Whatever happened to Japanese laptops?

The japanese companies were pretty amazing in the commercial space.<p>My employer had a few Fujitsu ultra portables in the circa 2007 timeframe. One of our internal customers mentioned to a salesguy that they needed a particular port in a particular location on the laptop, not expecting anything. Two weeks later, they Fedexed a loaner&#x2F;prototype with the port.<p>Really an amazing experience. We were buying 5-6 figure quantities of Dells and HP, and they could barely handle trivial requests re packaging, etc.

In the early 2000&#x27;s Japan was way ahead in the Sub-notebook market. As subnotebooks and tablets have come into popularity and wide availability worldwide, this arbitrage opportunity has narrowed significantly.<p>In 2007, I picked up a Panasonic R6 (10&quot; LetsNote&#x2F;toughbook). It was a great little machine, and I ran both Windows and Debian on it. The keyboard was a bit cramped, and the circular trackpad was pretty lame, but overall I loved the machine. Everywhere I went people would notice it and ask about it. After about 14 months, the logic board failed, and I discovered that as grey-market import, there was no warranty. This was a hard lesson, as I had paid almost $2k USD for the machine. Fortunately, I was back in the states when it happened, so I wasn&#x27;t stranded abroad without a working laptop.<p>Earlier this year, I was in Japan and picked up a Japanese chromebook 10&quot; for under $200. The keyboard is both english and Japanese which makes it a bit of a conversation starter. I installed Debian on it via Crouton (alongside ChromeOS). When I travel, I usually bring both my MacBook Air, and the Chromebook, and particularly in the developing world, I leave my MBA back in my hotel or apartment and bring my Chromebook with me when I&#x27;m out and about in the city.

Japan is really behind in PC&#x2F;Laptop. I was just there last week and the big PC and electronic stores only stock up to Geforce. Asus also has a big presence there now, but the prices are a lot more than US pricing for the same stuff. Not much innovation in the computer space. Home eletronics and appliances are amazing though. Their high end electrolux style vacuum stick cleaners easily clear $800 USD and are really awesome. The rice cookers can hit $600-$800 and can make the perfect rice you normally only get in Japan. The mcirowaves have built in toast oven in one unit, and it works amazingly well. Coming home, its kinda sad some of the convinces we dont have like the toilets, bathroom, kitchen, and even video doorbells (out current &quot;smart&quot; stuff are still rubbish).

I had a Panasonic CF-Y5. As one review had it: &quot;The exterior design of the machine&#x27;s casing is reminiscent of a Sherman tank cross-bred with a 1970s sports saloon, while the lid opens with the grace of a bank vault door.&quot;<p>It was incredibly lightweight (1.53kg at 14&quot; with an optical drive!) and built like, well, a Sherman tank. It wasn&#x27;t only the casing reminiscing it. In a weird little apartment overcrowded by all startup coders attending a conference someone accidentally kicked it off the table and yet it was completely OK.<p>I could only afford it because the CF-Y7 just got out and for a while I couldn&#x27;t afford them and then the B10 was no longer so incredibly tough (although the current models do mention a drop test and a pressurized test). Anyways, I am back to ThinkPads ever since. The keyboard is much better but the weight is worse. I am currently using a T420s upgraded with an 1080p screen and waiting for the Retro to happen. Our last hope.

One thing likely contributed to their downfall was US manufactures moved operations overseas and many Japanese manufacturers kept production in Japan making them expensive to the Us market --that and Apple and others catching up in terms of &quot;sleekness&quot; and aesthetics. People would buy Vaios despite poor hardware because they were thin and looked cool.

I had a Vaio Z once (This was ~2010, probably the first Vaio Z series). Performance was good in the 11&quot; package. But... the hinge was terrible, and I snapped it with a light drop. Agonizing 1.5 month repair sendout. $300 bill. Same day it came back, broke the hinge in the same place.<p>Never bought another Vaio.<p>And this is why I just buy Macs now. Repair is easy - a couple hours at the Apple store. And the things are built well. They can take a bit of a beating, which you need in a computer you&#x27;re moving around, have in a backpack that&#x27;ll inevitably be tossed around a bit, etc etc.

