> This the latest in a string of deals by Toshiba, which has been forced to sell off units to repair a balance sheet after the bankruptcy of a nuclear energy subsidiary.
So it's not really related to the perpetually prophesied "end of pc era" that the tech media has been waxing poetic about since the first iPad release, it's because Toshiba's having financial troubles.
They’re still selling the unit for less than $40M, coming from a market leader position a few years ago. Not exactly a vote of confidence insofar as the industry is concerned
I mean, everyone and their mother has a laptop line at this point. I could see buying another company's brand of laptops as more about securing a new label than about something you actually want to make.
Ive had good luck with a Asus AFTER it was formatted. The bloatware from the original install had me trashing Asus as a company because I thought their hardware sucked.
I dont think HP can be trusted, they have 1000 dollar laptops without onboard graphics that they sell to computer illiterate people that want big touch screens and gimmick features.
Just wanted to second your recommendation and add that they also run Windows very well (although personally I ran Fedora on my previous ThinkPad and current Dell XPS 15).
If you do go down the Windows route, just make sure you create new installation media from the Microsoft website and do a clean install before anything else.
Macbook pro (if you can find one without keyboard issues)
I also use an old Thinkpad 11.6" inch - it runs Ubuntu. I put it on a self-driving RC car and it won't die. Generally recommend Thinkpads.
I also have an HP Spectre x360 13" 2017. The trackpad is a bit buggy with Ubuntu but apart from that its seriously not a bad deal. It has USB-c and I can connect an external GPU enclosure for machine learning. Also great as a Netflix device
The DPI is not so bad. It's not retina, but at 128 DPI it's decent.
The biggest issues IMO are ghosting and color gamut, but I don't really care for using Sublime or browsing Reddit and HN. The MBA is not my main machine anyway.
Is the keyboard that bad that sticking with 2015 is worth it? For just about the same price the 2017's seem to have significantly faster SSD's by some benchmarks, a thinner form factor, slightly faster RAM and maybe a tiny perf boost from Kaby Lake. I don't expect to use the touchbar much but I don't see it being an issue either, I already map escape to capslock.
It's a matter of taste: I personally love the keyboard, much better in my opinion than the one of my old MacBook Air, or any other keyboard I've used in fact. But it took me a while to get used to it. However I would not be surprised to see it die prematurely: be careful not to stick something (food...) under a key!
The touchbar is entirely useless though. I've mapped the escape key to capslock, not doing so would have driven me insane.
I actually like the feel of the new keyboard but the "J" key is busted and compressed air isn't cutting it anymore so I'm going to have to send my main laptop off for a week which is a huge disturbance in my work flow (gotta set up the backup Mac)
Sure, find a maxed out 15" model. It'll do pretty much whatever you need it too. Mine (purchased new) still blows a lot of stuff out of the water as far as baseline day to day performance.
Mpbs were, and still are, very popular dev machines, so most dev tasks are pretty easy to achieve. Just be careful not to install multiple package managers or you may never find some of your libraries again.
Exact opposite at my work. Most devs were stuck trying to use VMs with 16GB Macbook Pros and I'm sitting with a 64GB Clevo happily running Linux. Its hard to overstate how much better a modern NVMe m.2 stick and spare ram for a memory disk in key locations is for your dev experience.
Thinkpad T series is the modern classic developers workorse for getting things done; if you feel like paying a premium for a pretty tool and want to hang out in coffee shops a lot then you can get a Macbook.
I feel like Thinkpad Ts started taking major steps backwards around 2013. Is that just me?
I kept a 2011-era one alive for a long time, but it finally died late last year - and nothing that Lenovo was selling at the time seemed very tempting.
I work with a lot of ThinkPad Yogas. They are decent. The business machines are not terrible on bloat. I would still download a Win10 installer and nuke the factory image.
I like Fujitsu Lifebook E series. Of course they are not the cheapest, but they come without bloatware since ever. Also my over 10 years old power supply still works with today's newer machines and via versa. And they have not just FULL SIZE CURSOR buttons, they have Page Up and Down buttons (without Fn) too, even on the 13" model. I also like the silver look with the thin red line.
