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Hardware Technology

The Gateway PC Brand Returns With New Laptops (pcmag.com) 55

Posted by BeauHD from the back-from-the-dead dept.
On Wednesday, Acer and Walmart announced they were reviving the Gateway brand to sell affordable Windows 10 notebooks and laptop convertibles from $179 and up. PCMag reports: Gateway was once a major PC vendor in the US, especially during the 1990s when it famously sold computers packaged in cow spotted boxes. However, the company's fortunes began to falter in the 2000s, resulting in Taiwanese PC vendor Acer later buying it up. Acer has now decided to bring back Gateway, calling it a "beloved" brand in the US. And to market the products, the company has resurrected the cow spotted box logo.

According to Acer, the products are designed for everyday consumers, students and "creators," who pump out content or graphic designs. The hardware will also feature processors from either Intel or AMD, and come fitted with 1080p screens. In total, the Gateway PCs span nine different notebook models. At the low-end is the "11.6-inch Ultra Slim" laptop, which retails for $179, and contains 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. At the high-end, you can buy the "Gateway Creator Series 15.6-inch Performance Notebook," which has an Intel 10th Gen Core i5-10300H processor, an NVIDIA 2060 RTX graphics card, 256GB of SSD storage and 8GB of RAM.
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The Gateway PC Brand Returns With New Laptops More

The Gateway PC Brand Returns With New Laptops

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  • commodity widows book (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dmay34 ( 6770232 ) on Friday September 11, 2020 @09:08PM (#60498032)
    Ok. So it's a commodity Windows notebook. Is there a single feature that differentiates it from Acer? Or any other Windows notebook?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by waspleg ( 316038 )

      Acer sucks so they're calling it Gateway?

    • It's about as different at the Mercury Bobcat was from the Ford Pinto
    • Spotted cow box is the difference ðY

      • They don't say anything about the boxes. As far as I can tell, their homage boils down to the name "Gateway" plus a logo that, if you squint enough, might remind you of the old cow boxes - but only if you were already familiar with those.

    • > Is there a single feature that differentiates it from Acer? Or any other Windows notebook?
      If it's anything like the old Gateway, then sure:
      Spotted cow box, inflated price, and lackadaisical support.

      If they're targeting budget Walmart computers there's always hope that that middle factor might not be revived.

      And seriously, what's up with all the computers with 4GB RAM in this day and age? The extra $10 for 8GB so that you won't start feeling the need to upgrade on the first day just drives the price up

      • It's the same trick automakers do: Get them into the showroom by advertising a low "base" price, and when they realise the base model doesn't have sat nav, digital radio or even air-conditioning, upsell them to the real price. The soldered-on RAM is especially heinous because it means you are forced to pay for the mark-up OEMs put on RAM, like you have to pay for the automaker mark-up with all those radios and sat navs that come "integrated" into the car dashboard nowadays (modern cars have no DIN slots). A

  • I remember these wretched things.....

    I wonder Walmart will revive the iconic Gateway cow boxes.

    Gateway used to be Acer's low end, now it will be Walmart's low end commodity machine filled with the hardware of the month.

    I wonder if they will use TeamGroup SSDs :)

    • Before Acer they were better than that. Mid- to late-90s they were actually ok. Then began the race to the bottom.

      • Agree. They were very good in the beginning. My first PC was a 386DX that came in the famous cow box. 120MB of storage and 1 or 2 MB of RAM. It ran Windows but came with DOS disks, which I used until 3.1 came out. The machine kept running well into the late 90's when I sold it after I'd bought a Pentium machine that one of the sysadmins at work had built for me. Gateway's customer service was excellent; you could actually call a number in South or North Dakota (they were in one of those Dakotas) and be talk
    • About the only thing iconic about Gateway was the boxes they came in. The PCs themselves were just OEM garbage bundled up with a bunch of crapware. I wonder why anyone thinks the brand is worth resurrecting.

      • Back when they were known as Gateway 2000 and not just Gateway, they were well regarded as building high quality computers. Of course, no one remembers that, they remember the utter garbage they produced starting in the late 90's, then continued once they were bought by Acer (which is no surprise since Acer is utter garbage), until the brand was mercifully killed off a few years back. Why they decided to revive the name is beyond me. They'd probably have better luck with the eMachines brand which they al

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday September 11, 2020 @10:27PM (#60498158)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • The cow box motif girly and cute. I remember girls in high school and college fawning over it.

      Real men built their own PCs....but none of that matters now that Apple took over the world.

