26 ms·

Whatever happened to Japanese laptops?

196 points by atjamielittle 10y ago

chemmail 10y ago
Japan is really behind in PC/Laptop. I was just there last week and the big PC and electronic stores only stock up to Geforce. Asus also has a big presence there now, but the prices are a lot more than US pricing for the same stuff. Not much innovation in the computer space. Home eletronics and appliances are amazing though. Their high end electrolux style vacuum stick cleaners easily clear $800 USD and are really awesome. The rice cookers can hit $600-$800 and can make the perfect rice you normally only get in Japan. The mcirowaves have built in toast oven in one unit, and it works amazingly well. Coming home, its kinda sad some of the convinces we dont have like the toilets, bathroom, kitchen, and even video doorbells (out current "smart" stuff are still rubbish).
- themodelplumber 10y ago
  > The mcirowaves have built in toast oven in one unit, and it works amazingly well I had one in my apartment outside Nagoya in 1996. Still can't believe I have never seen one in the states. I wonder if they just can't justify the potential marketing friction.
  - jcrawfordor 10y ago
    These are on sale at WalMart in the US. Indo think they're rather new there though.
    - chemmail 10y ago
      Will have to look out for it! Also stationary is amazing in Japan. They have Pilot Friction erasable pens that erase perfectly and writes amazing. Its been popular there over 10 years and barely a blip here in the US. You can actually find them at depotmax.
      - Freak_NL 10y ago
        Absolutely, Japan is great for stationary. I love the KuruToga mechanical pencils; these rotate the pencil lead some 30 degrees each time you lift the pencil from the paper. This means you always end up with a perfectly round tip and lines of equal thickness instead of the chisel tip you end up with normally. I used to rotate my simpler mechanical pencils myself before I found these. Never going back.
  - imglorp 10y ago
    It's the same reason we still have 2 piece washer/dryers: so they can sell two appliances instead of one. Until our market demands a combo mike/toast, we won't have one.
    - VLM 10y ago
      My Grandmother had a combo oven / microwave in the 80s. Sears model, I think. It was a full size oven and I believe it ran the microwave part off the 220 connection. The control panel was pretty complicated looking. It suffered the inevitable result of TV/VCR or TV/DVD combo units where I don't remember which half burned out first but once one half broke it was time to buy two separated devices.
    - randallsquared 10y ago
      Maybe they're much better now, but 15 years ago, I used a machine that washed and dried in the same drum, and it was pretty bad at both. A full cycle for one load on minimum settings took an hour and a half or two hours, and the load was tiny in comparison to any other washer or dryer I've ever used. Even if it had taken slightly less time than separate units, and even if the load size had been realistic, I would have had to use two of them to get the usual throughput I'm used to, where I can do a week of laundry in about 5 hours (two people's clothes, bath and kitchen, bedding). If I had to use that machine currently, it would be running for a few hours every day.
    - legulere 10y ago
      The problem with combined washers/dryers is that dryers need to be more empty than washing machines. That means you can either only wash a rather small amount of clothes or you have to take out some clothes after washing and before drying.
  - dom0 10y ago
    We've got a Samsung with that, it's pretty old (90s-ish). (Germany... maybe we have a thing with the Japanese... but then again Samsung "is" Korean?!)
- deleted 10y ago
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- narag 10y ago
  Asus also has a big presence there now, but the prices are a lot more than US pricing for the same stuff. The same Asus stuff or other brands? I live in Spain and although I haven't looked recently, Asus was the best quality-price relation here. In particular, batteries duration similar to macs, for half the money. If I needed a laptop now, I would see their offer first for sure. Time ago, I read that Asus doesn't sell in the USA, what explained how little comments I saw in specialized webs about their laptops.
Ezhik 10y ago
What's the laptop market like in Japan anyway? I don't really know a lot about it, but it's always interesting to see these random Panasonic or Fujitsu laptops not sold here, or those rare Japan-exclusive experimental ThinkPads.
- atjamielittle 10y ago
  One thing that I noticed when looking around was that screen resolution didn't seem to be a big focus. The Panasonic models still have optical media. I can't think of a single western laptop that has a Blu-Ray burner in it. There might be some gaming laptops with that, but they would probably be 17 inch monsters and not extremely lightweight laptops.
  - TulliusCicero 10y ago
    In the US, PC gamers at least abandoned physical media very early.
- TheAceOfHearts 10y ago
  I work for a startup with roughly half of its employees working from Japan. All developers use Apple laptops. I can't remember off the top of my head if non-developers used other brands.
  - santaclaus 10y ago
    I work with a few developers from Japan - MacBook Pros running Windows, across the board.
    - walterbell 10y ago
      Why do they run Windows on an expensive MacBook Pro, e.g. how is power management, HiDPI, driver support, etc? Is this mostly Windows 7 or 10? Why not macOS + Windows in a VM?
      - 10y ago
bikitan 10y ago
I think Japan is going to be one of the first markets to see laptop sales dry up almost completely. Most people are fine with their iPhones. Where I work, all developers use macbooks and everyone else uses a thinkpad. A lot of other laptop models, like a lot of tech in Japan, is targeted at the Japanese market only. Dynabooks are the budget windows machine of choice at the moment, it seems. Although most young people choose Apple whenever possible anyway.
- b2600 10y ago
  Really not trying to start an OS war but for the sake of accuracy Android is the dominant mobile OS in Japan, not iPhone.
  - zepto 10y ago
    If you aren't trying to start a war, please provide a citation to back this up so there can be no dispute.