I'm still beating the drums that the mid range chromebooks are the best Linux computer deals around. Take a look at something like the Asus C302 (and it won't come with the bloatware you mentioned about your previous Asus). Google's Pixelbook is a really impressive piece of hardware and you can currently get that for $675 (down from $1000).
chromebooks would be great if it weren't for the rather large software limitations of their ARM processors. so many packages and libraries just wont work. at that point, chromebooks feel like just another toy similar to your phone.
Dell XPS 15! Build quality (and touch pad) are equal to MacBooks and they come with minimal bloat ware.
Also Dell support for me personally has been great so far. I had a single dead pixel on my screen and they replaced without any questions within just two weeks.
Most Linux distros work out of the box. Manjaro took me 20 minutes to set up.
For most vendors, there is a big difference between their consumer hardware, sold based on price, bells & whistles; and their corporate hardware, sold based on cost of ownership - availability, manageability, serviceability, support. In many cases, the corporate model is worth the extra cost up front - it saves much more in headaches down the road. But usually they lack features for gaming and some other consumer or specialized applications.
I've seen many HP corporate models last seemingly forever - so long that the users grow frustrated because they can't justify a new computer. There's a ~14 year old one not far from where I'm sitting that runs perfectly and is in perfect condition, other than the pointstick (it has a trackpad too).
I'm surprised they're still going. I bought an Toshiba Tecra for work use about seven or eight years ago and the first boot took about two hours while it downloaded, installed and set up a mountain of crapware, hundreds of useless utilities and other junk.
Luckily it was the only Windows boot and being all Intel it ran Linux flawlessly.
Why is it so hard for a laptop maker to not completely fuck up software? Plain Windows with no OEM additions other than actual drivers would be welcome.
>Why is it so hard for a laptop maker to not completely fuck up software?
the demand for $400 laptops means you gotta sell out somewhere, sadly. the first thing i always do when a family member gets a new laptop is ask to see it first thing so i can format and reinstall windows. some of those oem-added bloatwares are downright toxic
There's no good excuse for it. Especially not in a business line. I bought a $200 laptop recently that came with very little bloatware, there is zero need ever to turn my laptop / phone into a swamp of poorly coded garbage. After replacing the 'fresh' Win10 install with Ubuntu, there was an extra 10 GB free on my 32 GB drive...
I believe that even without all the crapware, a Windows installation with all bells ans whistles is still quite a bit bigger than your average Linux installation, even Ubuntu. Although I agree that 10 GB is really a lot.
The only explanation I can imagine in my mind is a pretty flawed incentive system with these OEMs. I guess some people are rewarded in some way, by bringing in some additional thing into the laptop's default installation that brings another dollar per piece.
That's exactly what happens: say profits are stable, as you'd expect in a mature, relatively efficient market. You're the product manager and can tell your boss that revenue is stable or that you're getting an extra $20/unit kickback from bundling adware like Superfish or a McAfee trial.
Your annual bonus depends on whether that number moves up or down and you believe that most people decide what computer to buy by sorting by price. What do you do?
I'm a fan of the "Signature Edition" program that Microsoft leads that forces off-the-shelf clean Windows installs. (It's an official program at Microsoft's own Stores, applied to all their systems, but you can ask and/or secret handshake for one at other retailers like Best Buy and Staples.)
OEMs mostly don't want you to do apples-to-apples comparisons of models between retail stores, but the last time I put the effort into the math it seemed like almost exactly a $50 premium from the bloatware model to the Signature Edition version of that same model.
Have you reinstalled Windows lately? A vanilla Windows 10 install comes preloaded with a dozen crappy third-party demo/F2P apps (including Candy Crush) which you have to remove one by one.
The question is not why laptop makers bundle crapware, but why frivolous and user-hostile design decisions are considered acceptable in the Windows PC space as a whole.
