[HN Gopher] Toshiba formally and finally exits laptop business
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Toshiba formally and finally exits laptop business
Author : kiyanwang
Score : 131 points
Date : 2020-08-07 05:52 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| theodric wrote:
| Good riddance
| baybal2 wrote:
| SO, even the Japanese now prefer less boring styled laptops?
| grawprog wrote:
| 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.
| sparrish wrote:
| My first laptop was a Toshiba 205CDS. Loved it. Bought Toshiba
| for years until I finally saw the light and moved to Thinkpads.
| thisisnico wrote:
| best deal is to buy pre-owned think pads for 1/4th the msrp.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Or well below. I bought a T41 on eBay for $150 around 2009
| and it finally bit the dust last year.
| [deleted]
| agloeregrets wrote:
| 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.
| zumu wrote:
| 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.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Are you happier as a barista or SD? :) I'm only kind of being
| snarky
| Spooky23 wrote:
| My high school job as a barista/sandwich maker/prep guy was
| probably the best job from a fun POV ever.
| llampx wrote:
| Now imagine doing that as a 45 year old
| zumu wrote:
| 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.
| iakov wrote:
| 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.
| mettamage wrote:
| For me not really. Remote work all the way :)
|
| It takes a certain kind of person, and I'm part of that
| group ;-)
| will_pseudonym wrote:
| I got a laugh at the "grass is always greener" pun.
| Thanks :)
| core-questions wrote:
| All good SDs are their own baristas ;)
| bxparks wrote:
| 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.
| xxr wrote:
| 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.
| digikazi wrote:
| 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.
| zumu wrote:
| Not that with Toshiba it was necessarily the case, but are there
| any Made in Japan laptops left on the market?
| Marsymars wrote:
| I think Vaio, Fujitsu, Panasonic.
| basch wrote:
| 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.
| reaperducer wrote:
| 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.
| zumu wrote:
| 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.
| fraciel wrote:
| Yo tengo una toshiba satelite 610 desde aproximada mente 6 anos
| y todavia se resiste a naufragar
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| The toughbooks were iconic
| joshcain wrote:
| I thought Toughbooks are made by Panasonic? Did they buy the
| brand from Toshiba at some point?
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| projektfu wrote:
| I thought that was Panasonic.
| numpad0 wrote:
| 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 Y=100mil.(~$mil.)
|
| Just like an oscillating power circuitry! Can't make this up and
| they couldn't have been more engineering oriented than this.
| walrus01 wrote:
| 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.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Don't forget about WeWork and SoftBank (Japan).
| umvi wrote:
| 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...
| baybal2 wrote:
| Profits > Revenue
| Alupis wrote:
| 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?
| numpad0 wrote:
| > 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.
| numpad0 wrote:
| 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.
| vijayr02 wrote:
| 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_s
| can...
| [deleted]
| system2 wrote:
| Can you explain in plainly please. Also it is Japanese in the
| tweets.
| ussrlongbow wrote:
| 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.
| maxk42 wrote:
| Real shame. Toshiba always had the best value for low-cost
| laptops.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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).
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| znpy wrote:
| Toshiba also had their thin and light (portege z820 iirc) way
| before slot of other competitors (the only real competitor was
| the hp folio 13 iirc).
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| 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.
| danielscrubs wrote:
| They where awful. Build quality was shoddy, bad touchpad and
| fan noise through the roof.
| VectorLock wrote:
| Those ThinkPads might be the best thing IBM made since the IBM
| PC.
| hyperpl wrote:
| 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?
| megablast wrote:
| Toshiba went to shit, but in the early days they were at the
| top.
| chaoticmass wrote:
| 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).
| oska wrote:
| 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
| glorious 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
| f00zz wrote:
| 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?
| oska wrote:
| Maybe? I don't know. My father's business wasn't in the US.
| dasb wrote:
| I loved my ~2008 Toshiba Satellite. Rest in peace, old friend.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| 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.
| encoderer wrote:
| Who else was hacking on a Toshiba Satellite in the 90s?
| dmead wrote:
| I was gifted one as a 15 year old. It had 8mb of ram and spent
| lots of time running warcraft 2. Good times.
| carldaddy wrote:
| 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.
| megablast wrote:
| I went Toshiba -> thinkpad -> MacBook.
|
| They were the best at the time.
| bluedino wrote:
| My first laptop was a Satellite 2100 CDT
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| pravus wrote:
| I came here just for this. I cherish the font ROM on these.
| jcims wrote:
| 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)
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Present.
| Yhippa wrote:
| 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.
| thom wrote:
| 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.
| throwanem wrote:
| 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.
| gregschlom wrote:
| T1950CT for me, writing QBASIC games. Good memories.
| megablast wrote:
| Toshiba T3100e With batteries the size of your fist, and an
| orange screen. Building asm projects using masm or tasm. Good
| times.
| contingencies wrote:
| 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.
| canada_dry wrote:
| > 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
| katbyte wrote:
| about 10 years ago i finally did after using a random key
| for years
| contingencies wrote:
| 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?
| phreeza wrote:
| Yup, T1900 handed down from an uncle, my first computer!
| acomjean wrote:
| 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.)
| sct202 wrote:
| Sharp is also largely owned by Foxconn, so they probably have
| some advantages with production/assembly costs from that.
| ilyas121 wrote:
| Wild, I remember when I lived in Morocco, Toshiba laptops were
| all that I saw.
| knifepatrol wrote:
| 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
| pjmorris wrote:
| My first work laptop was a Toshiba. We went through so much
| together that I nicknamed it R2D2.
| devchix wrote:
| 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.
| ht_th wrote:
| 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.
| jmkb wrote:
| 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.)
| blitmap wrote:
| 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.
| theklub wrote:
| Toshiba protege m400 tablets were a god damn nightmare and
| forever tarnished the brand for me.
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