I spent a lot of time on <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dynamism.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dynamism.com&#x2F;</a> looking at the ultralight computers they had in Japan. Almost pulled the trigger a few times, they had awesome stuff.<p>The OQO was from that era too.<p>Good times.

I think Japan is going to be one of the first markets to see laptop sales dry up almost completely. Most people are fine with their iPhones. Where I work, all developers use macbooks and everyone else uses a thinkpad. A lot of other laptop models, like a lot of tech in Japan, is targeted at the Japanese market only. Dynabooks are the budget windows machine of choice at the moment, it seems. Although most young people choose Apple whenever possible anyway.

What&#x27;s the laptop market like in Japan anyway? I don&#x27;t really know a lot about it, but it&#x27;s always interesting to see these random Panasonic or Fujitsu laptops not sold here, or those rare Japan-exclusive experimental ThinkPads.

I bought a Toshiba Libretto L1 back in 2001 via the Internet (using translation services) and had it shipped to Germany. It was a fantastic form factor: A super wide 10&quot; 1280x600 display (143dpi) which was so wide that it left enough room for a decent keyboard. The CPU was a Transmeta Crusoe 600Mhz which was, unfortunately, the bottleneck of the system.<p>One other highlight I remember about this machine: Despite not having any international warranty that I was aware of, when the machine developed a problem, I called Toshiba Europe and they picked it up and send it back repaired a week later for free.<p>I was in Japan this summer and also had a look at the notebooks on sale there but nothing really caught my attention. With the arrival of Netbooks and later the Macbook Air 11&quot;, small notebooks are no longer hard to get in Europe.

I bought a Sony VAIO MultiFlip 13A for my wife because she loves Sony&#x27;s design and she wanted a touchscreen, so we bought the basic model with an SSD.<p>a) of a 128GB SSD, only 90GB was left after Sony took wat they thought was necessary<p>b) the fan was incredibly noisy, it would crash randomly and would eventually die and take the notebook with it<p>c) when put in a less performant mode, it&#x27;s really less performant and still gets really hot<p>d) the touch screen freaks out and other issues once it gets hot<p>e) it still ran Windows<p>That&#x27;s what happened to Japanese laptops in my personal experience. Now I could eventually fix a) and b), e) was still required for Adobe software and it&#x27;s still a freaking hot slow laptop that freaks out once in a while.

I&#x27;ve always loved their[Japanese] ultraportables for as long as I can remember. Probably their prime placement in the film and television I watched growing up. I&#x27;ve ended up with quite a collection of them at this point, ranging from the amazing little Vaio UX through the little Vaio P up to my 12&quot; let&#x27;s note. It weighs nothing, has an i5 and tons of RAM, I&#x27;m amazed they haven&#x27;t taken over the US. Not to mention its tough as bricks. They certainly have a quirky, unique charm to them.

I thought this would be about the tiny models like the Toshiba Libretto

My current laptop is a toshiba, and I bought it in the US. I&#x27;ve had good luck with the brand over the years.

I bought a 11&quot; Vaio in 1990 and loved it, but it only lasted about 18 months. I just bought one of the small 12&quot; MacBooks last Friday and it reminds me of the Vaio experience, but I am concerned that it is not physically robust.

Japan is more active around smartphones rather than laptops and desktops, since you can use them on trains, the preferred way of transport. People spend some considerable amount of time on trains.<p>Small spaces make desktops not a very good choice.

Your anchor tags are using curly quotes, so external links aren&#x27;t working.

I love Panasonic&#x27;s feature-packed laptops. Too bad they aren&#x27;t sold in Europe, and with some strong components, too.

The iPad happened. Most of the uses for the Japanese laptops can be covered by the iPad.

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&gt; I have a strange attachment to Panasonic<p>I have a lifetime prohibition on any Panasonic products after experiencing the most craptastic DVD recorder ever to grace this Earth. It crashes at random, takes forever to boot, won&#x27;t boot reliably with a disc in the drive, can&#x27;t play Audio CDs without locking up, responds to remote button presses with multi-second lag, and gets the tuner channels out of sync with the OSD. Basically a complete fuckup. Their &quot;fix&quot; in the successor model was to add a reset button. Never again Panasonic.