Toshiba was a company in crisis. They announced all sorts of forward looking partnerships via press releases and had powerpoints about them, but allocated ZERO budget to implement them.

They ordered their existing units (seemingly hundreds of business units) to stay the course on obsolete and non-competitive products that were not generating revenue any longer.

Their cloud and "chip to cloud" plans were Potemkin villages, devoid of tech or investment.

Their PC division was non-competitive with flash storage, even though Toshiba's disk division INVENTED flash storage (and that was unpopular in that division--it went to market with much opposition, driven by ONE guy).

Toshiba basically played fortress Japan, where they made handshake deals with other moribund Keiretsu would just cross sell to each other.

They were being out innovated on all fronts, and were paralyzed to make the big changes, as the culture was one of never rocking the boat, and hanging on till retirement. The dream was to retire and perhaps be asked to consult back to the company.

The same thing was going on with the other firms there, like Sony et al. Disruption, the cloud, open source and innovation just destroyed a firm with an amazing historical legacy.

This is a really intriguing artefact of specific cultures. Clearly, there are benefits to 'Failure is Not Tolerated' cultures, it is interesting how people can pull rabbits out of hats when they have to.

That said, if they are up against a real wall, they will be pulling the rabbits out their rears (ie fraud) and it will be a problem.

But then you get a secondary effect: a kind of 'coverup cancer' which spreads through the social system, nobody willing to let it surface.

The European CEO of Japanese Olympus has a pretty intriguing story about this. Uncanny stuff about the depth of the fraud, like being in an episode of Twilight Zone.

The corruption is way, way more than just a few leaders - it's entire networks of systems and leaders, everyone covering for one another.

I suspect there are vast systematic hidden problems in Japan.

Germany has a little bit of this.

For some cultures, it's hard to understand the actual value of 'Chapter 11'. It's really an amazing bit of commercial policy that bankruptcy protection.

Someone needs to write a book on all the various ways we hide problems. The US Fed takes on Trillions of toxic assets. The Canadian economy prints money to new migrants buying homes as a form of 'spending the future now' in a giant Ponzi scheme. China makes up numbers willy nilly. Japanese hide it inside private networks. Etc..

The Carlos Ghosn case highlights some of the points you raise about the arbitrariness and closed-box nature of Japanese nativism.

I have worked for a Japanese client (big firm, I will not name them). I think it is a miracle that Japanese innovate at all. Their hierarchies are extra rigid, and promotions are more or less dependent on seniority. It was difficult to find any tech manager who was not around 60 years old. Peer-to-peer email from our firm to Japanese engineers was strictly forbidden. Except for the money involved, it was like a humorous game of Chinese whispers - a perfectly legitimate technical point raised will come back as completely illogical gibberish because it was been distorted by layers of management in between.

Engineers at my (Indian) firm in 2001 were saying that Sony's days are numbered, and Samsung will eat their lunch. I refused to believe it since South Korea had just gone through a major crisis. 20 years later, it is patently clear that they were understating the trend.

The often deserving worship of Japanese culture that many indulge in, leads to vast blind spots about Japan's cultural disadvantages.

Innovation happens at the individual level, and to that end, the Japanese are incredibly innovative. The person must then fight the hierarchies which farms the innovations from individuals who are undercompensated for their miraculous work. Same with the incredible craftsmen and artists. But if the hierarchy is bad, everyone loses.

The engineer would often then defect and seek a meritocracy where they are valued by their work and not seniority.

A quick lookup for the Flash inventor backs this. Fujio Masuoka is now CTO of a company in Singapore.

Shuji Nakamura, the inventory of the blue LED is the other primary example. He is now professor of Materials at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with 208 US patents and a Nobel prize. He was in the news a lot, and stirred up much needed debate in Japan regarding who owns the work of an employee.

But one counter example is Nintendo. Shigeru Miyamoto is the genius behind Super Mario, and him and his small team are responsible for so much of their hierarchy's success. Nintendo stands tall to this day.

Sony is a mixed bag, but their gaming division is still winning.

Korea is actually known to be incredibly similar to Japan, and according to one theory the only reason why Korea outpaced Japan is because the Japanese were too busy addicted to Pachinko. That may sound absurd, but not if you've seen how ubiquitous Pachinko is, and it's pure gambling with all the dangers of addiction and lives in shambles. Ironically, 80% of the parlors are owned by Japanese Koreans.

>Korea outpaced Japan is because the Japanese were too busy addicted to Pachinko.

