Official: Toshiba pulls out of European consumer PC market

Warranty probably expired

I've got a Toshiba 3100. Haven't used it in a while though.

I see a lot of comments regarding how poor the various manufacturers are, and how its impossible to find a decent high spec machine

Can I suggest you look at getting a Clevo? These are bullet-proof chassis, made by a major ODM (Clevo) for final configuration by local specialists. For instance three UK assemblers (there are others)

http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/laptop-computers/clevo-laptops/40/

https://www.fortunetechnology.com/

http://www.dvc.uk.com/acatalog/Laptop_PCs.html (specialise in video editing suites)

If you need something for video editing, or game development one of these should be able to help.

Mature Market

The PC market is a mature market with most sales being for replacement kit. Eventually the sales will reach a sort-of steady state of units. There will be a few mass market sellers (Dell, HP, ?) and several niche markets (Acer, Lenovo, ?). The PC market will resemble the automobile market, a few very large international players who sell to the mass market (Ford, VW, Toyota, etc) and several niche players (BMW, Mercedes, etc). Properly managed they all can make money but the heady boom days are long gone.

Buy what you need

Don't buy preconfigured off the shelf, take the time to spec your laptop yourself, TBH any of the major manufacturers will be fine. Do you need a 17" screen, do you need a HiRes screen, do you need a quad core, do you need an SSD boot drive? All questions that are easily answered and will steer you towards the machine that will do what you need. I got the machine I needed for about $700 18 months ago, 15", 1366 x 768 (all I need), quad core, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, 1TB secondary, 802.11ac. No problems since purchase, because it wasn't off the shelf it took about 3 weeks to build and get here but it was worth the wait. Oh and when it arrives, wipe the sucker and put a clean install on there, Toshiba's bloatware was among the worst and their driver organization in terms of locating them on their website used to be a frigging nightmare.

Toshiba still made PCs?

Who knew? I haven't seen one in literally a decade. They should have exited years ago.

i switched to toshiba from ibm

After Lenovo bought ibms business. Have been with toshiba for over 10 years now. Current laptop is a almost 6 year old tecra A11($2200 new with 4 year on site support and extra batteries). Works well still though battery life is down to under 30 minutes(it spends 99%of the time plugged in). Have had the keyboard replaced twice due to wear(4 year on site support expired a while ago). I had a toshiba M5 before that(2006?)

I was hoping to get a new toshiba with 6th gen i7 and nvidia graphics. Gave up waiting(even though it works fine am worried at it's age and now no more onsite support) and caved in to lenovo. Had my company buy me a P50 which just came out (hasn't arrived yet. Well maybe its at the office waiting for me now not sure).

6th gen i7 with 4k and 2gig nvidia card 16gb ram (upgradable to 64 i rarely use more than 5gig on my 8 gig toshiba even with 1 or 2 VMs running). 4k display and will have 1TB of NVMe ssd and 1TB of SATA SSD. Samsung 950 pro(2x) and 850 pro respectively. Total about $3600.

I have no idea what I will use all the horsepower for yet but hope it lasts me another 5 years. Only thing i fear is the keyboard. Hoping i can get used to it.

Planning on running mint and windows 7 dual boot(99% in linux). It has official linux support though am half expecting i need to wait a bit for drivers to stabilize. I don't bother with sleep or suspend or hibernate on linux. Never worked reliability (maybe nvidia's fault i am not sure but I'd rather have nvidia without hibernate than no nvidia).

Toshiba MSX

Still got that Toshiba MSX clone HX-10 stored in a box in the attic. And it still worked a year ago when I tested it last.

Sad news :/

I got a very old Toshiba Satellite (SA60) which originally ran Windows XP Home edition. Never had any issues with it, could even enjoy playing DVD's (onboard dvd writer). The only issue which I should have done different is the wlan; it doesn't have an embedded adapter but needs a pcmcia.

In the mean time I replaced Windows XP with FreeBSD and my laptop, though slow in comparison, just keeps going. It's a perfect network problem solver and office workstation (OpenOffice). No screen issues, no keyboard issues... The only issue, as we all have, is that the battery could have lasted longer for my liking.

So yeah, sorry to see Toshiba go, I always favoured the brand :(

I switched to an ARM Chromebook instead

I went the other way, and finally decided to switch to an ARM. I'm glad I did. I got an Acer Chromebook 13, popped in an SDCard and put Ubuntu on it. It has a Tegra K1, so a 2.2ghz* quad-core ARM (+ 1 low power core that the kernel automatically switches to when it's running 1 CPU at lower speed.), and the 192-core CUDA video card appears to be roughly comparable to a GT720 in terms of CUDA units and speed. Supposed 13 hour battery life -- I measured about 15 hours battery life in ChromeOS (I think it would have gotten over 20 under lighter usage), and in Ubuntu about 12-13 hours under lighter usage down to maybe 8 hours under heavy use (maxing out all 4 cores compiling or H.264 encoding some videos or the like.) It kills my previous Dell speed-wise (admittedly elderly, a Core Duo), is much lighter, nice keyboard, no fan and no noticeable heat production (under full load one spot on the bottom seems to warm up like 5 degrees), seems well put-together and surprisingly has pretty good speakers.

*I think it's supposed to be able to do 2.4ghz, but probably has the speed disabled for thermal reasons. Maybe? The CPU temp never seems to get particuarly high, so it may be for battery life or some other reason.

Goodbye Tosh ...

Saw the headline, and the first thing that sprang to mind was "Hello Tosh, got a Toshiba" !

It's over thirty years since that ad ... feeling old :O(

As someone who's dealt with Toshiba

I say good riddance, give me a Dell or Lenovo anyday, at least they outlast their warranty, Toshiba is sub standard kuk!

Toshiba doesn’t have any senior executive DNA for PCs left in the business

The problem of the moment is, if you replace "Toshiba" in that sentence with the name of any other big computer name from the last decade, can you prove the statement is false?

No, I can't make that claim even for Dell, even with Michael back in charge.