End of the Road for eMachines Laptops

Last year Gateway bought out computer manufacturer eMachines. eMachines was known for its low prices and Gateway continued to release laptops under the eMachines brand even after the take over. But now Gateway is making a huge push and focus on selling laptops for 2005 and with their new offerings of budget notebooks combined with higher priced top performance notebooks it seems the eMachines branding will be dropped and only Gateway laptops will be released going forward.

Recently we noticed that on the eMachines website there was only one notebook left being displayed, this happened to be the eMachines m5405 (http://www.emachines.com/products/products.html?prod=eMachines_M5405). So we asked Gateway why products were disappearing from the eMachines.com website and got the following response from a spokesperson:

"We're focusing all of our resources behind building the Gateway notebook brand right now, so we don't have any immediate plans to introduce any new notebooks under the eMachines brand in the near future. However, we span the complete range of features/value/form factors within our Gateway brand of notebooks, which is offered widely by major retailers in addition to all of our direct channels."

So essentially what all this means is that Gateway will simply be releasing budget notebooks under their own branding and it doesn't make sense for them to confuse consumers any longer by selling under the eMachines brand. This is a good move by Gateway as the notebook market continues to grow. Now is the time to really establish themselves in the notebook arena, HP is stumbling and IBM is at least in a precarious position as they attempt to transition their PCdivision to Lenovo of China.

 

I think it's a smart play. Gateway offers models that are as cheap as eMachines and they wany the Gateway brand in retail outlets. There is very little shelf space to go around, so they decided the Gateway brand was the one that should survive. Really can't fault them at all for this decision. Makes tracking the major players a little easier for us too [ ]

Editor in Chief http://www.bargainPDA.com and http://www.SPOTstop.com

 

Good thing that they are consolidating market share. The move to China will help with overhead but they need to work on customer service.

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eMachines BLEW the hinge issue, so they were forced to dump the brand and go with gateway. Got a big batch of bad laptops? Ship em' all to Canada. Problem solved. Idiots. I hope at least someone at eMachines was fired. Problem is, Gateway had the same case with the same hinge issue. [ )]




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My Canada Does Not Include Celine Dion

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by labradogs1

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by bmwrob

 

One thing that has stayed with emachines even after the Gateway aquisition is the whole "emachines is for everyone" philosophy. The whole packaging, included manuals and feature set on the emachines only M5000 series was fantastic. I think it is a sad day that Gateway has pulled the plug on that line. Just look at the last model review by PC Mag:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1706488,00.asp

To get this kind of quality and feature combination out of Gateway, consumers will definately pay more. Funny too how emachines notebooks had the "hinge" issue after Gateway stuck there sloppy hands into the updated designs. I will surely miss the M5000 series notebooks from emachines and hope to see notebook models from that division return to store shelves as soon as Gateway comes to there senses. For goodness sakes, even crappy Compaq has survived the HP aquisition!

Barry J. Doyle
Editor in Chief
TabletPCReviewSpot.com
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