Asus might be buying Toshiba's notebook business

Found on notebookcheck.net: Notebookcheck: Toshiba?s notebook business may be on sale

Think this will have an impact on either company's notebook lineups?

 

IMO not that big of a deal, Toshiba doesn't manufacture notebooks to begin with. And that article is a bit misnomer since Asus is among the 3 largest notebook manufacturers now I believe, if not very close.

The only companies I can think of that may be bigger than Asus are Acer and Compal. Uniwill and Clevo are a joke as only a few nut cases want such monstrosity.

All this does is remove Toshiba as a brand name for competition. Whether Asus buys the brand name or not is the same result I would think.

 

I certainly wish this doesn't happen. I'd hate to see Toshiba turn into an inferior brand. Remember Compaq, Gateway, and eMachines? All these manufacturers used to make some decent products. After their acquisition by another company however, they quickly turned into a "rebadged value line" brand.

 

Actually you are wrong. Gateway sucked, horribly. It wasn't until Acer bought them out you saw the awesome 8800 and the best gaming laptop for the money.

I don't know what dream world you lived in. Compaq's bread and money notebooks were celeron cheap laptops costing $400 and lucky $100 on sale.

And I guess you missed it, Toshiba doesn't make laptops. It's just a brand name. You think Dell makes their laptops? You think Sony makes their laptops? These are just brand names.

Lastly find me a Toshiba laptop that comes close the G73jh? Quasimo is hideous, overpriced and overrated.
- I'd say Toshiba's were pretty awesome around 2002-2004. I really liked those Satellite series that featured the top Nvidia GPUs for notebooks back then. Since then they haven't been the same.

 

Quanta is #1 in notebook production and has been for a long time. Over the last 4 years, Compal is next, followed by Wistron (formerly Acer), Inventec, & Asus. Asus split its manufacturing arm off into Pegatron a couple years ago, and plans to maintain only a 25% ownership of the new company, so future ODM lists will likely list Pegatron instead of Asus. I've also seen articles that say Asus is planning to reduce the percentage of their notebooks made "in-house" so ODMs other than Pegatron are likely going to be manufacturing between 30 to 50% of Asus notebooks in the years to come.

 

AFAIK, Asus has already outsourced their K series notebooks to Foxconn and is currently looking for another ODM. So far, Asus's top choices are Flextronics and Quanta. From what I heard, the next series to be outsourced will be the N series if it's not already being made by another ODM.