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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.'"
Does this mean that they will start selling AMD processors? Great - all they need to do now is get Microsloth to stop delaying 64-bit Windows for Intel.
It'll be ready in January my ass...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
...will be called e-Cows, now with twice as much ugly.
The last acquisition Gateway made was also based in Irvine, CA: server manufacturer ALR. Does the Gateway acquisitions guy ever leave Irvine? And will Gateway ruin eMachines the way they ruined ALR?
Reminds me of those 1980's shaver commercials gone bad - "I liked it so much I bought th ecompany".
A company I used to work for bought one eMachine to see if we wanted to deploy them throughout the organization. They were horrible. came deliverred with the ram unseated so it wouldn't even boot out of the box.
After using just one eMachine, I have no idea what someone would do with the entire company.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
I'm not sure I get the general Gateway-hate among geeks. I have 5 computers here, one of them is a Gateway Pentium III 600. I've never had any problems with it whatsoever.
It came with Win98, which ran fine on the machine. Eventually I "upgraded" to WinME, which ran fine (at least as best as can be expected from WinME) on the machine. Now it runs Win2K, which runs fine on the machine. Everything aside from the OS is still factory. And while I've wiped the drive to upgrade Windows a few times, there's never been any trouble aside from the usual "Windows has been installed for 2 years, and it's getting slow as hell" that happens on any machine.
My only possible complaint is that the hard drive has gotten loud, when that thing's spinning, it's hard to think in the same room. I don't consider that Gateway's fault, though, as I've seen the same thing happen with countless drives.
--
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When Apple first announced they would open stores nationwide, people pointed to the then already declining Gateway Country Store profitability and said "Jobs, what are you thinking?"
But there is an obvious difference between the two retail stores. What are the core differences and how could things turn around Gateway or Apple's currernt trends?
Not a rhetorical question - please don't flame!
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
I love the packaging with the cow motif
I could blame Microsoft for this one, but the horrid restore-menu-architecture was the source of all my anguish.
I love the packaging with the cow motif
I love the packaging with the cow motif
For some reason I'm not blaming the software for this problem.
My experiences with eMachines have generally been negative. I hope Gateway will fix what's broken there, or they will really screw the pooch and end up hurting themselves more than helping.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
Let's hope these rumors are just that - rumors.
-L
Don't Panic.
Actually they have closed a lot of their stores as it seemed that they were bound to go out of business. However in the last year or so they have started making a lot of other products rather than just PC's. Maybe this will allow them to bounce back.
-NTidd
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.
** Chigusaaa!!! You're the coolest girl in the WORLD!!! **
The (thankfuly few) Gateways that I have had to deal with for the most part required you get replacement parts from gateway because they tried to play the, "hey, only Gateway parts fit in here" such as the odd sized floppy for example, or the misaligned screwholes,
I also rememebr some of the "pizza box" models where it was impractically difficult just to get the case open. Some of those things would have cut you fingertips off trying to slide the top off too fast.
I was almost expecting a hole for you to put your cigars in.
As far as the cow box, its not nearly as fun as the real thing. They dont tip over, you cant eat em, and you cant even grow shrooms on em.
Just for the record, they explode quite nicely when an m-80 is shoved into their rectum.
and, i half expected them to come with a free NASCAR sticker.
"the inner machinations of my mind, are an enigma"
-patrick star
Actually, it was $189.5 million with the mail-in rebate...
This merger makes perfect sense: one mediocre computer company buying another mediocre one.
I actually thought gateway was trying to move OUT of the PC business, with all the consumer electronics they introduced recently. Guess not.
"I forgot my mantra."
And what better motivation to get your work done then knowing yur cluster could blow up in your face at any time.
I've bought 6 of these things for my parents, inlaws, and friends. They're been great. My father has 3 at his small food processing business, I gave one to my inlaws, one to a friend and have one running my mail server.
Aside from the last one, each is essentially used for word processing, email, and web. And they do that well. Each has been in use for at least 2 years, and I've only had to perform one hardware related task on any one of them. (To be fair, my father jammed a screwdriver in the floppy drive to help get the disk out. Argh.)
They've been great machines for the non-computationally-intensive tasks that these people use them for.
I'm 6 for 6 and will continue recommend these machines for the casual user.
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.