    - mattnumbe 10y ago
      3rd party citation after searching "dominant OS Japan" in google https://www.statista.com/statistics/260415/market-share-held-by-smartphone-operating-systems-in-japan/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/260415/market-share-held... Android 64.6%
      - ralfd 10y ago
        Looking at the pattern: if the statistic would end in autumn instead of summer, then iOS could also have come up on top.
        dismantlethesun 10y ago
        How can market share dramatically swing between 30% and 60% like it's doing in this chart? Is this bad data? Is the market expanding & contracting so greatly that existing users are a minority of future marketshare?
bluedino 10y ago
I thought this would be about the tiny models like the Toshiba Libretto
- EdSharkey 10y ago
  My drinking buddy in the early 2000's carried his libretto around in big baggy jeans pockets so he could pull it out and code on his game any time he was out and about and had a free moment. I always thought that was so 1337.
  - Zarel 10y ago
    I used to code on the Voyage 200, which also fit in my coat pockets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-92_series#Voyage_200 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-92_series#Voyage_200 My fingers were small enough to touch type on those keys. After I grew out of TI-BASIC, I always wanted something like that for computer programming, too, but I never managed to find one. A laptop in regular-laptop shape that was 6" or so would be ideal for me. I've also been considering a phone/phablet with a keyboard case or keyboard cover, but none seem to be touch-typable. :/
    - spqr0a1 10y ago
      How about the Pyra? Seems to be close to your ideal. https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/ https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/
  - partisan 10y ago
    I had a Sony Vaio Picturebook around that time and would use it to do homework, listen to MP3s, etc. I turned the sleep function off when listening to music and would just keep it in the pocket of my jacket. It was a beautiful little machine.
mc32 10y ago
One thing likely contributed to their downfall was US manufactures moved operations overseas and many Japanese manufacturers kept production in Japan making them expensive to the Us market --that and Apple and others catching up in terms of "sleekness" and aesthetics. People would buy Vaios despite poor hardware because they were thin and looked cool.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >that and Apple and others catching up in terms of "sleekness" and aesthetics. Wasn't Apple always ahead of the Japanese laptops in terms of sleekness and aesthetics?
  - cstejerean 10y ago
    No, not always. The Sony Vaio was attractive enough back in its day that Steve Jobs offered Sony to run Mac OS on them (which they declined).
    - phs318u 10y ago
      Wow. Was not aware of that. Thanks. For those who couldn't be bothered googling... http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/5/5380832/sony-vaio-apple-os-x-steve-jobs-meeting-report http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/5/5380832/sony-vaio-apple-os-...
    - dopeboy 10y ago
      Had to look this up because I had no clue. > Most of Sony's executives spends their winter vacation in Hawaii and play golf after celebrating new year. In one of those new year golf competitions back in 2001, " Steve Jobs and another Apple executive were waiting for us at the end of golf course holding VAIO running Mac OS" recalls Ando.[President of Sony at the time] > Ando liked Apple. He always felt Mac and VAIO were so close in philosophy. He especially admired the original iMac introduced in 1998. But the timing was bad for Sony, it is just about the time, Sony's VAIO gained popularity and it is just about the time that VAIO team had finished optimizing both VAIO's hardware and software specifically for Windows platform. Because of this, most of the VAIO team opposed asking 'if it is worth it.' And that was the end of story for this Mac-compatible VAIO. http://nobi.com/en/Steve%20Jobs%20and%20Japan/entry-1212.html http://nobi.com/en/Steve%20Jobs%20and%20Japan/entry-1212.htm...
zumu 10y ago
My current laptop is a toshiba, and I bought it in the US. I've had good luck with the brand over the years.
- rmason 10y ago
  I've had really good luck with Toshiba Qosmio's, but they've stopped making these really high end machines.
- mikekchar 10y ago
  I have a Japanese Toshiba KIRA V63 (only sold in Japan, for some stupid reason). It's a great machine and quite cheap for it's specs. I bought it for battery life (I can do a whole day of programming on a single charge in Linux), but it has good performance as well. I've been very pleasantly surprised at how well the Intel 5200U has performed. Also at only 1.2 kg, I can easily stick it in my bag and carry it with me anywhere I go. I've seen on the news that Toshiba plans to shut down its laptop division in the near future. Some people have told me that it isn't 100% for sure, so I'm hanging on to some hope. I've been looking at offerings of other Japanese makers (I live in Japan) and there is nothing else comparable. I'm not sure what I'll do when I need to replace this one. Toshiba has been my go to maker for the last 10 years or so because virtually everything they make "just works" on Linux.
  - quanticle 10y ago
    >Toshiba has been my go to maker for the last 10 years or so because virtually everything they make "just works" on Linux. This is honestly a pretty shocking statement for me, because Toshiba has long been my go-to example for the worst-case scenario of installing Linux on laptops. I have never once had a Toshiba laptop that "just worked" out of the box with Linux. Whether it was power management, display drivers, or wifi, there was always something that was broken out of the box and needed to be fixed. Heck, I have a Toshiba A305 for which Linux still doesn't have proper power management drivers, even though the laptop is about a decade old. When people ask me about Linux on laptops, I say that they should go with either Lenovos or (more lately) the new Dell XPS models. Never Sony, never Toshiba. I've never heard of anyone having a good experience installing Linux on laptops made by those two manufacturers.
