Occasionally you see a YouTube video or a vintage computer post about a computer branded AOpen, sometimes with an additional badge on it. It’s also easy to find individual components branded AOpen, including optical drives, motherboards, power supplies, and pretty much everything but floppy drives. In case you were wondering, it is all related.
AOpen was backed by Acer
If you look closely, you will probably notice the letter A in AOpen bears a striking resemblance to the letter A in the the Acer logo from the same time frame. That is not a coincidence. The letter A in AOpen stands for Acer. The computer manufacturer.
My first encounter with AOpen was in the mid-1990s. I was in college, and a couple of my former managers from Best Buy, Don and Ron, somehow tracked me down. They wanted to know about the college town I was living in. I told them what I knew. Next thing I knew, Don and Ron were opening a computer store there.
Most of the hardware they sold was AOpen.
The AOpen sales pitch
There were other brands that were cheaper, but AOpen let them compete on quality. They would flat out tell you that the parts were made by Acer, so the quality of their computer was going to be the same as an Acer computer you bought in a chain store. Whereas if you just bought the cheapest computer on the block, you didn’t know where the parts were coming from.
I even seem to recall seeing an AOpen advertisement that used similar wording. The photo was a sketchy looking vendor giving off the same vibes as the people who sell area rugs out of the back of a van in the parking lot of an abandoned gas station.
Every town had one shop that sold bottom of the barrel stuff that would break a few months after the warranty had expired, but their selling point was that it was an open architecture system, so if you ever had any problems with it, you could replace individual failed parts, and if it was time to upgrade, you could swap in a whole new motherboard.
Don and Ron’s sales pitch was they could give you the same upgradability of a generic clone, but better dependability. And it had FCC approval too. Even if you didn’t care about regulations, the systems they sold had a good aura about them. The cases weren’t flimsy, and the fit and finish was good because everything but the floppy drive, CPU, and hard drive came from the same vendor. When you mixed and matched the cheapest parts available, they didn’t always fit together quite right.
And they could hit different price points by mixing and matching, especially when it came to processors. They were not at all shy about pitching AMD or Cyrix.
What happened to that business model
The reason you don’t see a lot of people selling computers that way today is profit margin. A small business just can’t compete with Dell‘s pricing anymore. And even if you prefer to buy in person, Acer is selling pre-built computers to the big box stores in such large quantities, either under their brand or the Gateway or brand that a small business can’t really match their price anymore, at least not if they want to turn any profit.
That’s why you don’t see much in the way of white box PCs anymore. They are cost effective for someone who is going to upgrade their machine on a regular basis, but they aren’t really cost-effective for someone who buys a pre-built machine and uses it for social media and keeps the same machine more or less unchanged for five or even 10 years.
You can still get AOpen components today, and the quality is still pretty good, but you probably won’t see an entire computer made just of AOpen components anymore.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
does AOpen still selling the latest AMD Intel Corp motherboards ?
seemingly only Asus MSI Gigabyte
It doesn’t look like it, but I have to admit it’s been a few years since I shopped for new motherboards. Like I said, the old AOpen business model doesn’t work the way it used to. Acer is still using the brand name but not on whitebox-type components all that much anymore.