Apple free since 1990!
just heard the entire universe yawn??? One marginal company swallowing another seems like some kind of new low for tech sector news.
...my wife, who is a careful reader of manuals and a good learner, but not a techie or a computer geek, set out to buy herself a computer a couple of years ago. It was very important to her to do everything by herself without my looking over her shoulder. (You know how annoying it can be when you have a problem and someone sits down at your keyboard, click click type type magic magic and says "works now." Well, it does work, but you have no idea what was changed or why or how to deal with similar problems in the future).
She bought a Gateway specifically because of retail stores where she could look at the stuff, try it, and talk to real, helpful retail salespeople. Plus she liked the idea of her computer coming in a box that looks like a cow.
I don't know what the answer is, but the computer industry is still in a state of self-denial about how difficult and intimidating computer purchases are for the average person. PCs are actually harder to buy, install, and use then they were five years ago. Mail-order is not the answer for everyone, nor are "warehouse" clubs or computer superstores.
I don't know why retail hand-holding isn't working out for Gateway. But I know without it, they would have had one less sale.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
What Gateway needs more than anything else is a QA dept, and not another low-bid business. Over a 4-5 year period from 92-97, their computers went from predictable usable machines to absolute and utterly complete crap. I call it the low-bid phenomenom. Initially, they started low-bidding parts, so that if you palced an order for 20, or even 5 PCs, you had about 90% chance of getting at least 3 different configurations even if you ordered the exact same PC. (namely - different motherboard and memory manufacturers, other peripherals as well though). This lost them lots of business. Then they "dropped" the continuous low-bid philosphy, going for long-term low-bid contracts. yeah. Then we got the infamous 1 in 2 Viewsonic monitors and power supplies dying.
After going through about 2000 monitors, we stopped buying Gateway, forever, as the quality never has been rated anywhere equal to Dell. (Why'd we buy 4000 systems, very large organization, with large upgrade needs at the time, and they were an approved vendor with the best price. For some mysterious reason, after all the problems, everyone seemed to favor Dell for their next upgrade purchase. out of 500 machines ordered in the next year, we had 2 bad hard drives, and 1 bad keyboard.)
Having excellent customer service just doesn't compete with not needing customer service at all.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I use to work for a company that did service work for equant, warantech, banctec, etc. We did the warranty repairs on a lot of e-machines. When they first came out the were junk. Best Buy finally dropped the line because of a 20% return rate. They are back in Best Buy now and they are doing much better. Worth a second look if your looking at a cheap computer.
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eMachines did the "unthinkable" by releasing an actual kick-ass desktop replacement laptop in the m6805 and m6807 series. Both sport Athlon64's. Unfortunately, since news of the Gateway acquisition, finding the m6807 (which comes with a DVD+/-R) has been an exercise in futility. The eMachines site lists the m6807, but clicking "buy now" gets a "there are no online resellers of this product" message. Circuit City is out. Best Buy never seems to have gotten any, although you can find the m6805 at both.
So, Gateway, eMachines had a great laptop there, don't fuck it up.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
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.
Never confuse volume with power.
Other than the power supplies going out, there's not much wrong with the eMachines. As a former Best Buy employee, some of my friends and I still have Linux on the first eMachines still chugging away in our dorms/basements.
They only had 2 PCI slots? 5400rpm drives? Integrated sound card?
They were only $299!!
What did you expect?
They basically created the sub-$1000 PC market. Remember what it was like before? PC, monitor, printer, you'd walk out of the store with a $2900 dent in your VISA, and all you'd have to show for it would be an IBM Aptiva or a Packard Bell.
You could buy an eMachines for $299, get a monitor and inkjet and a copy of Deer Hunter, and you still have money to buy the kids christmas presents. We'd have people drive from 80 miles away coming to buy the new cheap computers.
I'm not sure I get the general Gateway-hate among geeks. I have 5 computers here, one of them is a Gateway Pentium III 600. I've never had any problems with it whatsoever.
I've never liked Gateway. I bought a used P2-266 for really cheap. The only thing good in it was the motherboard and cpu. Everything else was mostly weird proprietary shit. The case was sick mess, and the cd-rom and floppy drives had curvy plastic on the front which made it completely clash with any other case. The power supply was something terrible, I ripped it apart and only kept the fan that was in it (but the fan was a piece of shit). The motherboard used onboard video for which there was no Win2k drivers, though I can't totally fault Gateway for that, and the board itself is pretty stable.