phmagic 10y ago
The iPad happened. Most of the uses for the Japanese laptops can be covered by the iPad.
phmagic 10y ago
The iPad happened. Most of the uses for the Japanese laptops can be covered by the iPad.
Spooky23 10y ago
The japanese companies were pretty amazing in the commercial space. My employer had a few Fujitsu ultra portables in the circa 2007 timeframe. One of our internal customers mentioned to a salesguy that they needed a particular port in a particular location on the laptop, not expecting anything. Two weeks later, they Fedexed a loaner/prototype with the port. Really an amazing experience. We were buying 5-6 figure quantities of Dells and HP, and they could barely handle trivial requests re packaging, etc.
- Johnny555 10y ago
  You were buying 10,000 - 100,000 laptops, or $10,000 - $100,000 worth of laptops (around 5 - 50 at $2000 each)? If it's the former, I'm surprised they didn't package them anyway you want. If the latter, I'm not surprised they wouldn't make any changes.
  - philtar 10y ago
    It's probably the latter. You can be not surprised, that's fine. You probably seem hard to impress as you just glossed over the fact that fujitsu did that for them.
- notoothpaste 10y ago
  I wonder what their manufacturing processes are like, such that they could accommodate this kind of flexibility.
  - dba7dba 10y ago
    It was probably more like having some engineers and guys in shop/factory work weekend to meet the demand, on top of what they were already supposed to do.
    - notoothpaste 10y ago
      In order to create a prototype with a port in a different location, they would need, at the very least, to produce a one-off motherboard PCB, and a one-off injection molded case. That they could justify doing so to produce near production quality results for a small order either indicates impressive manufacturing flexibility, or an inefficient manufacturing process.
carsongross 10y ago
I spent a lot of time on http://www.dynamism.com/ http://www.dynamism.com/ looking at the ultralight computers they had in Japan. Almost pulled the trigger a few times, they had awesome stuff. The OQO was from that era too. Good times.
- tomcam 10y ago
  I spent thousands with them on teeny teeny computers, including the OQO. Worth it!
- XJOKOLAT 10y ago
  As we speak, I'm literally looking up OQO on wiki/elsewhere to reminisce ... good times indeed.
kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
> I have a strange attachment to Panasonic I have a lifetime prohibition on any Panasonic products after experiencing the most craptastic DVD recorder ever to grace this Earth. It crashes at random, takes forever to boot, won't boot reliably with a disc in the drive, can't play Audio CDs without locking up, responds to remote button presses with multi-second lag, and gets the tuner channels out of sync with the OSD. Basically a complete fuckup. Their "fix" in the successor model was to add a reset button. Never again Panasonic.
bdcravens 10y ago
Your anchor tags are using curly quotes, so external links aren't working.
partycoder 10y ago
Japan is more active around smartphones rather than laptops and desktops, since you can use them on trains, the preferred way of transport. People spend some considerable amount of time on trains. Small spaces make desktops not a very good choice.
- deleted 10y ago
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benzesandbetter 10y ago
In the early 2000's Japan was way ahead in the Sub-notebook market. As subnotebooks and tablets have come into popularity and wide availability worldwide, this arbitrage opportunity has narrowed significantly. In 2007, I picked up a Panasonic R6 (10" LetsNote/toughbook). It was a great little machine, and I ran both Windows and Debian on it. The keyboard was a bit cramped, and the circular trackpad was pretty lame, but overall I loved the machine. Everywhere I went people would notice it and ask about it. After about 14 months, the logic board failed, and I discovered that as grey-market import, there was no warranty. This was a hard lesson, as I had paid almost $2k USD for the machine. Fortunately, I was back in the states when it happened, so I wasn't stranded abroad without a working laptop. Earlier this year, I was in Japan and picked up a Japanese chromebook 10" for under $200. The keyboard is both english and Japanese which makes it a bit of a conversation starter. I installed Debian on it via Crouton (alongside ChromeOS). When I travel, I usually bring both my MacBook Air, and the Chromebook, and particularly in the developing world, I leave my MBA back in my hotel or apartment and bring my Chromebook with me when I'm out and about in the city.
- minikomi 10y ago
  Can you share which Chromebook you got? I'm living in Japan and am interested.
  - benzesandbetter 10y ago
    I have the Chromebook Flip C100
    - minikomi 10y ago
      Interesting. Seems the price has changed - I can't find it for any less than ¥35,000 without flets hikari subsidy.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
  > The keyboard is both english and Japanese So, Japanese, then? Or does it have English labels on the modifier keys?
Tepix 10y ago
I bought a Toshiba Libretto L1 back in 2001 via the Internet (using translation services) and had it shipped to Germany. It was a fantastic form factor: A super wide 10" 1280x600 display (143dpi) which was so wide that it left enough room for a decent keyboard. The CPU was a Transmeta Crusoe 600Mhz which was, unfortunately, the bottleneck of the system. One other highlight I remember about this machine: Despite not having any international warranty that I was aware of, when the machine developed a problem, I called Toshiba Europe and they picked it up and send it back repaired a week later for free. I was in Japan this summer and also had a look at the notebooks on sale there but nothing really caught my attention. With the arrival of Netbooks and later the Macbook Air 11", small notebooks are no longer hard to get in Europe.
- amiga-workbench 10y ago
  I've got a few Libretto's kicking around, they are fantastic machines, full pentium class UMPC's I've also got a GPRS modem for my 100CT and it makes a nice portable IRC machine. http://i.imgur.com/IUp4U7p.jpg http://i.imgur.com/IUp4U7p.jpg http://i.imgur.com/SuMjceM.jpg http://i.imgur.com/SuMjceM.jpg