Why wouldn't it activate for you? There's a standard ISO download from MS and you don't even need to type in a product key now that's stored in the bios.
Hmm, I last tried this in the Windows 7 days with one of those ISOs from MS. The license key on the sticker didn't work, and neither did punching it into the activation phone line.
Yes I've run into that with 7, these days I've even managed to activate 10 with a win7 OEM key. The website refused it but it was accepted when booting the downloaded installer.
The OEM additions usually have negative cost (they get paid to include them). If you look for a more expensive model (try the small business section if the vendor has one), you can probably find one that doesn't have those additions, you will just have to pay for the true cost of the laptop and not the ad-subsidized cost.
yup, and it makes sense -- for each one of us that recoils in horror at the mcafee logo when we first boot a fresh laptop, there's two more who shrug and continue on with their lives and one who pays to upgrade to ultimate bad guy stopper pro (tm) edition
It's the Facebook "you don't get something of real value for free" but with say a $400 baseline cost.
I hate this business model as I'm sure most other folks do as well - but it's instructive to understand that it's not just online services like FB that rely on it. It's infested hardware, media, pretty much all parts of our consumer life... give it time and the corporate adlords will infest government/city services as well. Ads everywhere, minority-report style.
> Why is it so hard for a laptop maker to not completely fuck up software?
No competition: Windows is the default in Japan, and they make the meat of their money there, by selling overprices laptops at 2-3 times the price they sell overseas. The typical electronic stores in Japan are full of japan-made computers and you only get a small Lenovo corner and that's more or less it. There must be either tariffs or import rules to protect domestic companies, so they have absolutely no incentive to serve the end user or to make anything remotely valuable. And the crapware installed by default is just another monetization strategy.
Microsoft sells "Signature Edition" machines which are basically what you're looking for.
A friend bought one and it was roughly as advertised. The only non-Windows things on it are the drivers and a handful of utilities that come with the drivers.
Toshiba, 130 years down the drain. They did not adapt to the changing market and their internal culture was risk averse. Rot at the top (accounting corruption) and inability to compete in numerous market segments played into the company's rapid descent to obscurity. Given they invented flash storage and SSDs, perusing their online store gave zero options for BTO with different SSD storage options. Imagine that. They would build and launch devices without competitive analysis. Too much focus internally on "fortress japan" and cross selling to keiretsu cronies. Meanwhile, Chinese and Korean firms were eating their lunch.
I have a Toshiba laptop that runs linux very well. Everything works perfectly. Too bad they had to go out of that business. They got hit really hard recently by having to get out of the nuclear power business.
Pity. Their Satellites were always decent laptops. They were what I used in high school and college.
In fact, the last remaining Windows PC in my apartment (the rest are Linux now) is an old Toshiba Qosmio[0] behemoth from 2010 or so running Windows 7. I keep it around for some apps I use on occasion that don't run especially well on WINE. I'm not sure what I'll do when that thing finally dies.
I'll do a Windows VM before I dual-boot. I frequent the Linux and Fedora sub-reddits and pretty much every other week is someone posting that either a recent kernel update or a recent Windows update trashed their grub menu. Not going through that headache.
Although they were big, bulky, laptops I really liked the Satellites. They had pretty good spec to price ratios. I still have a 7 or 8 year old one that is running fine with linux. I have it hooked up to my TV. That laptop helped a broke college graduate start his career. A part of me is very sad to see them go.
Agreed, I wasn't prepared for all the negative comments in this thread. I was a happy user of the Z830 for a long time, until it got stolen.
Of course, I did spend a couple hours after the first installation to uninstall bloatware, and upgrading the BIOS, and after a while I installed more RAM… but after that it was a good ultrabook which even had a physical Ethernet port!
I also liked the fact that it was 1.4 kg IIRC, and with a battery that lasted all day so I didn't have to bring my charger on the go.
Shame indeed. The £200 Toshiba chromebook II I bought 4 years ago is running strong as ever, admittedly running Linux. Still, the battery hasn't degraded much and the build quality has held up.