So, like many other system builders, Gateway takes a decent mobo and CPU, and slaps a bunch of cheap and/or proprietary crap onto it which any self-respecting geek would completely replace. So why not just buy the mobo and CPU and build your own?
From what I have seen, eMachines was starting to produce machines that were actually good (contrary to their earlier reputation). I really hope Gateway doesn't fuck it up. Though, maybe Gateway is better these days, I dunno, I haven't used a recent Gateway, but all the older ones I've used pretty much sucked.
MicronPC, on the otherhand, put out some good PC's back then (around the time of P1 and P2), and they still do. And they sell AMD-based machines. If I have to recommend a system builder, I recommend them.
#!/
My problem with gateway started in 2000. I had ordered a few computers from them before that in 98-99 for me and my family. I was upgrading my pc and already had a great sound card I wanted to keep. So I asked them to remove the sound card (a practice they never had a problem with before) and I was told that removing the sound card was impossible (it was a non-intergrated card btw, when I received the computer it was a SB128) I was told windows 98 required a sound card and would not run without one!!!
I would of stopped right then and there and built my own pc, but my parents where buying the pc for me and refused to let me build it. Claimed I didn't have the knowege, an excuse I still use today when they call me for support :-) Of couse that makes them wonder what all that money for my certs was for though.
We have used Gateway systems at our company for the past five years.
The past two years have been excellent with them. If you order a hundred systems, they'll be identical so you can image and deploy them easily. They have inexpensive long-term warranties and tech-support that will help you out when you have a complex problem. I've had them send me a better monitor when one of theirs burned out. It was there the next day, even before I'd packed up the old one to ship back.
Their cases are nice to work in now. Completely toolless to install cards and drives. The edges are rounded so no more coming out of an upgrade missing a finger tip.
We even have a few Gateway servers now and we've been very happy with them. Absolutely no problems.
I've always liked their laptops better than Dell, Compaq, HP, or Toshiba.
Yes, the first three years they weren't very fun to work with. You'd order a hundred and you'd get three different video cards, four different network cards, different motherboards, in any given machine. That's a huge pain in the ass when you are trying to image and deploy those in a corporate environment.
Don't even get me started on their "if you open the case or install any software you've voided the warranty" bullshit during those few years.
But that's turned around. They are a good computer company, and an antidote to the Dell hegemony in the PC world.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
At my old company, I switched from Dell (bad support problems) to Gateway back in 2000. I bought their systems for the next couple of years, until forced into Compaq/HP by our corporate parent - but in my experience I was getting better quality systems in the old Gateway E-series desktops for less money than the Compaqs were costing. And when I or one of my techs called Gateway, we got to talk to a human who'd actually not make us go through all the clueless support hoops that a Dell or HP would. If we diagnosed a problem, the Gateway tech would actually believe us and send the part (if we needed it) withough giving us a line of BS.
And they'd also send us a real live sales rep who'd come to visit us a few times a year and show us the actual roadmap, so we could forecast our ordering appropriately. Dell and Compaq wouldn't bother doing that for us because we weren't big enough to justify actual face time (we had about 150+ users).
Nowadays, though, as I mentioned above what's left of my old company is living La Vida HP, reliability problems and all. And I've got my own place now, and I used Dell systems to set up my training lab (even though I can't stand 'em), because I just couldn't pass up the $150/box I was saving over the equivalent Gateway. Bummer. But that's the market position Gateway's been in. The big companies don't take them seriously versus Dell, HP, and IBM, and the little price-conscious companies can't afford them. At least eMachines helps them in the price-fixated marketplace.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
My experience with Gateway in 1999 caused me, as a Network Admin, to never buy Gateway again. My company bought 10 new "identical" Gateway PCs. When we received them in, I got ready to build one and clone the rest in order to make "standard" PCs. Well, lo-and-behold, the PCs weren't identical! Even though we had ordered all the same model # and specs, gateway had used different sound cards, video cards, network cards, etc. They all had the same "specs", but weren't really identical.
Pulling crap like that really increases the support costs for a corporate network.
Because of that, now that I'm in charge of determining what brands we buy, Gateway is not on my vendor list.
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