Toshiba is joining the list of Japanese tech giants that have left the PC industry. The company that has solemnly sold its remaining 19.9 percent stake in its Dynabook laptop brand to sharp, officially leaving the laptop business, and really the PC business at large. The company hasn’t really been doing well in the PC market for a while (it sold its 80.1% stake to Sharp in 2018), but this is still notable as the end to a 35-year chapter in the firm’s history.
The company was a pioneer in the portable computer space. Its T1100 for 1985 is richly considered the first mainstream laptop computer and created a design template for portables that didn’t really undergo any change much until Apple’s PowerBook line Arrived in 1991. Toshiba flourished in the 1990s and early 2000s with its Satellite, Portege, and Qosmio lines, this writer’s first laptop was a 13.3-inch Satellite from 2002.
It’s not certain who prompted Toshiba’s decline, although there are a number of likely factors. Toshiba’s failure in HD DVD didn’t help, it produced media-centric laptops whose main feature became unuseful the moment Blu-ray and streaming took over. Rivals like Apple, Dell, and Lenovo also surpass Toshiba at its own game with ultraportables like the MacBook Air and XPS series. Including the Shrinking PC market and Toshiba was facing serious competition in a market where there wasn’t much money for anyone but the very biggest contenders.
Toshiba is still a major name in the PC market through categories like printing and storage and it has branches in categories like energy and retail. The Dynabook brand will stay alive, for that matter. Still, it is a sad moment, whatever you thought of its products, Toshiba was a mainstay in the persona computing landscape.
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