Gateway Completes eMachines Acquisition

ryanjensen writes "Gateway just completed its $289.5 million deal to acquire Irvine, CA-based eMachines Thursday according to News.com. From the article: 'Many analysts believe that Gateway ultimately will abandon some or all of its namesake stores in favor of selling products at third-party retailers. However, they expect the company to continue selling Gateway-brand products, including PCs and consumer electronics, directly to its customers.'"

Comments

Can anyone confirm this Intel rumor?

[laddhebert]

I was reading another board last week about the sell of e-machines (I had just purchased the m6805 - amd 64 laptop) and one of the posters said the chances of amd 64 chips being released on a wide scale was probably not going to look good at the present time because Intel worked out 2 year contracts with most of the large manufacturers of laptops and desktops such as Dell HP, and Gateway. Since Gateway now owns emachines, it seems likely that their amd64 lines of laptops will be discontinued. I did notice that HP released a 64 bit laptop, along with Toshiba too.

Let's hope these rumors are just that - rumors.

-L

Didn't they go bankrupt?

[subjectstorm]

wtf?

i thought gateway was on the verge of bankruptcy maybe 6 months ago. i was actually happy when i heard they were tanking . . . and now they've dropped nearly 300 million on eMachines? what?

did their plasma screens really sell THAT well?

i must have missed something here.

Re:Norelco?

[DaHat]

Despite your experience with a single unit, eMachines has truly gotten their act together in recent years.

In the early fall when I was looking for a laptop, I found the eMachines M5310 (I think it is) to offer the best bang for my buck, XP 2400+, 40 gig hd, 802.11g wifi. It's not the smallest or lightest unit to say the least, however it does it's job wonderfully, hell, I even use it for lan parties from time to time! If only Battlefield would take advantage of the wide screen.

I too back in the day came to despise the name of eMachines, but I gave them a shot. When people first see my laptop they say "I didn't know they made laptops" and walk away quite impressed.

But now Gateway... the definition of crap.

Re:Country Store vs. Apple Store?

[DaHat]

True, however you've got to admit, from the marketing prospective, there is a great advantage to rebranding... the final product has your name on it! Another major advantage, this time for the customer is tech support from a single house.

Like it or not, most of the people who buy from a company like Gateway are not going to drive down the street to see if the same camera costs a few bucks less, they'll buy it from Gateway or even along with their desktop or laptop and have support from the same company.

A couple of years ago while getting a tour of the Gateway tech support center in Sioux Falls, SD, I was surprised when many of the end calls would end with the tech asking if there was anything else the customer needed like an scanner or digital camera, I was even more surprised that there were quite a few who would want to be transferred to a salesmen to be sold on such a device.

Bleh

[Remlik]

Gateway horror story:

Company exec decides he doesn't like the IBM thinkpads we've speced and goes out on his own and buys a Gateway laptop (this is roughly 2000).

We say fine, but we aren't responsible for hardware support as it breaks the standard...right...like that works... For some reason exec can't get his Palm to sync up over the serial connection.

Enter me: 4 long frustrating days spent trying everything under the sun to get this beast syncing. Palm syncs on three other desktops and two other laptops with no problem, install it on gateway and nothing.

Tech call #1 to gateway...OS is corrupt reload from rescue disk. Tech call #2, palm is bad...explain that it works everywhere but on gateway.
Tech call #3...CSR almost gets the balls to tell me gateway doesn't support palm, I inform him that I aint yo mammys foo.

Tech call #4 after talking with 2 differnt people I am finally transferred to "level three" support. Guy comes on the phone, reads case notes and says simply "That model's serial port is defectivly impemented, it will not work, you'll need to get later revision..blah blah blah..."

Laptop goes back the next day for full refund, exec gets a fsking thinkpad and has to explain why the seinor IT guy spent 4 days fsking around with his crappy out of standard laptop. He was gone a month later.

Re:Argh Gateway

[Mr Guy]

It has alot to do with luck and expectations. The real beef with Gateway is that they play a numbers game, as do most of the mass marketed computers. They use the confusing nature of PC marketing to sell overpriced computers that have higher fail rates for each part and run slower than they seem like they should. They sell a 2.4 Celeron with PC2100 RAM and their consumers are happy only because it's faster than that 866 they upgraded from, if only just barely. They have no idea they could get a MUCH faster machine by using an AMD 2.4 Barton with PC2700 RAM for roughly the same price, because they do nothing to educated their users. As someone else said about emachines, when chosing between quality and cheap, they always always always chose cheap. You just got lucky and got one without a flaw.