Toshiba: We're stopping making consumer laptops
Toshiba has confirmed it's ditching consumer notebooks to focus on businesses
Toshiba has confirmed that while it's stopping making PCs for European consumers – and indeed won't be offering these outside of its home market of Japan – the company will continue to sell computers to businesses in Europe and the US.
As you may have seen, Toshiba has been in trouble for a while now in terms of struggling to make a profit on its machines, and this led to rumours of a big laptop merger with Fujitsu and Vaio last month, which the firm was quick to put to rest at the time.
But now the cards have been laid on the table, and as Anandtech reports, Toshiba hopes that B2B sales of premium models will make a profit going forward.
In a statement, the company said: "Toshiba will concentrate on the B2B PC market globally by developing, manufacturing, and selling its Tecra and Portégé brands to the corporate market."
The DynaPad, with its detachable keyboard, has also dodged being chucked on the scrapheap.
2-in-1 growth
Essentially, the focus will be on ultra-thin notebooks, tablets and 2-in-1 convertibles, the latter of which will likely be a prime area for every manufacturer, as some big growth has been witnessed in this sector, and further major growth is predicted by multiple analysts and pundits. So focusing on this particular arena would seem a smart move.
Remaining stock of consumer notebooks will of course be sold, and those who buy these, or have just bought laptops in Toshiba's consumer lines (including Chromebooks), will still be covered by their full warranty, as you would expect.
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Meanwhile, Toshiba is apparently still exploring the possibility of some sort of deal with other computer vendors.
Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).