eMachines never obsolete PCs: More than a meme

It’s a meme from the turn of the century, an irony to end all ironies. The cheapest computers on the market at the time, which were arguably obsolete the day before you bought them, had stickers on the front bragging they were never obsolete. Of course I’m talking about the eMachines never obsolete marketing campaign.

Now, what eMachines said and what they meant by never obsolete were two very different things, but if anything that just made the stickers more ludicrous.

Why eMachines’ never obsolete claim is funny

Without the historical context, the idea of a computer with a 366 MHz or 566 MHz CPU and 32 MB of RAM claiming to be never obsolete is pretty funny. But this wasn’t a heavyweight like HP or Dell or Apple making this claim. eMachines was a relative upstart, launching in the third quarter of 1998. We forget today how big of a deal they were when they launched. In the fall of 1998, an entry level computer generally sold for around $699. You could get something for less if you went to a clone shop that assembled PCs from parts and were very careful what you asked for, or if you caught a closeout deal.

Then along came this South Korean upstart pricing its entry level machine at $399, with incrementally more powerful PCs priced at $499, $599, and $699. Their most expensive computer cost the same as the least expensive computer the established PC companies wanted to sell at the time.

I think eMachines was the most disruptive of the 90s computer brands.

It took less than a year on the market for eMachines to amp things up even more with their never obsolete campaign.

What never obsolete actually meant

There are surviving examples of the eMachines never obsolete computers with intact stickers on them, and that’s why it’s still a joke today. By the time Web 2.0 made sharing graphical memes easy, eMachines no longer existed as an independent company and most of us had forgotten about that ludicrous claim. That is, until someone found one, snapped a picture, and shared it.

The sticker on the case implied that if you bought Internet service from eMachines, after 2 years, they would upgrade your computer to the fastest available on the market for the low price of $99.

But there was a catch. Of course there was a catch

The exact terms of service were a little different from that, and you had to fire the computer up to see them.

The way it worked was if you bought Internet service from them at a price of $19.99 per month for 24 months, they would offer to upgrade your computer for $99 plus shipping. You had 90 days to ship your never obsolete eMachines PC back to them in original packaging, with original proof of purchase, and then they would upgrade it and ship it back to you. You also had to pay the shipping each way.

What you actually got was based on what you originally paid for the computer. If you paid $399, they would upgrade the processor to what they were selling for $399 at the time. If you bought a more expensive unit, they moved you further up the product line. Depending on the timing, they might only have to swap a CPU. The worst case scenario for eMachines was that they would have to swap the motherboard and CPU and the memory. But it wasn’t quite like getting a new PC. You still had your old hard drive, optical drive, and everything else.

Was the eMachines never obsolete promotion a good deal?

If all you received was a replacement CPU chip, $99 plus shipping both ways probably wasn’t a bargain. The more they had to replace, the more money they stood to lose on the offer, but the better deal it would be for the consumer. Presumably, one of the things they factored in when releasing new models was how much of a loss they stood to take based on the number of machines that would be eligible for the upgrade.

But in the meantime, that Internet service was a revenue stream, and they had a very good idea how many people were eligible, and what percentage of them would actually take them up on that offer.

Basically, what eMachines were doing was very similar to what independent computer shops had been doing since at least the 386 days. The whole reason for buying a computer from Bob’s Better Business World in St Louis, and yes, that was the name of the place, was that Bob would take back your old motherboard and CPU, no matter how old it was, in trade for a new one.

It was a way for a relative newcomer to get buyers to be more confident buying a PC from them.

What about getting it for free?

It was possible to get in on the eMachines never obsolete promotion for free. Sort of. That’s because you could get the computer itself for free, if you were willing to mess with multiple rebates.

One rebate was from retailer, and there was a much larger rebate that you got from signing up for Internet from MSN or Compuserve for 2 or 3 years. The problem was the never obsolete deal also required you to buy Internet service from a different provider, one that was providing eMachines kickbacks.

So it usually didn’t make sense to do both. Rather than spend $480 on Internet service you didn’t need and then spending $99 plus shipping to get the upgrade, it was cheaper to just buy another eMachine in 2 years again. Maybe you’d even splurge on the $499 model this time.