Hello from Japan. When people from the Westernized world talk about Japan, I find it interesting to hear what everyone has to say. Some are true, some are ridiculous, some are "facts" people echo on forums. This in not true. This is ridiculous.

Do you think everyone is so addicted that we do nothing else? Do you understand that the addicted to pachinko is a small percentage and these people would be addicted to something else and be un-productive anyway?

Its not a matter of "people". Korean companies have outpaced Japanese companies, because Korean company are more global. And nice for them. But Pachinko has absolutely nothing to do with that.

Pachinko sound like Russian word "pochinka", which means "the process of repairing something".

I know a lot of very innovative and entrepreneurial Japanese people, both within and outside of big companies. Outside of big companies, Japan's risk-averse system makes it very difficult for them to pursue ambitious tech projects. They have to fight much harder to get financing and also to work with suppliers that are more used to dealing with corporate partners. So the ones that insist on starting a business often go into lower risk but still rewarding sectors.

Within companies, it really depends. As you point out, Nintendo is a good example of a company that is actually averse to not taking risks, and doesn't get humbled by failure. They insist on reinventing themselves and trying crazy things even when they'd probably do just fine sticking to something easy and proven. Their senior leadership drives that. They're far from the only company like that in Japan, but one of the few in tech.

Japan's big slow companies are good at the kind of innovation that takes decades of slow, continuous refinement and constant long-term funding rather than sudden pivots and breakthroughs. Metallurgy and materials science, chemistry, and precision engineering are fields where those big heirarchies have done well for themselves.

Except sudden pivots and breakthroughs are what made Sony and Toyota and Nintendo and what still drive them. Mario, the Walkman, the Corolla. More recently, the Switch, PlayStation, and Prius. All breakthroughs with exciting beginnings resulting in massively popular and lucrative products.

Nintendo trusts the innovators who insist on innovation. I would love to believe this is the winning formula, and maybe many Japanese companies do, but the problem with that is when the innovators are wrong. How often does a researcher invent exactly what the market needs? So in between hits, the hierarchies must figure ways to feed themselves. And some self destruct through corruption (Toshiba) and internal conflict (Nissan). Some get bailed out (Sharp, JAL). Sony's gaming division has been bailing out their other businesses.

In the case of Xperia, the innovation and product is there, but Sony miserably failed at marketing and being competitive in the US core market. Sony marketing is legendary in Japan, but they have never successfully translated that magic to the US. In Japan, the Xperia is killing it.

https://onlineshop.smt.docomo.ne.jp/ranking/index.html?color...

Some of the stuff you list are not that sudden. Switch for example is exactly a product of long time refinement. Nintendo has been trying to make a tv-portable hybrid since the snes years.

> "Shigeru Miyamoto is the genius behind Super Mario, and him and his small team are responsible for so much of their hierarchy's success. Nintendo stands tall to this day."

Not really a counterexample. If you have one hypertalented person that rises to the top of the otherwise moribund system, sure they can work miracles ... until they retire. Moreover, their blind spots become the company's blind spots; e.g. missing out on network features like cloud saves that Nintendo is criticized for. It's not a generally applicable model.

>>80% of the parlors are owned by Japanese Koreans

Especially those with longstanding connections to the North.

As I understand it, the "promotion through seniority" thing isn't always a huge issue.

It's basically a way to create less risk and stress for employees. As long as they put in the work (and yeah, they're ALL expected to work) they get job security and get promoted in a predictable way.

If they show that they're actually good at their jobs, they don't get more (or less!) promotions, they just get to work on the more interesting projects and are given more free reign.

Of course, I expect this would only be true in the companies that are not sinking. And it's not like the USA doesn't have its share of former tech giants getting torn apart by more competent competitors (anyone remember Yahoo? HP? Is IBM on the upswing or downswing right now?).

Isn't this a problem with policies rather than cultural? If it was cultural then there wouldn't be such inventions in the first place and legendary bike and car companies.

What I feel is this is because policy created which reduces competition and increases monopoly. It is hard to find companies now which can be started with like Soichiro Honda or like Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka now. This trend is going on everywhere.

It makes sense as a cultural problem from the perspective that workplace culture is an aspect of culture overall. Policies don't spawn in a vacuum separate from culture, but reflect the values of those that create them.

Japanese companies also avoid firing people as much as possible. Typically, when they want you to leave, they will demote you or move you to a generally unpleasant position.

I can't find the source where I heard this, but it was an interview with several "average" Japanese people concerning Japanese work culture.

Yes 'window dressing' [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-i...