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  - va3agav 10y ago
    Oh boy, I'm not going to hide my envy, those beasts look really sexy.
PebblesHD 10y ago
I've always loved their[Japanese] ultraportables for as long as I can remember. Probably their prime placement in the film and television I watched growing up. I've ended up with quite a collection of them at this point, ranging from the amazing little Vaio UX through the little Vaio P up to my 12" let's note. It weighs nothing, has an i5 and tons of RAM, I'm amazed they haven't taken over the US. Not to mention its tough as bricks. They certainly have a quirky, unique charm to them.
chx 10y ago
I had a Panasonic CF-Y5. As one review had it: "The exterior design of the machine's casing is reminiscent of a Sherman tank cross-bred with a 1970s sports saloon, while the lid opens with the grace of a bank vault door." It was incredibly lightweight (1.53kg at 14" with an optical drive!) and built like, well, a Sherman tank. It wasn't only the casing reminiscing it. In a weird little apartment overcrowded by all startup coders attending a conference someone accidentally kicked it off the table and yet it was completely OK. I could only afford it because the CF-Y7 just got out and for a while I couldn't afford them and then the B10 was no longer so incredibly tough (although the current models do mention a drop test and a pressurized test). Anyways, I am back to ThinkPads ever since. The keyboard is much better but the weight is worse. I am currently using a T420s upgraded with an 1080p screen and waiting for the Retro to happen. Our last hope.
dep_b 10y ago
I bought a Sony VAIO MultiFlip 13A for my wife because she loves Sony's design and she wanted a touchscreen, so we bought the basic model with an SSD. a) of a 128GB SSD, only 90GB was left after Sony took wat they thought was necessary b) the fan was incredibly noisy, it would crash randomly and would eventually die and take the notebook with it c) when put in a less performant mode, it's really less performant and still gets really hot d) the touch screen freaks out and other issues once it gets hot e) it still ran Windows That's what happened to Japanese laptops in my personal experience. Now I could eventually fix a) and b), e) was still required for Adobe software and it's still a freaking hot slow laptop that freaks out once in a while.
- pwg 10y ago
  > a) of a 128GB SSD, only 90GB was left after Sony took wat they thought was necessary > e) it still ran Windows Your "e" item indicates that it was not Sony who took 90G of the 128G SSD, but rather it was Microsoft who took 70% of the drive space. Lay the blame where it belongs, on Microsoft, they created an OS that consumes 90G of disk space. Sony did not create mswin, Sony just installed it because it is what most of their target market believes they want pre-installed.
  - kafkaesk 10y ago
    90 GB is what was left, not what was used. But even 38 GB seems a bit too much for a fresh OS, I assume that includes a recovery partition or the good old GiB/GB mix-up.
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      > GiB/GB That's only 7%
  - dep_b 10y ago
    Nope, that was wat Sony took for all kinds of rescue stuff. After that we were still looking at Windows and various Adobe Software plus scratch (working with external drives for storage, naturally).
herbst 10y ago
If thats your site. Please check the mobile view.
deleted 10y ago
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Aoyagi 10y ago
I love Panasonic's feature-packed laptops. Too bad they aren't sold in Europe, and with some strong components, too.
bpicolo 10y ago
I had a Vaio Z once (This was ~2010, probably the first Vaio Z series). Performance was good in the 11" package. But... the hinge was terrible, and I snapped it with a light drop. Agonizing 1.5 month repair sendout. $300 bill. Same day it came back, broke the hinge in the same place. Never bought another Vaio. And this is why I just buy Macs now. Repair is easy - a couple hours at the Apple store. And the things are built well. They can take a bit of a beating, which you need in a computer you're moving around, have in a backpack that'll inevitably be tossed around a bit, etc etc.
- fiatpandas 10y ago
  Using a 13" 2013 Vaio Z right now. It's a really great machine: 2x SSDs in RAID0, HDMI + VGA, 2x USB 3, SD reader, ethernet port with an interesting hatch mechanism to support its very thin form factor, 1080p, good thermal design. The product design is quite nice as well, which was an important factor for me. When researching the model before purchasing, I found a YT video with one of Sony's industrial designers disassembling the entire laptop, describing all the components and a few of the design decisions, to a tech reporter. There was definitely a level of design consideration and technology craft that reminded me a lot of Apple, albeit not as sophisticated with material science. But it was the nicest 13" PC laptop at the time. That said, there are issues with it: small key travel, flexible plastic body, bendy screen, out-of-box Sony bloatware (which I formatted away), lack of dedicated graphics, and it has absolutely terrible speakers.
  - nsomaru 10y ago
    I have the same model (SVZ13), I'm sure. Is yours carbon fibre? It's super fast and hasn't slowed down with a little maintenance. I'm sure it will go for a few more years with care. The docking station external graphics are useless though (only marginally better than the onboard intel HD) That said... Limitations I'm coming up against right now: 1) Cannot upgrade from 8GB RAM which is soldered to the board. I want to run more VM's! 2)I want two bigger SSD's to replace the current 2x128GB scenario. Once again, these are soldered to the board. 3)My sim tray broke and if I remove it it will definitely not be usable any more. 4) would love to install linux on it but not sure what the RAID0 story is there with this machine. There might be a way to do it, I just need a guide to parts etc (for ssd and hdd).
mark_l_watson 10y ago
I bought a 11" Vaio in 1990 and loved it, but it only lasted about 18 months. I just bought one of the small 12" MacBooks last Friday and it reminds me of the Vaio experience, but I am concerned that it is not physically robust.

