Sharp Mebius

» see sharp.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Sharp built laptops for fifteen years and I have never once had my hands on one. Almost the whole Mebius range was a domestic Japanese product. What did travel went out wearing different words, Actius in the United States and WideNote for a stretch, and none of it had a Turkish channel behind it. A shop in Ankara had no reason to stock a machine that cost more than the Toshiba beside it and came with a keyboard laid out for a different alphabet.

The name is a Möbius strip written the way Japanese marketing wanted it in 1995, and the logo carried the loop. Underneath it was a straightforward PC/AT compatible line sold into a domestic market where the competition was not price. Japanese buyers were being sold millimeters and grams, and every maker in Tokyo was fighting over the same two numbers.

Sharp won that fight more than once. The Muramasa machines, which users named after the swordsmith and Sharp eventually adopted, put a 12 inch notebook at 16.6 millimeters and 1.31 kilograms in 2001, which nobody else was near. In 2003 the Mebius PC-RD3D shipped with a screen that produced 3D without glasses, six years before Hollywood made anyone care. The last real idea was the PC-NJ70A netbook of 2009, whose touchpad was a small optical sensor LCD you could write on with a stylus.

Machines like this reached me as photographs. Turkish hardware forums in the early 2000s were full of threads about specifications nobody in the thread could order, and Japanese domestic laptops sat in that pile with the imported graphics cards. You learned the numbers and then you bought whatever the local retailer had in a box.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the quiet exit ~

There was no final model and no announcement of a final model. On 21 october 2010 the Japanese press reported that Sharp was leaving the PC business, and the company confirmed something stranger: it had already stopped manufacturing computers during 2009. The brand had been dead for a year while the news caught up. That closed 31 years of Sharp computers going back to the MZ-80K of 1978.

The stated reason was that Sharp wanted to move from selling hardware to selling hardware attached to a content service, which in 2010 meant tablets. The PC line was the thing traded away for that plan.

~ what it was traded for ~

The plan was called Galapagos, a family of tablets built around Sharp's own ebook store, launched in Japan in december 2010 with a stated goal of a million units. On 30 september 2011 Sharp discontinued two of the three models, nine months in. The 7 inch one lasted a little longer.

Mebius outlived the thing that replaced it, in a way. Sharp brought the name back on 30 september 2013 for a Windows 8.1 tablet sold to businesses first and consumers later, and that ran until about 2016 before going quiet for good. sharp.co.jp is still a large company's website. mebius.jp does not resolve.

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