As long as they go with Fujitsu & Toshiba quality controls not VAIO. Fujitsu & Panasonic historically are close. So will Panasonic Toughbooks be included?
I only have experience with Toshiba notebooks and Fujitsu drives with no complaints with either. Panasonic is a totally separate corporation and is not involved in the merger. So there is no reason to expect it would be included.
Yes there is. Underneath the skin lots of Fujitsu & Panasonic laptops parts are cross sourced. I've torn down dozens, even managed to repair some.
Panasonic was always associated with Japanese quality, however they moved all the manufacture to China and they did not do a good job of overseeing the quality. It fell off rather badly and they lost market share because of it. I am not sure that they ever recovered. If the Japanese stop buying a big local name, then you know they screwed up. I can not see them joining this group - they have nothing of value to offer.
That's not the same thing as being sibling companies in the same corporation. That's just buying discrete components from outside sources. For example, Micron and Samsung make the actual memory chips used by many RAM makers. That does not mean Micron and Samsung are really the same company as Kingston or Corsair. Crucial, on the other hand, is a Micron company. ASUS makes many of OEM motherboards for Dell and HP but ASUS and Dell and HP are not sibling companies.
Sounds good to me, especially if they will offer cheaper high end machines. I hope they will force others like HP and Acer to do the same.
The problem is, in reading the original BloombergNews source article, this merger is targeted as a "domestic" move - that is, localized in Japan and not really a global thing. So no sure it will influence HP or Acer for the rest of us - especially since Lenovo is really the dominant global maker out there.
I concede the point. A difference I've noticed is the Fujitsu & Panasonic parts are marked as such. Whereas in most other laptops the parts are rebranded or unbranded.
Yes, often the case. But typically, those are basically special orders. For example, you will often see Dell part numbers on the ASUS motherboards or Brand X power supplies used in their computers. This happens because Dell buys 500,000 at a time and can dictate that. But if you crack open that PSU or carefully inspect each chip or cap, you will see the actual component manufacturer's name on those discrete components.
If that worked out that'd be better. Vaio was the weak link. OT I'd like to see HP laptops & Vaio merge. Both terrible quality would it easier to avoid.