Considered as one of the pioneers in personal computing products, Toshiba has arrived at a difficult decision. The Japanese electronics group confirmed that its Dynabook manufacturing operations have been shuttered. This marks the end of a 35-year laptop range as Sharp takes over after it paid $36 million for 80 percent of shares and finally bought out the remainder just recently. The tech industry recalls the debut of the T1100 in 1985, which was apparently the world's first laptop.

The device was far from what modern notebooks can offer but was definitely revolutionary at the time. Toshiba called it "the world's first mass-market laptop computer" and its performance was comparable to the desktop PC produced by IBM. Other notable features include a monochrome 600 x 200 LCD display, an Intel 80C88 CPU, 256 kB of RAM (up to 512 kB), and no internal storage. Instead, it used a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive and the whole thing weighed in at 8.8 pounds.

It is another major Japanese company that has discontinued its laptop business. In 2014, Sony announced that it will sell off its VAIO computing brand due to unfavourable sales. Toshiba issued a statement on Aug. 4, this year, which read: "Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502) hereby announces that it has transferred the 19.9% of the outstanding shares in Dynabook Inc. that it held to Sharp Corporation. As a result of this transfer, Dynabook has become a wholly owned subsidiary of Sharp."

"Under the terms of a June 2018 share purchase agreement between Toshiba and Sharp, Toshiba transferred to Sharp 80.1% of the outstanding shares of Toshiba Client Solutions Co., Ltd (hereinafter TCS), then Toshiba's wholly owned subsidiary in the personal computer business," the company added.

"That transfer closed in October 2018, and TCS changed its name to Dynabook in January 2019. On June 30, 2020, under the terms of the share purchase agreement, Sharp exercised a call option for the remaining outstanding shares of Dynabook held by Toshiba, and Toshiba has completed procedures for their transfer," it concluded.

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Analysts point out that flagging sales of Toshiba laptops were attributed to the market dominance of brands such as Apple, Lenovo, Dell, and Microsoft among others. Moreover, instead of regularly introducing new features, the lack of innovation was pushing consumers away from its products.