In South Korea they will place your table in front of the bathroom and wait for you to quit. They are making it illegal now.

Fine, if it doesn't stink.

I recommend reading Olympus CEO Michael Woodford's book ”Exposure". Here's my brief summary:

Woodford works his way up through the company ranks. He's hear of Olympus Europe when he gets made CEO of the whole company. He goes over to Japan.

Soon after becoming CEO an investigative journalist for a small magazine, Facta, discovers some strange acquisitions Olympus made. Woodford questions the board. They tell him not to worry.

Woodford starts digging and covering his back. He gets fired. The Japanese board state "cultural differences" and no journalist questions this.

News of the fraud finally starts to break. 1.5 billion USD of losses were hidden over fraud which took place over decades. A few key board members get suspended sentences. Some members of the board remain on the board even after the dust settles.

His book goes into more detail about how companies, banks and journalists are all complicit in a system that allows fraud to go unchecked. Even after the details were published they were still selling this one under the rug.

(A bit of a tangent but it's hard not to sympathise with Kelly and Ghosn of Nissan. The key players at Olympus never saw the inside of a jail cell but Ghosn got half a year of solitary before any conviction.)

I feel like most places have vast systemic problems. It's just that they are problems unique to each place, at least, in their own way.

Toshiba’s legendary accounting fraud in PC division: https://mobile.twitter.com/zapa/status/1218450189301628928/p...

Darker blue is operational profit and lighter blue is sales total in ¥100mil.(~$mil.)

Just like an oscillating power circuitry! Can’t make this up and they couldn’t have been more engineering oriented than this.

Can somebody expound a little more on what the fraud was?

Edit: I believe the tweet is referring to the 2015 accounting scandal (listed on wikipedia here[0]), more information on how it happened here[1].

From what I understand, the oscillations come from the fact that corporate leadership handed down profit targets for business unit presidents to meet, with the expectation that failure to meet them = you're fired. So the business unit presidents worked with accountants to fudge the numbers at the end of every quarter to meet the unrealistic targets. Then the numbers would revert back to reality at the start of the next quarter. Corporate leadership was only looking at end-of-quarter numbers so they just kept increasing the (already unrealistic) profit targets year after year? Or maybe they understood what was going on but liked the effect it was having on their stock options/bonuses/whatever, so they kept perpetuating the fraud? But then again, why allow profits to revert back to reality, why not fudge profits all the way to hide the oscillations?

My vote is on corporate leadership incompetence. When you have a dictatorship-like culture of strict obedience, you start having an information propagation problem. Your underlings will suppress information they know you won't like (because you'll punish them) and will only feed you the truth when convenient. They will also outright lie if they have to, to save themselves from your wrath.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba#2015_accounting_scanda...

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/081315/toshi...

> Investigators describe how Toshiba's corporate leadership handed down strict profit targets, known as Challenges, to business unit presidents, often with the implication that failure would not be accepted. In some cases, quarterly Challenges were handed down near the end of the quarter when there was no time left to materially affect unit performance. It soon became clear within individual business units that the only way to achieve these Challenges was to do so through the use of irregular accounting techniques.

So impossible targets set late. You basically tell them "be fired or cheat". Then the corporate culture, or maybe Japanese work culture, means no communication that the impossible is being asked. So, save your skin.

Stupid maneuvers all around.

Similar dynamics to the Wells Fargo scandal [0]

It's a pity that Wells Fargo has not yet exited the banking business :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scan...

I believe they had to have some internal consistencies and they couldn’t just fabricate all of it.

So future contracts projected into the figures at present had to stay at that point in time in case they materialize later. That led to sharp decline after the numbers for one term was finalized.

Profits > Revenue

Yes, but where can we find a graph and explanation similar to that twitter post? Google Translate isn't really getting the implications across clearly for me.

Obviously Profit can't exceed Revenue, but how did they do this?

> It appears there were paper tradings at Toshiba subsidiary “Toshiba IT Services” which reminds me the legendary Toshiba accounting fraud. The legendary one that the waves compounded from excess manipulation, to the point that the operational profit surpassed sales figures.

The tweet I quoted was about a newly discovered incident but the chart is from 2015. Sorry but that was the best link I could find at that time.

In that instance at P.C. sales in 2008-2015, IIRC, the employees were forced to “do challenges” to meet the predetermined goals by the end of fiscal year(31st March in Japan). But the target wasn’t realistic and “challenges” became a synonym for various manipulation inside the corporate, from relabeling future sales to forging documents. That led to yearly pulse right at the end of FY and scheduled YoY growth on paper.