I can't comment on their Windows targeted laptops, but this chromebook is my least regretted purchase so far.
It always felt like they had good hardware with horrible software. Reinstalling drivers, downgrading or upgrading the OS, debugging issues, anything that crosses what Toshiba was responsible for was a nightmare when I had one, and never heard good things in that area since.
Granted most Japanese makers are horrible on the software side, but Toshiba felt specially handicaped in my opinion.
The Chromebook 2 will always have a special place in my heart.
When I was transitioning into software development, I had ~$1000 left in my bank account, but the consultancy I had just landed an internship with asked me to provide my own laptop, so figuring the compatibility would be decent, I forked out roughly $450 for a Toshiba Chromebook 2 and a new emmc drive. Developed on that thing for a over a year running Ubuntu and later GalliumOS.
The screen is still better than my ThinkPad. Unfortunately, I spilled water on the keyboard at some point, but it pulled double duty as a travel laptop for a year or so after retirement as my daily driver.
I mean, it's WSJ. 'Closing the book' is a common idiom in the accounting/business world with specific connotation around ending a project/line of business.
Glad to hear it. Their support and drivers are horrendous; I was left with a mostly useless $800 laptop because the wi-fi wouldn't work after a Windows "upgrade" (I've since switched to GNU/Linux and never looked back).
Our last (ever, I guess) toshiba had the motherboard go out. They replaced it under warranty with a different board with different components.
The new board didn’t work at all with linux. Windows sort of worked, but was unusable for reasons that escape me at the moment (kernel panics, maybe).
Way earlier, I had a 266MHz satellite. That was great, though I think the power brick went out a few months after warranty, and they wanted >> $100 for a new one, so I had to buy third party.
It's interesting that your solution to a hardware issue was to change to Linux. I tried Linux a year ago and eventually switched back to windows because everything Just Worked. I would sneeze two towns over and something random would break with Linux (Mint/Cinnamon).
n=1 of course so I might have just had some wonky hardware or something.
Linux can be an absolute bastard where drivers are concerned, but Windows actively fights you when you try to modify the drivers. Windows is more likely to work correctly out of the box, but if it doesn't it is a bigger pain in the ass to fix.
On Windows, all I've ever had to do is try different driver versions. On Linux, I've run into multiple problems where the story is "broken, many people have the same problem, there is no cure, maybe if you want to spend a week wrangling ACPI code you can figure it out." I wouldn't call that a smaller pain in the ass.
It is still fairly common to have the WiFi on a small mini-PCIe card slot, so it is usually possible to open up the laptop and replace it with one which has a better driver.
I don't know how common it is now, but some laptop manufacturers would also put in firmware checks, so that only the WiFi that was factory installed would be recognized. So even if you can physically replace the WiFi, it might not work.
All I'm saying is that it may be worth investigating if you or anyone else runs into that sort of problem.
Ah yeah, Toshiba had a similar line of weird laptops that I saw in the shop.
Still have my weird Lifebook from college too. Built my first startup on it. It was as light as a MacBook Air but the performance was absolutely terrible.
Toshiba laptops are purchased a lot for governments and large corporations. So they might be trying to focus on that.
But, the article says that the Toshiba laptop section is being sold to Sharp, which is controlled by Foxconn, and that Foxconn wants to:
"Sharp executives say Mr. Tai believes Foxconn’s know-how in assembly and connections in the technology business can make the PC business profitable at Sharp"
So they're giving it a reboot under the Sharp name, and maybe not focusing on government or corporate sales. Interesting.
114 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadSo it's not really related to the perpetually prophesied "end of pc era" that the tech media has been waxing poetic about since the first iPad release, it's because Toshiba's having financial troubles.
Ive had good luck with a Asus AFTER it was formatted. The bloatware from the original install had me trashing Asus as a company because I thought their hardware sucked.
I dont think HP can be trusted, they have 1000 dollar laptops without onboard graphics that they sell to computer illiterate people that want big touch screens and gimmick features.
Any recs?
