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  • Yaldabaoth - Tuesday, March 29, 2016 - link

    "The company announced intentions to stop selling consumer computers completely and focus on business and corporate PCs instead."

    It's not mentioned, but does this mean Chromebooks, too?
  • Rampart19 - Tuesday, March 29, 2016 - link

    Yes. They've already stopped selling them. Per the price that we were buying them from Toshiba, they said they were only making $3 a unit, which explains why they are quitting. I believe we've now exhausted their remaining stock that we were allotted too.
  • BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - link

    It's no surprise that'd be the case. For as long as Chromebooks have been around, their sales have never really been beneficial to the companies making them. In fact, literally the only place I've seen indications that someone has one in their physical possession is here on Anandtech in reviews. I've literally never met someone who's actually purchased one and I'm surprised Google hasn't killed them off in favor of dedicating more resources to addressing Android's shortcomings when used for productivity with a keyboard and mouse type interface.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - link

    Our district current owns just shy of 10000 chromebooks, with 12000 more on order. Individuals may not own them in large numbers, but they have been very popular with school districts.
  • BrokenCrayons - Thursday, March 31, 2016 - link

    Chrome boxes are good for students. Don't take me the wrong way. I'm not questioning the use cases for Chrome, just the market appeal. In a world where several million unit sales numbers are unimpressive, something like a school district wide purchase of 10-12k is a pretty small number.
  • extide - Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - link

    I know plenty of people with them, sure that is anecdotal, but so is your experience. It's really hard to say.
  • wow&wow - Tuesday, March 29, 2016 - link

    Right move, Toshiba should market and sell its value of quality and brand trust.
  • yuhong - Tuesday, March 29, 2016 - link

    I have suggested that Intel/AMD does its own PCs for a while now.
  • pugster - Tuesday, March 29, 2016 - link

    I have never seen their business line of pc's.
  • Murloc - Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - link

    I have a Portégé, 5 years old and still going strong with at least 7 hours of battery life to this day.
    Very lightweight and has all the full-sized ports you need, including ethernet. The case is intact, only the paint is chipped on the corners and the most used keyboard keys have a depression where I scratch them with my nails when typing, still functional.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - link

    This is why toshiba is making a good move. The tecra and portge brands are some of their best machines, and are actually made well. Leave that cheap junk to acer and the like.
  • Samus - Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - link

    Toshiba hasn't sold a decent model in North America in 15 years. All of their good stuff stays in Asia and Europe. The same goes for Acer too. It's like their brands are synonymous with disposable computers in America so why bother selling anything good?
  • Fallen Kell - Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - link

    I know seriously they gave up on offering decent laptops in the US. I have no idea why, especially when they were the first company to offer a laptop with 3D video card chips in them back around 1999.
  • Samus - Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - link

    I had a Portege in the late 90's, Pentium 3 800MHz 12.1" incredibly good laptop, followed by a Thinkpad X40, Pentium M, probably the best laptop I've ever owned (the guy I sold it to STILL USES IT) and the first laptop I ever had with an SSD. I don't remember if it was 40GB or 64GB, but it was PATA and it cost $600 in 2003 LOL.

    Practically every laptop I've had since was crap. The Dell Inspiron 700m (huge piece of crap, there was a site called www.recall700m.com up for years, Dell never acknowledged the defects that basically ruined the thing) and the Lenovo X200 that followed that awful Dell I dealt with for years, only to have huge issues of its own ranging from the USB ports cracking (google it, the USB ports are too tight/not molded to spec) to having 1/3 the keyboard fail in warranty and not be covered because of "wearable component" to the battery failing a month out of warranty, obviously not covered, I've been happier with my HP Revolve 810 G1, going on 3 years, than anything I've owned since that IBM-engineered X41 and Toshiba Portege.

    HP is basically king of business laptops now. Dell has some interesting offerings, especially the XPS13 (which isn't really a business model, no docking station, but has USB-C to make up for it.) Lenovo is just crap to me. I practically fix Lenovo's for a living. I just had a $1000+ Thinkpad Yoga in for a bad CPU fan, and coincidentally repaired the same exact one a year ago because of a defective battery switch. Both of these are incredibly common defects and Lenovo continues to sell them, defective, for $1000.