Looks like they simply moved profit from the first two months in the quarter into to the last month.

The profit only exceeded the monthly revenue, not the quarter average.

I wonder if big Japanese companies are doing more internal auditing, as a result of the recent fiasco with Nissan and Ghosn that saw Ghosn's ouster and arrest and subsequent escape.

The ousting of Ghosn is emblematic of the culture.

Ghosn was also a problem, aside Nissan and prosecution.

Don't forget about WeWork and SoftBank (Japan).

Can you explain in plainly please. Also it is Japanese in the tweets.

same explanation as other comments with other words.

The books were cooked. The profits oscillations in the tweet graph aren't natural, and the peaks were inncreasing.

At one point the profits were even greater that revenues.

That's too bad. I had toshiba laptop from 2008-2014 or 2015 or so. It was probably my longest lasting and hardest treated one. That thing carried me all through school, travelled to yellowstone and all around BC, was taken to camp sites and used during field work. I regularly threw it in a backpack with no case or anything packed in with a bunch of stuff and carried it well over a few hundred km over the years like that.

I'm still not sure exactly what's wrong with it. The original hard drive ended up with a corrupted MBR, then the replacement drive i put in ended up with the same thing within a day. I just ended up retiring it and getting a new one.

Though for a while though i was keeping that thing on life support by running a linux distro partitioned across 4 usb flash drives just so i could keep using it for a bit longer. I managed to recover everything off the drives that way too.

By comparison, the acer i replaced it with ended up needing a screen replacement within 2 years and that thing just pretty much hung out at home.

I got a ~$250 Toshiba in 2012 for college. I added a small SSD and 4GBs ram so maybe $350 total. A few years later I replaced the CD drive with a hard drive since the SSD filled up pretty quick. I still use it daily 8 years later.

My only complaint is the cheap plastic case has deteriorated so it's partially held together by tape now. I also had to replace the screen hinges a few years ago.

But compared to the Acer before it (2008 bad Nvidia GPU) and my wife's trash HP laptop the Toshiba has been worth every penny.

Same experience here. Those laptops have been really reliable.

A shitty courier company apparently loaded a fridge over one corner of my laptop while transporting it (don't ask why or how it happened) and the end result was the laptop broke at the corner (imagine loading 200kg on side of a fibre glass plate).

Long story short the hinge popped off, the laptop's display bottom totally teared up and yet lo and behold it's still working since the last 5 years. It looks like a Frankenstein laptop but it works flawlessly and never has given me any issues. My asus laptop on the other hand.. :/

I have a toshiba laptop from 98 that still runs!

My father had a computer store that sold Taiwanese desktop clones and Toshiba laptops in the late 80s. The article says that Toshiba were manufacturing laptops from 1985. I'm pretty sure we were selling them in 1987 so I didn't realise quite how close to the start we were. They were very good laptops at the time - their only real competitor was the Compaq laptop range and I'd argue that the Toshibas were better, although I'm obviously biased.

Just looking now at wikipedia, I'm sure that we sold the T1000 [1] and T1200 [2] but I'm not sure if we ever sold the T1100 [3] (their first model). We also sold the T3100 [4] which had a gas plasma screen that was quite a wondrous thing at the time. It was also very expensive. They were mostly bought by higher level executives as a status symbol. My father kept one for personal use too.

It was a very profitable business to be in at the time - margins were high, unlike the razor-thin margins of today. But my dad didn't capitalise on it as well as he should have. He overpaid his sales staff when they really weren't having to make much of an effort to sell such a hot item. And he didn't pay enough attention to the accounts so that when the recession of the early 90s arrived and government departments stopped buying he hit a cashflow problem and the company went bust. But there were a few good years before that and I still remember the Toshiba laptops of that time quite fondly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1000

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1200

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1100

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T3100

Wasn't there a US import ban on Toshiba products for a few years back in the 80s, apparently because they sold parts to the Soviet Union?

Part of Toshiba was banned from selling into the US for two years at the end of the 80's for selling machines to the USSR which were used to make quiet propellers for submarines. https://apnews.com/aad45a6f2de8d599d97242394be65923

This response by the US would have hurt both Japan and the US, while not so much affecting the USSR who already had their quiet propellers. It probably did hurt US consumers, but it didn't end up hurting the US government which ignored its own ban! https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1988/12/15/t...

Maybe? I don't know. My father's business wasn't in the US.