196 points by atjamielittle 10y ago

Japan is really behind in PC/Laptop. I was just there last week and the big PC and electronic stores only stock up to Geforce. Asus also has a big presence there now, but the prices are a lot more than US pricing for the same stuff. Not much innovation in the computer space. Home eletronics and appliances are amazing though. Their high end electrolux style vacuum stick cleaners easily clear $800 USD and are really awesome. The rice cookers can hit $600-$800 and can make the perfect rice you normally only get in Japan. The mcirowaves have built in toast oven in one unit, and it works amazingly well. Coming home, its kinda sad some of the convinces we dont have like the toilets, bathroom, kitchen, and even video doorbells (out current "smart" stuff are still rubbish).

themodelplumber 10y ago
> The mcirowaves have built in toast oven in one unit, and it works amazingly well I had one in my apartment outside Nagoya in 1996. Still can't believe I have never seen one in the states. I wonder if they just can't justify the potential marketing friction.
- jcrawfordor 10y ago
  These are on sale at WalMart in the US. Indo think they're rather new there though.
  - chemmail 10y ago
    Will have to look out for it! Also stationary is amazing in Japan. They have Pilot Friction erasable pens that erase perfectly and writes amazing. Its been popular there over 10 years and barely a blip here in the US. You can actually find them at depotmax.
    - Freak_NL 10y ago
      Absolutely, Japan is great for stationary. I love the KuruToga mechanical pencils; these rotate the pencil lead some 30 degrees each time you lift the pencil from the paper. This means you always end up with a perfectly round tip and lines of equal thickness instead of the chisel tip you end up with normally. I used to rotate my simpler mechanical pencils myself before I found these. Never going back.
- imglorp 10y ago
  It's the same reason we still have 2 piece washer/dryers: so they can sell two appliances instead of one. Until our market demands a combo mike/toast, we won't have one.
  - VLM 10y ago
    My Grandmother had a combo oven / microwave in the 80s. Sears model, I think. It was a full size oven and I believe it ran the microwave part off the 220 connection. The control panel was pretty complicated looking. It suffered the inevitable result of TV/VCR or TV/DVD combo units where I don't remember which half burned out first but once one half broke it was time to buy two separated devices.
  - randallsquared 10y ago
    Maybe they're much better now, but 15 years ago, I used a machine that washed and dried in the same drum, and it was pretty bad at both. A full cycle for one load on minimum settings took an hour and a half or two hours, and the load was tiny in comparison to any other washer or dryer I've ever used. Even if it had taken slightly less time than separate units, and even if the load size had been realistic, I would have had to use two of them to get the usual throughput I'm used to, where I can do a week of laundry in about 5 hours (two people's clothes, bath and kitchen, bedding). If I had to use that machine currently, it would be running for a few hours every day.
  - legulere 10y ago
    The problem with combined washers/dryers is that dryers need to be more empty than washing machines. That means you can either only wash a rather small amount of clothes or you have to take out some clothes after washing and before drying.
- dom0 10y ago
  We've got a Samsung with that, it's pretty old (90s-ish). (Germany... maybe we have a thing with the Japanese... but then again Samsung "is" Korean?!)
deleted 10y ago
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narag 10y ago
Asus also has a big presence there now, but the prices are a lot more than US pricing for the same stuff. The same Asus stuff or other brands? I live in Spain and although I haven't looked recently, Asus was the best quality-price relation here. In particular, batteries duration similar to macs, for half the money. If I needed a laptop now, I would see their offer first for sure. Time ago, I read that Asus doesn't sell in the USA, what explained how little comments I saw in specialized webs about their laptops.

Ezhik 10y ago

What's the laptop market like in Japan anyway? I don't really know a lot about it, but it's always interesting to see these random Panasonic or Fujitsu laptops not sold here, or those rare Japan-exclusive experimental ThinkPads.

atjamielittle 10y ago
One thing that I noticed when looking around was that screen resolution didn't seem to be a big focus. The Panasonic models still have optical media. I can't think of a single western laptop that has a Blu-Ray burner in it. There might be some gaming laptops with that, but they would probably be 17 inch monsters and not extremely lightweight laptops.
- TulliusCicero 10y ago
  In the US, PC gamers at least abandoned physical media very early.
TheAceOfHearts 10y ago
I work for a startup with roughly half of its employees working from Japan. All developers use Apple laptops. I can't remember off the top of my head if non-developers used other brands.
- santaclaus 10y ago
  I work with a few developers from Japan - MacBook Pros running Windows, across the board.
  - walterbell 10y ago
    Why do they run Windows on an expensive MacBook Pro, e.g. how is power management, HiDPI, driver support, etc? Is this mostly Windows 7 or 10? Why not macOS + Windows in a VM?
    - 10y ago

bikitan 10y ago

I think Japan is going to be one of the first markets to see laptop sales dry up almost completely. Most people are fine with their iPhones. Where I work, all developers use macbooks and everyone else uses a thinkpad. A lot of other laptop models, like a lot of tech in Japan, is targeted at the Japanese market only. Dynabooks are the budget windows machine of choice at the moment, it seems. Although most young people choose Apple whenever possible anyway.