Dell's XPS 13/15 line run Linux very well, as do Lenovo's Thinkpads.
If you do go down the Windows route, just make sure you create new installation media from the Microsoft website and do a clean install before anything else.
I also use an old Thinkpad 11.6" inch - it runs Ubuntu. I put it on a self-driving RC car and it won't die. Generally recommend Thinkpads.
I also have an HP Spectre x360 13" 2017. The trackpad is a bit buggy with Ubuntu but apart from that its seriously not a bad deal. It has USB-c and I can connect an external GPU enclosure for machine learning. Also great as a Netflix device
Yeah, the screen is old, but it's not that big of a deal IMO.
The wife has a Macbook Air I believe from 2013. Swapped in an SSD upgrade some time ago, still kickin.
The biggest issues IMO are ghosting and color gamut, but I don't really care for using Sublime or browsing Reddit and HN. The MBA is not my main machine anyway.
Under the new models, the old non-touchbar 15" with deeper keyboard is shown.
The touchbar is entirely useless though. I've mapped the escape key to capslock, not doing so would have driven me insane.
I actually like the feel of the new keyboard but the "J" key is busted and compressed air isn't cutting it anymore so I'm going to have to send my main laptop off for a week which is a huge disturbance in my work flow (gotta set up the backup Mac)
Looking to give Apple the least amount of money as possible.
Mpbs were, and still are, very popular dev machines, so most dev tasks are pretty easy to achieve. Just be careful not to install multiple package managers or you may never find some of your libraries again.
I kept a 2011-era one alive for a long time, but it finally died late last year - and nothing that Lenovo was selling at the time seemed very tempting.
https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/huawei-matebook-pr...
Also Dell support for me personally has been great so far. I had a single dead pixel on my screen and they replaced without any questions within just two weeks.
Most Linux distros work out of the box. Manjaro took me 20 minutes to set up.
For most vendors, there is a big difference between their consumer hardware, sold based on price, bells & whistles; and their corporate hardware, sold based on cost of ownership - availability, manageability, serviceability, support. In many cases, the corporate model is worth the extra cost up front - it saves much more in headaches down the road. But usually they lack features for gaming and some other consumer or specialized applications.
I've seen many HP corporate models last seemingly forever - so long that the users grow frustrated because they can't justify a new computer. There's a ~14 year old one not far from where I'm sitting that runs perfectly and is in perfect condition, other than the pointstick (it has a trackpad too).
It's annoying that Dell and HP decided to continue to copy Apple by going all USB-C.
Luckily it was the only Windows boot and being all Intel it ran Linux flawlessly.
Why is it so hard for a laptop maker to not completely fuck up software? Plain Windows with no OEM additions other than actual drivers would be welcome.
No wonder Apple goes from strength to strength.
the demand for $400 laptops means you gotta sell out somewhere, sadly. the first thing i always do when a family member gets a new laptop is ask to see it first thing so i can format and reinstall windows. some of those oem-added bloatwares are downright toxic
Your annual bonus depends on whether that number moves up or down and you believe that most people decide what computer to buy by sorting by price. What do you do?
OEMs mostly don't want you to do apples-to-apples comparisons of models between retail stores, but the last time I put the effort into the math it seemed like almost exactly a $50 premium from the bloatware model to the Signature Edition version of that same model.
Destroys the illusion.
Hello, open source citizen revolution.
The question is not why laptop makers bundle crapware, but why frivolous and user-hostile design decisions are considered acceptable in the Windows PC space as a whole.
I've given up.
With what? If you use a standard Windows image, it won't activate. If you use the manufacturer's recovery procedure, all the crapware comes back.
On the old days we got bundles at the local shop, now you get them on the hard disk.
I hate this business model as I'm sure most other folks do as well - but it's instructive to understand that it's not just online services like FB that rely on it. It's infested hardware, media, pretty much all parts of our consumer life... give it time and the corporate adlords will infest government/city services as well. Ads everywhere, minority-report style.
