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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.'"
...will be called e-Cows, now with twice as much ugly.
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!!! **
Actually, it was $189.5 million with the mail-in rebate...
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.
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.