b2600 10y ago
Really not trying to start an OS war but for the sake of accuracy Android is the dominant mobile OS in Japan, not iPhone.
- zepto 10y ago
  If you aren't trying to start a war, please provide a citation to back this up so there can be no dispute.
  - mattnumbe 10y ago
    3rd party citation after searching "dominant OS Japan" in google https://www.statista.com/statistics/260415/market-share-held-by-smartphone-operating-systems-in-japan/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/260415/market-share-held... Android 64.6%
    - ralfd 10y ago
      Looking at the pattern: if the statistic would end in autumn instead of summer, then iOS could also have come up on top.
      - dismantlethesun 10y ago
        How can market share dramatically swing between 30% and 60% like it's doing in this chart? Is this bad data? Is the market expanding & contracting so greatly that existing users are a minority of future marketshare?

bluedino 10y ago

I thought this would be about the tiny models like the Toshiba Libretto

EdSharkey 10y ago
My drinking buddy in the early 2000's carried his libretto around in big baggy jeans pockets so he could pull it out and code on his game any time he was out and about and had a free moment. I always thought that was so 1337.
- Zarel 10y ago
  I used to code on the Voyage 200, which also fit in my coat pockets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-92_series#Voyage_200 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-92_series#Voyage_200 My fingers were small enough to touch type on those keys. After I grew out of TI-BASIC, I always wanted something like that for computer programming, too, but I never managed to find one. A laptop in regular-laptop shape that was 6" or so would be ideal for me. I've also been considering a phone/phablet with a keyboard case or keyboard cover, but none seem to be touch-typable. :/
  - spqr0a1 10y ago
    How about the Pyra? Seems to be close to your ideal. https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/ https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/
- partisan 10y ago
  I had a Sony Vaio Picturebook around that time and would use it to do homework, listen to MP3s, etc. I turned the sleep function off when listening to music and would just keep it in the pocket of my jacket. It was a beautiful little machine.

mc32 10y ago

One thing likely contributed to their downfall was US manufactures moved operations overseas and many Japanese manufacturers kept production in Japan making them expensive to the Us market --that and Apple and others catching up in terms of "sleekness" and aesthetics. People would buy Vaios despite poor hardware because they were thin and looked cool.

coldtea 10y ago
>that and Apple and others catching up in terms of "sleekness" and aesthetics. Wasn't Apple always ahead of the Japanese laptops in terms of sleekness and aesthetics?
- cstejerean 10y ago
  No, not always. The Sony Vaio was attractive enough back in its day that Steve Jobs offered Sony to run Mac OS on them (which they declined).
  - phs318u 10y ago
    Wow. Was not aware of that. Thanks. For those who couldn't be bothered googling... http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/5/5380832/sony-vaio-apple-os-x-steve-jobs-meeting-report http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/5/5380832/sony-vaio-apple-os-...
  - dopeboy 10y ago
    Had to look this up because I had no clue. > Most of Sony's executives spends their winter vacation in Hawaii and play golf after celebrating new year. In one of those new year golf competitions back in 2001, " Steve Jobs and another Apple executive were waiting for us at the end of golf course holding VAIO running Mac OS" recalls Ando.[President of Sony at the time] > Ando liked Apple. He always felt Mac and VAIO were so close in philosophy. He especially admired the original iMac introduced in 1998. But the timing was bad for Sony, it is just about the time, Sony's VAIO gained popularity and it is just about the time that VAIO team had finished optimizing both VAIO's hardware and software specifically for Windows platform. Because of this, most of the VAIO team opposed asking 'if it is worth it.' And that was the end of story for this Mac-compatible VAIO. http://nobi.com/en/Steve%20Jobs%20and%20Japan/entry-1212.html http://nobi.com/en/Steve%20Jobs%20and%20Japan/entry-1212.htm...

zumu 10y ago

My current laptop is a toshiba, and I bought it in the US. I've had good luck with the brand over the years.

rmason 10y ago
I've had really good luck with Toshiba Qosmio's, but they've stopped making these really high end machines.
mikekchar 10y ago
I have a Japanese Toshiba KIRA V63 (only sold in Japan, for some stupid reason). It's a great machine and quite cheap for it's specs. I bought it for battery life (I can do a whole day of programming on a single charge in Linux), but it has good performance as well. I've been very pleasantly surprised at how well the Intel 5200U has performed. Also at only 1.2 kg, I can easily stick it in my bag and carry it with me anywhere I go. I've seen on the news that Toshiba plans to shut down its laptop division in the near future. Some people have told me that it isn't 100% for sure, so I'm hanging on to some hope. I've been looking at offerings of other Japanese makers (I live in Japan) and there is nothing else comparable. I'm not sure what I'll do when I need to replace this one. Toshiba has been my go to maker for the last 10 years or so because virtually everything they make "just works" on Linux.
- quanticle 10y ago
  >Toshiba has been my go to maker for the last 10 years or so because virtually everything they make "just works" on Linux. This is honestly a pretty shocking statement for me, because Toshiba has long been my go-to example for the worst-case scenario of installing Linux on laptops. I have never once had a Toshiba laptop that "just worked" out of the box with Linux. Whether it was power management, display drivers, or wifi, there was always something that was broken out of the box and needed to be fixed. Heck, I have a Toshiba A305 for which Linux still doesn't have proper power management drivers, even though the laptop is about a decade old. When people ask me about Linux on laptops, I say that they should go with either Lenovos or (more lately) the new Dell XPS models. Never Sony, never Toshiba. I've never heard of anyone having a good experience installing Linux on laptops made by those two manufacturers.

phmagic 10y ago

The iPad happened. Most of the uses for the Japanese laptops can be covered by the iPad.

phmagic 10y ago

The iPad happened. Most of the uses for the Japanese laptops can be covered by the iPad.