No competition: Windows is the default in Japan, and they make the meat of their money there, by selling overprices laptops at 2-3 times the price they sell overseas. The typical electronic stores in Japan are full of japan-made computers and you only get a small Lenovo corner and that's more or less it. There must be either tariffs or import rules to protect domestic companies, so they have absolutely no incentive to serve the end user or to make anything remotely valuable. And the crapware installed by default is just another monetization strategy.
A friend bought one and it was roughly as advertised. The only non-Windows things on it are the drivers and a handful of utilities that come with the drivers.
I guess you haven't tried the keyboard on the latest MacBook Pros.
In fact, the last remaining Windows PC in my apartment (the rest are Linux now) is an old Toshiba Qosmio[0] behemoth from 2010 or so running Windows 7. I keep it around for some apps I use on occasion that don't run especially well on WINE. I'm not sure what I'll do when that thing finally dies.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_Qosmio
Dual-boot
Of course, I did spend a couple hours after the first installation to uninstall bloatware, and upgrading the BIOS, and after a while I installed more RAM… but after that it was a good ultrabook which even had a physical Ethernet port!
I also liked the fact that it was 1.4 kg IIRC, and with a battery that lasted all day so I didn't have to bring my charger on the go.
I can't comment on their Windows targeted laptops, but this chromebook is my least regretted purchase so far.
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14679
It's sad because Toshiba was credited on the ACPI specification documents so how they messed things up so bad I don't know.
To this day, the Toshiba I own currently only works with Windows 7 and Linux. No support for any of the BSDs.
Granted most Japanese makers are horrible on the software side, but Toshiba felt specially handicaped in my opinion.
The Toshiba Chromebook 2 was one of the best devices in its price range.
The screen alone rivals $1,000 laptops in terms of quality / real estate but the Chromebook is only $300.
IMO it's the perfect portable developer laptop if you account for specs / price.
Was it something different from Crouton/Chrubuntu/Gallium?
I wrote about the entire process 2 years ago at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromeboo....
I still happily use it today.
When I was transitioning into software development, I had ~$1000 left in my bank account, but the consultancy I had just landed an internship with asked me to provide my own laptop, so figuring the compatibility would be decent, I forked out roughly $450 for a Toshiba Chromebook 2 and a new emmc drive. Developed on that thing for a over a year running Ubuntu and later GalliumOS.
The screen is still better than my ThinkPad. Unfortunately, I spilled water on the keyboard at some point, but it pulled double duty as a travel laptop for a year or so after retirement as my daily driver.
The new board didn’t work at all with linux. Windows sort of worked, but was unusable for reasons that escape me at the moment (kernel panics, maybe).
Way earlier, I had a 266MHz satellite. That was great, though I think the power brick went out a few months after warranty, and they wanted >> $100 for a new one, so I had to buy third party.
n=1 of course so I might have just had some wonky hardware or something.
It is still fairly common to have the WiFi on a small mini-PCIe card slot, so it is usually possible to open up the laptop and replace it with one which has a better driver.
I don't know how common it is now, but some laptop manufacturers would also put in firmware checks, so that only the WiFi that was factory installed would be recognized. So even if you can physically replace the WiFi, it might not work.
All I'm saying is that it may be worth investigating if you or anyone else runs into that sort of problem.
No wonder they failed :)
Just got a Lenovo 12" for $179 (and I overpaid) that is an awesome Lubuntu machine.
Still have my weird Lifebook from college too. Built my first startup on it. It was as light as a MacBook Air but the performance was absolutely terrible.
Toshiba laptops are purchased a lot for governments and large corporations. So they might be trying to focus on that.
But, the article says that the Toshiba laptop section is being sold to Sharp, which is controlled by Foxconn, and that Foxconn wants to:
"Sharp executives say Mr. Tai believes Foxconn’s know-how in assembly and connections in the technology business can make the PC business profitable at Sharp"
So they're giving it a reboot under the Sharp name, and maybe not focusing on government or corporate sales. Interesting.
Really sad to hear.