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They were never obsolete because, as it says on the sticker (that no one on the internet can ever seem to be bothered to read), that you can replace it every 2 years for new, more modern system for only 99 bucks.
and quite frankly, thats a fucking steal, considering what PC prices were like back in the late 90s, and with how fast technology was advancing.
For crying out loud, thank you!
Power users didn’t flock to these, but they were awesome for a certain demographic. Low skill early tech adopters. Grandma, grampa, mom and dad. Dudes out in rural areas, like my friend’s dad, who only needed to use the PC for 30 minutes a day to keep his farm operation running and couldn’t give 2 shits.
The trick was closing down your PC company before the two years are out.
As it is with all “lifetime” subscription options
Ah yes, totally legible sticker
I remember these shit boxes. Fuck these shit boxes. Set that fucking thing on fire and throw it off the overpass.
I use that case for my work computer! It has a ryzen7 and RTX 2080. I had to hack the front USB to connect it with a modern mobo header, but it works…
Where’s the radiator?
It’s upward inside the drive bay, using a single 120mm fan and rad, then I perforated the case’s top sheet metal with a new grid of holes for outlet airflow. Definitely not amazing cooling performance but hey. I had to slice the CDROM drive in half to make room for it… the floppy drive actually works but not the giant CDROM lol
Clever!
Of all the machines an Emachine. Those were the cheapest and worst built computers ever. They were often obsolete the moment they were sold.
I guess that makes the irony even more delicious.
Even when these first came out you had to know it was silly
Correct me if I’m wrong but I think this was a programme where they would upgrade/replace your setup for free every year or so.
That’s right. There’s an insightful blog article if you want to learn the full story.
You could get your PC upgraded for $99 if you also bought 24 months of dial-up Internet service through them. But you also had to pay shipping both ways, and be out the use of your computer while you did it! That seems so inconvenient I imagine almost nobody bothered. eMachines certainly expected people wouldn’t, making the whole thing little more than a carefully calculated marketing tactic. And it worked.
That said, their machines were very competitively priced even without the upgrade deal, and it really disrupted the incumbents, making them good value machines even if you didn’t take them up on the dubious “never obsolete” offer.
Take me back. I don’t like it in the future…
I used to be a retail PC service tech back when these things were new. I remember scoffing at the “never obsolete” tag. They were obsolete while still new in the box.
I worked in retail sales at the time.
customer: “What’s the catch?”
me: “It’s pretty slow now, if you keep it a couple years, you get to buy someone else’s post upgrade for cheap assuming the company is still around, you don’t get the replacement from us”
customer: “So what about those Compaq’s?”
Where is the lie
I be there’s a Linux distro that would run on it.
AntiX runs great on my Pentium 3 rig.
There aren’t many i386 distributions anymore, but you should still have some selection, I think