Spooky23 10y ago

The japanese companies were pretty amazing in the commercial space. My employer had a few Fujitsu ultra portables in the circa 2007 timeframe. One of our internal customers mentioned to a salesguy that they needed a particular port in a particular location on the laptop, not expecting anything. Two weeks later, they Fedexed a loaner/prototype with the port. Really an amazing experience. We were buying 5-6 figure quantities of Dells and HP, and they could barely handle trivial requests re packaging, etc.

Johnny555 10y ago
You were buying 10,000 - 100,000 laptops, or $10,000 - $100,000 worth of laptops (around 5 - 50 at $2000 each)? If it's the former, I'm surprised they didn't package them anyway you want. If the latter, I'm not surprised they wouldn't make any changes.
- philtar 10y ago
  It's probably the latter. You can be not surprised, that's fine. You probably seem hard to impress as you just glossed over the fact that fujitsu did that for them.
notoothpaste 10y ago
I wonder what their manufacturing processes are like, such that they could accommodate this kind of flexibility.
- dba7dba 10y ago
  It was probably more like having some engineers and guys in shop/factory work weekend to meet the demand, on top of what they were already supposed to do.
  - notoothpaste 10y ago
    In order to create a prototype with a port in a different location, they would need, at the very least, to produce a one-off motherboard PCB, and a one-off injection molded case. That they could justify doing so to produce near production quality results for a small order either indicates impressive manufacturing flexibility, or an inefficient manufacturing process.

carsongross 10y ago

I spent a lot of time on http://www.dynamism.com/ http://www.dynamism.com/ looking at the ultralight computers they had in Japan. Almost pulled the trigger a few times, they had awesome stuff. The OQO was from that era too. Good times.

tomcam 10y ago
I spent thousands with them on teeny teeny computers, including the OQO. Worth it!
XJOKOLAT 10y ago
As we speak, I'm literally looking up OQO on wiki/elsewhere to reminisce ... good times indeed.

kevin_thibedeau 10y ago

> I have a strange attachment to Panasonic I have a lifetime prohibition on any Panasonic products after experiencing the most craptastic DVD recorder ever to grace this Earth. It crashes at random, takes forever to boot, won't boot reliably with a disc in the drive, can't play Audio CDs without locking up, responds to remote button presses with multi-second lag, and gets the tuner channels out of sync with the OSD. Basically a complete fuckup. Their "fix" in the successor model was to add a reset button. Never again Panasonic.

bdcravens 10y ago

Your anchor tags are using curly quotes, so external links aren't working.

partycoder 10y ago

Japan is more active around smartphones rather than laptops and desktops, since you can use them on trains, the preferred way of transport. People spend some considerable amount of time on trains. Small spaces make desktops not a very good choice.

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benzesandbetter 10y ago

In the early 2000's Japan was way ahead in the Sub-notebook market. As subnotebooks and tablets have come into popularity and wide availability worldwide, this arbitrage opportunity has narrowed significantly. In 2007, I picked up a Panasonic R6 (10" LetsNote/toughbook). It was a great little machine, and I ran both Windows and Debian on it. The keyboard was a bit cramped, and the circular trackpad was pretty lame, but overall I loved the machine. Everywhere I went people would notice it and ask about it. After about 14 months, the logic board failed, and I discovered that as grey-market import, there was no warranty. This was a hard lesson, as I had paid almost $2k USD for the machine. Fortunately, I was back in the states when it happened, so I wasn't stranded abroad without a working laptop. Earlier this year, I was in Japan and picked up a Japanese chromebook 10" for under $200. The keyboard is both english and Japanese which makes it a bit of a conversation starter. I installed Debian on it via Crouton (alongside ChromeOS). When I travel, I usually bring both my MacBook Air, and the Chromebook, and particularly in the developing world, I leave my MBA back in my hotel or apartment and bring my Chromebook with me when I'm out and about in the city.

minikomi 10y ago
Can you share which Chromebook you got? I'm living in Japan and am interested.
- benzesandbetter 10y ago
  I have the Chromebook Flip C100
  - minikomi 10y ago
    Interesting. Seems the price has changed - I can't find it for any less than ¥35,000 without flets hikari subsidy.
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
> The keyboard is both english and Japanese So, Japanese, then? Or does it have English labels on the modifier keys?

Tepix 10y ago

I bought a Toshiba Libretto L1 back in 2001 via the Internet (using translation services) and had it shipped to Germany. It was a fantastic form factor: A super wide 10" 1280x600 display (143dpi) which was so wide that it left enough room for a decent keyboard. The CPU was a Transmeta Crusoe 600Mhz which was, unfortunately, the bottleneck of the system. One other highlight I remember about this machine: Despite not having any international warranty that I was aware of, when the machine developed a problem, I called Toshiba Europe and they picked it up and send it back repaired a week later for free. I was in Japan this summer and also had a look at the notebooks on sale there but nothing really caught my attention. With the arrival of Netbooks and later the Macbook Air 11", small notebooks are no longer hard to get in Europe.

amiga-workbench 10y ago
I've got a few Libretto's kicking around, they are fantastic machines, full pentium class UMPC's I've also got a GPRS modem for my 100CT and it makes a nice portable IRC machine. http://i.imgur.com/IUp4U7p.jpg http://i.imgur.com/IUp4U7p.jpg http://i.imgur.com/SuMjceM.jpg http://i.imgur.com/SuMjceM.jpg
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- va3agav 10y ago
  Oh boy, I'm not going to hide my envy, those beasts look really sexy.