Their "I checked my notebook" commercials in the 90's are memorable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSycqXoxIzI

No company would even joke about behaving like that on an airplane today.

Wait. They sold the business to sharp, which renamed it Dynabook. so this isn't entirely new. (Sharp just recently acquired the remaining 19% of Toshiba's notebook company it didn't already own.)

Sharp is also largely owned by Foxconn, so they probably have some advantages with production/assembly costs from that.

I had a Toshiba Chromebook for a little while and it was fantastic, a machine focused around meeting all the hardware needs to be “good enough” at a reasonable price. It had a great 1080p display, good performance, a good keyboard and great build. All under $300. Oh well. Such is life.

My first developer laptop was one of these hacked to run Ubuntu. I think I dropped $400 on it. That puppy took me from barista to employed software developer.

Afterwards it found a second life as my favorite travel / bedside laptop until a glass of water claimed its life a few years back.

Are you happier as a barista or SD? :) I'm only kind of being snarky

I was a barista at a pretty successful shop, where we did a LOT of business. It could be fairly back breaking work at times. Despite winning a few awards (excuse the brag), I don't think I ever made more than $44,000 a year in a high cost of living metro.

But yea, being young, working with my hands, and having significantly less after work mental baggage was all awesome.

Doing painful physical labor 40 hours a week, but barely being able to afford rent and having no sick days or health care makes it a pretty poor trade in the big picture.

There really are two Americas, and having lived in both, it is much better in the bubble than on the outside.

Everyone is different so ymmv, but that is my experience.

It's a valid question though. So many of my colleagues in software engineering want to be baristas, or bake bread, or grow organic marijuana! But I guess the grass is always greener on the other side.

I got a laugh at the "grass is always greener" pun. Thanks :)

For me not really. Remote work all the way :)

It takes a certain kind of person, and I'm part of that group ;-)

My high school job as a barista/sandwich maker/prep guy was probably the best job from a fun POV ever.

Now imagine doing that as a 45 year old

Living on that salary would be misery.

But I like talking to people and enjoyed interacting with customers and regulars.

Living without the social stigma associated with IT work (at least in western countries) is also an incentive. So many times I have seen faces changing when I say that I work as a SD. It's a real attraction killer. I even once had a lady who wouldn't believe me because I was "too cool" to do this job.

Being in the service industry isn't great either. I was blown off many a time when the person I was otherwise hitting it off with found out I was a barista. I have literally been laughed at. I have a lot of pent up trauma about it.

All good SDs are their own baristas ;)

Agreed, the Toshiba Chromebook 2 is nice, 4GB RAM, good keyboard, beautiful screen. But the web has become so slow and bloated, it's not very usable anymore. It now works as dedicated recipe terminal in the kitchen. It is still getting ChromeOS updates, until next year I think.

I still rock a TCB 2 - the earlier version with only 2GB RAM. I still find it eminently usable and often have 10+ tabs open(1). It hasn't missed a beat since May 2015 although perhaps recently I've started noticing a bit of slowness here and there but nothing major. I'm still using it every day as a bedside laptop; I'll be very sorry to let it go when the time comes.

(1) I use it primarily for light browsing, email and YouTube, so it doesn't do any heavy lifting.

How well does it do at that job? I've found that recipe websites are some of the most bloated and least performant, up there with network-affiliate-branded news sites.

Two of my children are still using these. The Toshiba Chromebook 2 is available (swappa.com, eBay, etc.) in 2014 or 2015 versions. The major difference seems to be that the 2015 has backlit keys and is very rare compared to the 2014.

I bought protective shells for them and that made a huge difference in longevity. The kids would tend to pick up their computers by the top/screen and could crack the screen or knock a connector loose.

The speakers on it are also decent, which my kids appreciate.

I really don't see how people can use the typical Chromebook with its 1366 x 768 screen except that it would make you focus solely on what was on screen.

Who else was hacking on a Toshiba Satellite in the 90s?

Haha. My first ever non-antique laptop was a Toshiba Satellite Pro circa 2000. Bought it from some dodgy central Eurasian fellows out of the back of a car. One of said fellows is apparently now running some major blockchain thought leader scammery. People don't change their colours.

Prior to that I acquired this guy donated through the local 2600 chapter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Epson-l3s-and-psu.jpg and submitted an nmap fingerprint for its DOS-based, parallel-port driven TCP/IP stack! Good times.

> Bought it from some dodgy central Eurasian fellows out of the back of a car... people don't change their colours.

