Toshiba popularised the laptop, then sold the business that made it for $36M

Toshiba put the laptop on the map: the T1100 of 1985, with its internal rechargeable battery, LCD and IBM PC compatibility, is widely counted as the first mass-market portable PC, and by the 1990s Toshiba was the world's largest PC maker. Thirty-five years later it shipped its last one. Sales had collapsed from 17.7 million PCs in 2011 to 1.4 million in 2017, outpaced by Dell, HP and Lenovo as the market turned into a price-and-scale fight.

In 2018 Sharp bought 80.1 percent of the PC business for $36 million and rebranded it Dynabook; on June 30, 2020 Toshiba transferred the remaining 19.9 percent and left the market it had created. The division that defined the product category went for the price of a mid-size office building.

The category inventor lost to the category's economics. Laptops became a scale business of thin margins, and a conglomerate juggling a nuclear write-down and an accounting scandal had neither the appetite nor the balance sheet to fight a price war in its oldest business — so the pioneer exited as a rounding error in someone else's portfolio.