The only time it made sense to do both would be if you had a friend or relative who was paying for dialup anyway, didn’t mind switching, and agreed to reimburse you.

Why the eMachines never obsolete campaign ended

There were very practical reasons for the never obsolete campaign to come to an end. Dial up Internet’s days were numbered even when the promotion started. All of the YouTube videos about the never obsolete campaign say that their computers were from the year 2000, but I don’t think that’s right. I think it was late 1999, after they launched an Internet provider in September.

The reason the promotion ended was broadband. Not everyone could get broadband in 1999 or even 2000, but as time went on, getting broadband got easier. And once you had broadband, you didn’t want to be paying $20 a month for mediocre 56k dial-up.

What happened to eMachines

By 2004, eMachines was an acquisition target. They found a buyer in Gateway. Yes, the people who sold computers in cow-spotted boxes. I even blogged about it at the time. Gateway was struggling with controlling costs, meeting competitive price points, and quality. They saw what eMachines was doing as an improvement over what they were doing. But the merger didn’t work out for them, with the result looking more like the worst aspects of the two companies combined rather than the best. In 2007, Acer bought the combined company, and in 2013, Acer discontinued using the eMachines brand name.

So eMachines has been gone now for more than a decade. But thanks to the eMachines never obsolete stickers and the delicious irony, I don’t expect they will be forgotten any time soon.

Were eMachines any good?

At the time eMachines hit the market, I’d done my time selling computers at Best Buy. I’d witnessed the rise of Packard Bell first hand, and its shady practices were catching up with them. At the same time, I built some surprisingly good computers at those types of price points myself at that time. So I suggested to my employer that we buy one to evaluate. It was worth $399 to us to find out if they were any good.

After I tore one down, I concluded they were the very definition of mediocre. In a writing lab where they would see 3 to 4 hours of use mostly for word processing and email, they were fine. We had a small lab with 10 very old machines in it where 9 more eMachines would have been a big improvement. So we planted the first one we had bought in that lab, bought 9 more, and everyone was happy.

When I recommended eMachines

From time to time, I would meet someone who had bought a Packard Bell and it had either broken or outlived its usefulness, and I recommended an eMachine to them. It wasn’t great, but it was better than what it replaced. Cheaper, too.

That was the epitome of the eMachine. If you needed a computer and you had $399, it was a decent computer that wouldn’t fall apart in 2 or 3 years as long as you didn’t overload it with more hardware than its power supply could handle. They weren’t great, but as retro Youtubers who refurbish them are finding, they weren’t as bad as we remember, either.

But that was the thing about it. It was a decent computer that given everyone’s recent memory of Packard Bell, you just expected it to work for two or three years. The idea that you could pay $399 for a computer that would never be obsolete was ludicrous to anyone who knew anything about computers at the time.

Limitations

But that’s not to say an eMachine didn’t have its limits. It certainly did. It had AGP graphics, but they were integrated onto the motherboard. You didn’t get an AGP slot. So if you wanted to replace the entry-level video on the motherboard, you had to settle for a PCI graphics card.

So if you were really into 3D gaming, an eMachine was suboptimal.

Depending on the motherboard, you might get three or four PCI slots. Their target audience was someone who’d add a network card and maybe an additional USB card. In other words, someone who didn’t see three PCI slots as limiting.

The same went for the memory. They generally only had two RAM slots.

And I can imagine if you actually did fill up the interior with upgrades, you’d run up against the limits of the power supply, and you’d probably have reliability and stability issues.

Nostalgia for eMachines today

For Gen Xers like me, eMachines were a reasonable computer for the money, as long as you didn’t buy the $399 model with $799 worth of expectations of it. For the generation younger than me, eMachines were something they grew up with. It might have been their first computer. If it wasn’t, they had a friend who had one. Depending what games they were trying to play on them, they probably have some fond memories of them.

And for about 7 years, the big-box retailers sold a lot of eMachines. So if you go looking for a vintage computer to run Windows 98, an eMachine from that era is likely to turn up in your hunt.