And... what dodgy things are you currently involved in?? I'm guessing you never paid for your RAR license either. /s

One of the oddities of China where I've been for ~20 years is that rar is still super popular. Never figured that one out. I guess the warez OS images bundled it years ago and it became a thing for 1.4 billion people. How's that for a marketing channel?

about 10 years ago i finally did after using a random key for years

I worked in tech support for Winbook laptops from ~94-96 at their call center in Columbus. We had a small crew of engineers there as well and we'd regularly buy Toshibas and tear them apart just to check out the competition. They were definitely the gold standard.

Also got a job offer to work at McMurdo Station on the south pole after getting them up and running on a few laptops. Never took it due to some matrimonial commitments, but did get a cool hat and pin out of the deal.

Good times. (It's Doogie if anybody that worked then is in here)

I was gifted one as a 15 year old. It had 8mb of ram and spent lots of time running warcraft 2. Good times.

My first laptop for college was a Toshiba Satellite. This would have been around 2006. It was a great machine at a reasonable price. Never had any issues with it until the battery died like 8 years later.

aye. my grad school machine was a toshiba from that era. sorry to see they're out of the biz.

Tecra 500CDT for me. Dual booted Windows largely for DOS gaming, and Debian.

But what I really wanted (and still occasionally look up on eBay) was one of the tiny Librettos. Never took the dive though and as the years passed the spec became harder and harder to justify.

I had a Tecra 500CS in high school. Used to carry it in my bookbag, no case or anything. It was an absolute beast, and the first machine I ever installed Linux on - Slackware 3.4, via floppy disk sets because I couldn't afford a CD drive on top of the machine itself, which even used cost me an entire summer job's proceeds. It did have a built-in modem, though, and that sure was handy.

I suppose I shouldn't talk of it in the past tense. After all, I still have it, and it still works after all these years.

I used to always use the floppy net install image for Debian. Was magic to me that a single disk could bootstrap so much amazing stuff.

I'm pretty sure I didn't yet know Debian existed. Also, my mom would've been pissed at me tying up the phone line that long. Disks I could download piecemeal, one or two a night, while I was staying up far longer than I should to get on the MUCKs while the west coast folks were around.

My aunt got one and I helped her set it up and install software on it. These things were so cool at the time. It even had a built-in 3.5" floppy drive. I think it had a trackball and buttons instead of the touchpads we're all used to now.

Yes, my first laptop was a 320CDT which I bought when I started contracting. The first thing I did was format it and install Windows NT on it.

I had a couple of Dells after that but they never felt as robust as the Toshiba.

I installed Debian Jessie on my 320CDT just a week or two ago. That's the last version of Debian that supports the Pentium MMX CPU. The battery doesn't hold a charge anymore and the screen is pretty dim.

The 320CDT came with Windows 95 but I got a $200 or so Toshiba store credit in a class action settlement because of a floppy drive problem with the 320CDT that I never actually experienced. I used that to buy Windows 2000 which ran reasonably well on the 96MB of RAM I have in the 320CDT.

My next laptop was a Satellite Pro 6100 which was a truly awful piece of hardware... got sent in for repairs multiple times and never worked right.

I hacked my way through college on a Toshiba Tecra 750... $7,500 configuration that I was able to get for $900! Probably the best laptop I owned except for my current 2015 MacBook Pro.

I came here just for this. I cherish the font ROM on these.

T1950CT for me, writing QBASIC games. Good memories.

Toshiba T3100e With batteries the size of your fist, and an orange screen. Building asm projects using masm or tasm. Good times.

I loved my Satellite Pro 4600 - circa 2001-2003. But then I was finally able to afford the ThinkPad of my dreams (a maxed out T42p).

My first laptop was a Satellite 2100 CDT

I went Toshiba -> thinkpad -> MacBook.

They were the best at the time.

Yup, T1900 handed down from an uncle, my first computer!

Present.

The most impressive laptop I ever owned was a Libretto. It was more than a decade before another laptop came around that gave that same feeling (the Macbook Air).

Libretto 30 owner clocking in. It was amazing to have a portable device that fit in a "poacher" pocket and could browse the web and play mp3 files in 1998.

It couldn't do both at the same time.

Toshiba Portege, at about 1.1kg IIRC, was pretty incredible, around the time the Macbook Air first came out, lighter than the Air but with a DVD drive. It was my travel work laptop, before netbooks became a thing.

It felt quite plastic though, nothing like a Macbook Air (which I got pretty soon after). Mechanical drive too, I seem to recall - I still have it upstairs and have it pencilled in as a first Linux laptop for my son.

