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It might be a symptom of people aging out if the industry or what jobs they may have had. Cloistered in a university somebody may never have seen the groundbre

It might be a symptom of people aging out if the industry or what jobs they may have had. Cloistered in a university somebody may never have seen the groundbreaking Toshibas, or the Zenith supersport. Its been interesting to me to watch an industry giant like Toshiba abandon the laptop market while Apple took all the mindshare. Zenith was probably doomed as their main businesses were decimated by white box suppliers but toshiba had few peers 25 or 30 years ago. I did used to favour toshibas but the last two were hard to distinguish from everything else.

cehrlich 5y ago
Some 20+ years ago my dad had a Toshiba Portégé (no idea what the model number was, but it had a P3-500) that didn’t weigh more than a current MacBook Air, yet was a competent laptop. They were truly ahead of their time in some ways. I wonder what happened. Innovation slowed down? Poor product market fit / not price competitive? Failed at securing corporate mindshare like Dell/HP/IBM?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  I'm not sure. HP have shown that a premium laptop like the Spectre definitely has a market, which is where Toshiba probably needed to be. They seemed to decide at some point that they wanted to cover the entire market, including budget offerings like the Satellite right up to the fancy touchscreen, crazy folding half-tablet Ultrabook. The last Satellite I bought all the hinges broke and the screen flaps about (still works though). My wife's old Ultrabook has a cool design idea (screen slides over the keyboard and folds upwards) but all the hinge gubbins are exposed so it looks half-finished when it's open. It has also decided to poop itself when Microsoft send out updates on a semi-regular basis and require booting from a rescue USB. Both of them are ancient though. Their market used to be "I'm doing business but I'm not a developer" types who wanted something reliable and a little stylish and paid a premium for it, so I suspect what happened is too many budget Satellites and not enough interesting thinking like the Ultrabooks.

cehrlich 5y ago

Some 20+ years ago my dad had a Toshiba Portégé (no idea what the model number was, but it had a P3-500) that didn’t weigh more than a current MacBook Air, yet was a competent laptop. They were truly ahead of their time in some ways. I wonder what happened. Innovation slowed down? Poor product market fit / not price competitive? Failed at securing corporate mindshare like Dell/HP/IBM?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
smackeyacky 5y ago
I'm not sure. HP have shown that a premium laptop like the Spectre definitely has a market, which is where Toshiba probably needed to be. They seemed to decide at some point that they wanted to cover the entire market, including budget offerings like the Satellite right up to the fancy touchscreen, crazy folding half-tablet Ultrabook. The last Satellite I bought all the hinges broke and the screen flaps about (still works though). My wife's old Ultrabook has a cool design idea (screen slides over the keyboard and folds upwards) but all the hinge gubbins are exposed so it looks half-finished when it's open. It has also decided to poop itself when Microsoft send out updates on a semi-regular basis and require booting from a rescue USB. Both of them are ancient though. Their market used to be "I'm doing business but I'm not a developer" types who wanted something reliable and a little stylish and paid a premium for it, so I suspect what happened is too many budget Satellites and not enough interesting thinking like the Ultrabooks.