    Lenovo has destroyed what they inherited for IBM. I hope HP, Dell and now Toshiba can go after them in quality, because really it won't be hard. The problem is Lenovo is such cheap shit (like, really, they cost half of the competition) that it's hard to sway people away from them. Nobody has a concept of quality anymore. They just want it cheap, even if they're unhappy with it and it breaks on them constantly. At least it was cheap.
  • Murloc - Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - link

    what about Asus?
  • TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - link

    They are real hit-or-miss on anything that isnt their G series.
  • Samus - Thursday, March 31, 2016 - link

    They have come a long way, I'll give them that. I am a huge Asus fan going back to my first Asus motherboard (a 386 with a secondary math coprocessor) in the early 90's. They have had some duds but overall are well above average. The only company with better support than Asus is Supermicro. ABIT back in the day had great support, and Gigabyte used to be good but have become very average with the likes of MSI (who has improved substantially over the years.) DFI, although they made some pretty crappy boards, did have decent support, with constant BIOS updates and easy RMA. Basically the only companies that are hard to deal with anymore are the 3rd tier ie Foxconn, ECS, etc. ECS does a ok job with BIOS updates but good luck dealing with an RMA, their US headquarters in City of Industry doesn't even employ English speaking staff; it's almost impossible to communicate with them via email or over the phone. This is a stark contrast to Supermicro where you call a number and Allen picks up and says hello.
  • KingOfAnts - Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - link

    I buy Lenovo exclusively for my executive and engineering users, but only the T and X series of business laptops. I buy at least 20 per year for the past 6 years and not a single one had a defect (other than R&R eating too much disk space). My only complaint is that they change out models so quickly that I can't even get an UltraBase for an X230 unless I go to Amazon.
  • Samus - Thursday, March 31, 2016 - link

    The T and X series are the only ones that I'd ever consider contenders for business. The problem is Lenovo, starting with the E series, and now into the Yoga, is putting the Thinkpad name on a lot of stuff undeserving of the nameplate. It'd akin to Ford making a Lincoln based on the Fiesta platform.

    But the problem is, even with the T and X series, there are serious quality control issues, granted they have improved over the first Lenovo-based models (T60 series and their chronic overheating issues into the T400's with their quirky power issues and USB ports cracking)

    At the end of the day, the issue really is support and Lenovo's is terrible. If you buy an HP or Dell business machine, they treat you like a King, and if you are out of support, they still treat you well, it's just that you'll have to pay. Lenovo doesn't even offer the user an option to do the repair themselves. HP ships me parts, not just batteries, but motherboards, cooling fans, and so on, all the time, free overnight from Texas, and I have 5 days to ship the bad part back with the prepaid sticker. The killer feature of Elitebooks and many ProBooks is most have 3y/3y support built in. Dell offers Gold support for 3 years, usually <$100, and worth it, on most of their business models. Lenovo offers 1 year support across the board and it is terrible.
  • Flunk - Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - link

    Their business computers, like the Tecra and Protege lines are pretty good.

    Their consumer machines are garbage and have been for at least 10 years. I think that's the main reason they're pulling the lines, they're not profitable because they didn't sell the big volumes they would have to sell to make money because they're crap.

    I think it's great news that they're pulling the crap off the shelves, maybe it will stop poisoning their good name.
  • BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - link

    Consumer sales are expensive. The moment the end user calls technical support under warranty the profit on the sale is gone. Corporate buyers retain their own support staff and can solve a lot of problems internally without being a bother to the OEM. Their support plans cost more and their per unit markup is higher too.
  • jabber - Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - link

    Good. Their domestic level stuff has been awful for several years. My heart sinks when a customer brings in a domestic level Toshiba. Horrible quality.
  • Trevor08 - Monday, May 16, 2016 - link

    Poor OCZ (SSD), which is Toshiba's new business unit. Toshiba acquired them 2 years ago. Looks like OCZ is finally done, when Toshiba exits the consumer PC business.

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