The Libretto! I had completely forgotten about my Libretto 100, which I carried with me to class and took notes on, as well as used in the field to debug HW issues, using the small dock and connecting field HW to the serial port. I took that quirky little laptop all over the world with me in my travels. It was thick and sturdy, so I wasn't too concerned about protecting it, as opposed to the ultraportable laptops nowadays, which are so thin and wide that I have to mind what happens to it. There was also a small and friendly community of Libretto owners which would share tips; I recall disassembling the laptop and soldering on more memory, based on some guides from people in the Libretto mailing list.

Toshiba also had their thin and light (portége z820 iirc) way before slot of other competitors (the only real competitor was the hp folio 13 iirc).

Ah, and I forgot to mention the Compaq Aero and the Sony Vaio. I did own the former, not the latter.

That was the first computer I owned that earned itself back inside of a month.

Toshiba was fucking HUGE in the 1990s. I had a couple back in those days. They were good machines for the time.

Then IBM became king with the ThinkPad.

They where awful. Build quality was shoddy, bad touchpad and fan noise through the roof.

You're saying they were awful in the mid 90s, or they became awful later? Because the machines I had in '96 or so were solid.

Awful in 2005

At least personally, I always considered Toshiba laptops to be the bottom of the barrel in terms of quality. I don't recall a time when thinkpad (at least before Lenovo bought them) could have been considered inferior?

They were quite good in the early to mid 90's but by 2000 and onward they were pretty bad as far as quality. I worked in a computer store that did also did repair and there were a few problems you'd always see on Toshibas: power button failure (ribbon cable on the inside would get damaged or just come loose) and power connector failures (the barrel connector would come unsoldered on the inside).

Toshiba went to shit, but in the early days they were at the top.

Those ThinkPads might be the best thing IBM made since the IBM PC.

It's a shame because they made such outstanding products at one time. I was given a Toshiba laptop as I headed off to college in 1995, and it still boots (to Windows 3.11) 25 years later.

100%. My first business was buying/refurbishing/selling used laptops. I bought/sold tens of thousands. Toshiba was by far the best. IBM was 2nd. Now they’re both gone.

The only things I liked about my early 2000s Toshiba laptop were the physical volume control knob and manual wifi switch. Software controlled volume seemed so stupid in comparison. I still think laptops should have both if these switches as well as a physical camera and microphone switch. You can't ( realistically) hack past an air gap.

The Toshiba T1000 was the first portable computer I ever used, touched, or saw. It was a miracle: LCD screen, battery power, real keyboard. It felt like something snatched from a time traveler. (Except it booted from MS-DOS 2.1 hard-coded in ROM. I had to boot DOS 3.2 from a floppy.)

Real shame. Toshiba always had the best value for low-cost laptops.

There was a time when the Toshiba laptops were the top priority for laptops and it is strange how the turntables.

I have a Toshiba Portege R500 in a cupboard somewhere. It was a very impressive machine. It's extremely light at less than a kg (particularly compared to others at the time). It has an SSD (albeit on some weird interface). The keyboard is also rather nice. The most interesting part is the transflective screen which works in direct sunlight. One nice point was that Toshiba repaired it free of charge when the screen broken off due to a korfball incident.

It's a shame they've exited when they used to have such innovative machines.

My first ever laptop, and in fact first ever computer that I did not share with someone else was a Toshiba Satellite A100 that I purchased when I was 22. I actually needed it for a job I got (not having a computer provided was in hindsight a bad sign) and the company was so bad I left in 3 months. The Toshiba was a decent laptop though until 3 years later I switch to a Macbook, and have had Macbooks since. It seems many other people followed that same path so sad as it is, it's not a surprise.

My first laptop was a Toshiba T1000 around 1987. I thought I was quite the high roller traveling around with that thing. MSDOS and a 640x200 display - those were the days.

My first laptop was a Toshiba T3100e from the late 1980s. It still works!

I remember the fun I had playing games, learning to program in basic, and writing reports with WordPerfect 4.2.

I loved my ~2008 Toshiba Satellite. Rest in peace, old friend.

Mine's still in service (as a stationary machine for video comsumption.)

I don't understand the wild leap of logic other comments in this thread are making where "Company X does fraud" becomes "Japanese work culture leads to fraud". You could easily make similar shoddy arguments with any country but it seems HN seems intent on only wheeling out the "tHeIR cUlTuRe Is bAd" argument when nobody from that culture is around to defend it.