      The world is so confusing now.

    • My Gateway (in the late '90s I think) was beloved for one reason: it had a physical volume control wheel, mounted on the side like in old transistor radios. I used it all the time, for instantly turning down some obnoxious blaring site and instantly muting it when I saw the boss approaching.

      I hated the lack of it on my next PC that required multiple two-key-combination presses to turn the volume down, with a lag in the response. I was very close to modding it with an external potentiometer in series wi

  • Browser Rendering (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fermion ( 181285 ) on Saturday September 12, 2020 @12:17AM (#60498308) Homepage Journal
    The problem I see with low end machines is that most websites are now rolling out with no concern with resource consumption. My older machines hang on even the simplest websites. It is not just Google ads and dynamic content. It seem to be the incredibly wasteful engines used to build the sites. I see these creative machines used by young people who do most of their stuff on the web and store most of their stuff in the cloud. They do not need to run Adobe tools, but they do need to have a machine that can deal with website that assume you have 128 GB of memory and 2 GHz 8 core processor.

    • It seem to be the incredibly wasteful engines used to build the sites.

      One man's incredibly wasteful engine is another man's highly capable and highly customisable engine preventing the re-inventing of wheels.

      I actually think this is a good thing. Maybe if we can finally make experience for end users horrible enough they will realise that when you buy cheap shit you will get a cheap shit experience as a result. This goes well beyond laptops mind you, I'm talking about consumer goods in general.

      This isn't NASA, we're not cramming incredible capability into a very limited system

      • ...highly capable and highly customisable engine...

        Given the priorities of web designers, which is to say chic presentation crap and data mining. No wonder they don't care if it runs like crap even on a high-end PC with fiber.

        We shouldn't pander to the lowest common denominator.

        Ah, yes... we've all forgotten that the web is about the accessibility of information, and content should scale to the platform. It's nice to know that after about two decades of us old-timers calling for standards compliance and graceful degradation, today's web developers just hard-code for Chrome and tell you to fuck off if your

        • which is to say chic presentation crap and data mining.

          The former yes, the latter no. Web designers don't give a shit about data mining beyond firing up some analytics to see if their chic presentation is working. This is called understanding the market. About the only people who don't do this are people who don't give a crap if they have customers. The internet is a business.

          Ah, yes... we've all forgotten that the web is about the accessibility of information

          Well if this were the 1980s I'd agree with you. For me the web is about streaming content, video conferencing, running office suites, remotely managing devices through cloud services, and

          • > Web designers don't give a shit about data mining
            Of course they do - it's a must-have feature demanded by their clients.

            >You use the internet to "access information"?
            So do you - everything you lists qualifies, and there's no good reason for any of it to demand a powerful computer to do.

            • Of course they do - it's a must-have feature demanded by their clients.

              So what you're saying is the web designers don't, but someone else does. I've never seen someone disagree with me so hard while agreeing with me.

              So do you - everything you lists qualifies, and there's no good reason for any of it to demand a powerful computer to do.

              The fact that you suggest that shows you used a time machine to join us from 1999. You have a lot to learn. You can start with my list considering that most of the items have nothing to do with "access information" in any kind of limited way that doesn't "demand a powerful computer".

              Unless you think computers are nothing more than "accessing information" in general

              • So what you're saying is the web designers don't, but someone else does. I've never seen someone disagree with me so hard while agreeing with me.

                His point is that the people who view the web site are not the customers. The advertisers are the customers. Thus, web designers don't care about the user's experience and only care about what the advertisers want.

                Speaking of still living in 1999...

          • There is literally no website out there that tells you that any one of the many modern browsers or platforms are unsupported.

            Well, that argument holds up just fine if your view is that anything other than Chrome is "not modern".

            I use PaleMoon as my primary web browser and Firefox as a backup. Twitter blocked PaleMoon outright, insisting that it is not supported. Nonetheless, a version of Iron (Chromium fork) from many years ago and based on far older technology works just fine.

            But, hey, you can always insist that PaleMoon, which uses exactly the same rendering engine as Firefox, is ancient technology. If it intentionally doesn

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dwywit ( 1109409 )

        There are websites where you can post top-quality sarcasm, but you shouldn't do it here, you'll be taken seriously.

    • The web killed netbooks. Those atom-core machines were adequate for everyday tasks until website CPU consumption went bananas. Luckily you can buy the modern equivalent for around the same price. I got a dual core ryzen 3 with Vega graphics for $300, which is literally what a netbook cost when not on sale. It's roughly equivalent to my desktop towards the end of the XP era graphics-wise, and has more CPU.