PebblesHD 10y ago

I've always loved their[Japanese] ultraportables for as long as I can remember. Probably their prime placement in the film and television I watched growing up. I've ended up with quite a collection of them at this point, ranging from the amazing little Vaio UX through the little Vaio P up to my 12" let's note. It weighs nothing, has an i5 and tons of RAM, I'm amazed they haven't taken over the US. Not to mention its tough as bricks. They certainly have a quirky, unique charm to them.

chx 10y ago

I had a Panasonic CF-Y5. As one review had it: "The exterior design of the machine's casing is reminiscent of a Sherman tank cross-bred with a 1970s sports saloon, while the lid opens with the grace of a bank vault door." It was incredibly lightweight (1.53kg at 14" with an optical drive!) and built like, well, a Sherman tank. It wasn't only the casing reminiscing it. In a weird little apartment overcrowded by all startup coders attending a conference someone accidentally kicked it off the table and yet it was completely OK. I could only afford it because the CF-Y7 just got out and for a while I couldn't afford them and then the B10 was no longer so incredibly tough (although the current models do mention a drop test and a pressurized test). Anyways, I am back to ThinkPads ever since. The keyboard is much better but the weight is worse. I am currently using a T420s upgraded with an 1080p screen and waiting for the Retro to happen. Our last hope.

dep_b 10y ago

I bought a Sony VAIO MultiFlip 13A for my wife because she loves Sony's design and she wanted a touchscreen, so we bought the basic model with an SSD. a) of a 128GB SSD, only 90GB was left after Sony took wat they thought was necessary b) the fan was incredibly noisy, it would crash randomly and would eventually die and take the notebook with it c) when put in a less performant mode, it's really less performant and still gets really hot d) the touch screen freaks out and other issues once it gets hot e) it still ran Windows That's what happened to Japanese laptops in my personal experience. Now I could eventually fix a) and b), e) was still required for Adobe software and it's still a freaking hot slow laptop that freaks out once in a while.

pwg 10y ago
> a) of a 128GB SSD, only 90GB was left after Sony took wat they thought was necessary > e) it still ran Windows Your "e" item indicates that it was not Sony who took 90G of the 128G SSD, but rather it was Microsoft who took 70% of the drive space. Lay the blame where it belongs, on Microsoft, they created an OS that consumes 90G of disk space. Sony did not create mswin, Sony just installed it because it is what most of their target market believes they want pre-installed.
- kafkaesk 10y ago
  90 GB is what was left, not what was used. But even 38 GB seems a bit too much for a fresh OS, I assume that includes a recovery partition or the good old GiB/GB mix-up.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    > GiB/GB That's only 7%
- dep_b 10y ago
  Nope, that was wat Sony took for all kinds of rescue stuff. After that we were still looking at Windows and various Adobe Software plus scratch (working with external drives for storage, naturally).

herbst 10y ago

If thats your site. Please check the mobile view.

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Aoyagi 10y ago

I love Panasonic's feature-packed laptops. Too bad they aren't sold in Europe, and with some strong components, too.

bpicolo 10y ago

I had a Vaio Z once (This was ~2010, probably the first Vaio Z series). Performance was good in the 11" package. But... the hinge was terrible, and I snapped it with a light drop. Agonizing 1.5 month repair sendout. $300 bill. Same day it came back, broke the hinge in the same place. Never bought another Vaio. And this is why I just buy Macs now. Repair is easy - a couple hours at the Apple store. And the things are built well. They can take a bit of a beating, which you need in a computer you're moving around, have in a backpack that'll inevitably be tossed around a bit, etc etc.

fiatpandas 10y ago
Using a 13" 2013 Vaio Z right now. It's a really great machine: 2x SSDs in RAID0, HDMI + VGA, 2x USB 3, SD reader, ethernet port with an interesting hatch mechanism to support its very thin form factor, 1080p, good thermal design. The product design is quite nice as well, which was an important factor for me. When researching the model before purchasing, I found a YT video with one of Sony's industrial designers disassembling the entire laptop, describing all the components and a few of the design decisions, to a tech reporter. There was definitely a level of design consideration and technology craft that reminded me a lot of Apple, albeit not as sophisticated with material science. But it was the nicest 13" PC laptop at the time. That said, there are issues with it: small key travel, flexible plastic body, bendy screen, out-of-box Sony bloatware (which I formatted away), lack of dedicated graphics, and it has absolutely terrible speakers.
- nsomaru 10y ago
  I have the same model (SVZ13), I'm sure. Is yours carbon fibre? It's super fast and hasn't slowed down with a little maintenance. I'm sure it will go for a few more years with care. The docking station external graphics are useless though (only marginally better than the onboard intel HD) That said... Limitations I'm coming up against right now: 1) Cannot upgrade from 8GB RAM which is soldered to the board. I want to run more VM's! 2)I want two bigger SSD's to replace the current 2x128GB scenario. Once again, these are soldered to the board. 3)My sim tray broke and if I remove it it will definitely not be usable any more. 4) would love to install linux on it but not sure what the RAID0 story is there with this machine. There might be a way to do it, I just need a guide to parts etc (for ssd and hdd).

mark_l_watson 10y ago

I bought a 11" Vaio in 1990 and loved it, but it only lasted about 18 months. I just bought one of the small 12" MacBooks last Friday and it reminds me of the Vaio experience, but I am concerned that it is not physically robust.