First laptop I ever used (or saw for that matter) was a Toshiba T1200. That thing must have weighed 10lbs, but it was a marvel at the time.

I really loved the Toshiba Radius 12 I had several years ago, with a 2160p display. It very much kicked ass at gaming, too.

Toshiba had potential.

How the world changes.

I reckon all the laptops I was exposed to in the early-mid 90s through school and my father’s work were Toshibas, to the point where I may even have thought Toshiba was the only company that made laptops.

Seeing this news today, my reaction is “Toshiba still makes laptops?”

My first work laptop was a Toshiba. We went through so much together that I nicknamed it R2D2.

Lol, mine is simply nicknamed "Toto", which here in France is the equivalent of "foo" and also a naughty child character in jokes.

I remember Toshiba AC100 back in 2011 (afair) with tegra cpu and 3G modem weighting about 800 grams. Originally shipped with Android without marketplace, became more or less usable after installing Ubuntu on it.

They really could win a niche of ultraportable laptops.

Almost 2 decades ago my daily driver was a Toshiba Portege running redhat. My first post college laptop. Despite the effort of required to get it running, it served me well and had great design for its day.

I had a Toshiba laptop that weighed 80 pounds, a quarter of that was the power adapter and an external drive. The backpack I carried it in could fit a folded yurt. It permanently altered my gait. Good times.

Funny. The first laptop I saw was my dad's clunky old Portege (from the '90s?). Tried to bring it back to life the other day but it looks like the disk is dead and I didn't care _that_ much.

My dad had a Toshiba back in the day and I thought it was the coolest laptop in existence. I now have had a Macbook for the past 7 years, but I have nothing bad to say about Toshiba laptops.

The toughbooks were iconic

I thought Toughbooks are made by Panasonic? Did they buy the brand from Toshiba at some point?

Most of them still are iconic. Those things are nigh on indestructible and unless you really mean it they will be happy to continue to exist for a very long time. I wonder how recyclers deal with Toughbooks.

I thought that was Panasonic.

:( https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/582967-doge

My one and only windows pc was a toshiba laptop, the thing overheated so much that the exhaust grill plastic cracked and broke off leaving a side of the laptop exposed.

I always lusted after a T3100. God, that was an amazing machine.

I had several generations of Qosmio laptops and they were exceptionally good high performance machines. A bit pricey but for the use I gave them a great value.

SO, even the Japanese now prefer less boring styled laptops?

Panasonic still make Let's Note, so I guess not.

Let's Note 10 incher is by far not boring, or cheap styled. It's a status product in Japan. Almost like Iphone, but 1 decade before it.

My first laptop was a Toshiba around 2003. It was pretty great at the time, but laughably heavy and clunky by today’s standards (I still have it for some reason...)

RIP

I still have an old ca. 2008 Toshiba Satellite laptop running as a sort of media centre for the exercise room. My first laptop.

My first laptop was a Toshiba 205CDS. Loved it. Bought Toshiba for years until I finally saw the light and moved to Thinkpads.

best deal is to buy pre-owned think pads for 1/4th the msrp.

Or well below. I bought a T41 on eBay for $150 around 2009 and it finally bit the dust last year.

End of an era, I guess. My first ever computer was a Toshiba T1910 in the mid 90s. Monochrome, Running windows 3.1.

I think I still might have my old Toshiba laptop somewhere. Installed Debian on it via ZMODEM. Good times.

Not that with Toshiba it was necessarily the case, but are there any Made in Japan laptops left on the market?

I think Vaio, Fujitsu, Panasonic.

They should have merged when they had the chance.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3056030/proposed-toshiba-fuj...

Looks like the answer is 4 years.

But are they actually made in Japan, or are they just Japanese companies that farm the manufacturing out to China, like everyone else?

The last time I was in Yodobashi Camera, I had a hard time finding any electronics that were actually made in Japan. I even asked the staff about it.

NEC and Fujitsu was famost PC manufacturer in Japan but they are acquired by Lenovo (partially). But they are still building some PCs (mainly Laptop) in Japan and selling. I don't know whether they are exported. Some ThinkPads are also made on NEC fabs in Japan.

It is increasingly hard to decipher. I haven't checked recently, but a lot of camera factories were still operating in Japan around 10 years ago.

Toshiba protege m400 tablets were a god damn nightmare and forever tarnished the brand for me.

Wild, I remember when I lived in Morocco, Toshiba laptops were all that I saw.

We had a Trashiba system 20 years ago. The case was impossible to open.

End of an era, their laptops used to be everywhere.

Reminds me of When sony quit

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