      My website is dynamic and runs on a CMS yet runs fine if you disable JavaScript completely. It's shamefu

  • Even the buildings were cow-spotted (Score:3)

    by TigerPlish ( 174064 ) on Saturday September 12, 2020 @12:23AM (#60498320)

    On my way to Grand Forks AFB in 1996, in my itty bitty Miata, I spotted the buildings that were Gateway 2000's manufacturing base. They were cow-spotted.

    Now the name is just a bad memory, the kind that goes away as your rub your eyes as you wake up. I remember the e-machines hookup.

    The Gateway I remember was cool. Well-spec'd, well-built. That was late 90's.

    The Gateway of the 2000's was an atrocity that deserves to stay dead. Dear lord, put that shit back in the grave, Acer....

  • If only it were true - Where are you Real Gateway? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by az-saguaro ( 1231754 ) on Saturday September 12, 2020 @01:46AM (#60498392)

    Many of the comments post so far seem to refer to the bad experiences of Gateway in the 2000's. But, before that was Gateway 2000, a great company making great machines. It was a custom build site, and Gateway could put your perfect system together cheaper than you could buying your own parts. By specifying top end components, my Gateway machines each ran for many years. System integration and testing was good, and things usually ran as they should on delivery. Customer service was superb - that is what Gateway 2000 built its brand on, and it was truly good for the first decade.

    As I recall the news back then, founder Ted Waitt broke down over the stress of the thing. Upon moving the company from Iowa to California, then relinquishing operations to others, it all fell apart. I remember when they tried to open an online computer parts store - it was the worst. Their e-Machines merger turned their product line to cheap poo, polluting their brand. However, up until 2007, you could still spec out a top line machine at a premium price. My last Gateway purchase was a laptop in 2007. It is still the best laptop I have had, in service until 2016 when the graphics chip lost its solder - but re-balling it saved it. It's hardware is now too old to support modern big memory apps and graphics, missing usb-3, hdmi & dp, etc., but it is still the most wonderful machine. And, my main desktop rig is even better. It came from them in 2004, and it was my main machine until 2016, now semi-retired for the same reasons, but still in use for various apps and file and project updates that do not render well under Win 10.

    After year 2000 roughly, when Gateway went from stellar to stinko, it was because they moved their attention to the mass market cheapo side of things, rather than sticking with their traditional base of techies, hobbyists, developers & creators, and businesses who wanted better machines with personal support.

    I miss them. If it were the old Gateway, I would still buy everything from them. (I have found a new vendor that I love, buy my stuff there now - Puget Systems.)

    This news that Acer and Walmart are bringing forth a new line of under-powered cheap machines under the old name means nothing. The Gateway name is indeed "beloved" I believe among those who knew it in the 1990's. For anyone who knows it from the 2000's, this is a yawn at best, a turn off at worst. For those who never knew the name, it is just another commodity line at Walmart - useful if you want a basic machine, but apt to be disappointing if you are going to really exercise your machine.

  • Sometimes I wonder why certain brands can't just rest in peace. The likes of Commodore (and Amiga), Atari, Gateway, Napster etc. Anyone who even remembers the brand also knows that this new thing with the same name is not the old thing. So there is no nostalgia or loyalty. And anyone who doesn't derives no brand recognition at all. So what's the point? All that happens is the brand reanimates, flops, gets sold on, reanimates, flops, gets sold on etc. The brands are basically undead, cursed to walk the eart

  • First Gary Larson gets a Website and knida-sorta gets out of retirement.
    Now we see cow spotted boxes at Waltmart.

    I, for one, welcome our Bovine overlords.

  • .... one of their first desktop PCs. I remember they offered a motherboard upgrade for $300 after awhile. I liked their ads too. They were different.

  • All the models that are even remotely compelling on price come with Win10S. Once you get into Win10 Home the price is no better than what you'd find in a half dozen brands. Gateway Fail.

  • Huh? I want a Quantex! Anyone remember Quantex? Come on, I bought two computers from them! Never heard, huh?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Guppy ( 12314 )

      Huh? I want a Quantex! Anyone remember Quantex? Come on, I bought two computers from them! Never heard, huh?

      Yeah, I remember their "Do you speak Quantex?" advertisements.

  • Hello! Do you want to talk to me? I am here - https://cutt.ly/ctxw3W2 [cutt.ly]

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