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AMD Technology

Gateway is Back, And It's Selling AMD-Powered Budget Laptops at Walmart (theverge.com) 46

Posted by msmash from the blast-from-the-past dept.
Gateway, the major PC brand of the 1990s with the iconic cow-spotted logo, is back -- well, kind of. Acer now owns the company and has decided to start selling Gateway-branded laptops again, exclusively at Walmart. From a report: As is often the case with Walmart-exclusive laptops, the main attraction is the price. On the most affordable end is the Gateway Ultra Thin series, which starts with a $179 11.6-inch laptop with an AMD A4, and spans up to a $499 15.6-inch model with a Core i5. There's also a $199 11.6-inch touchscreen 2-in-1 available, powered by an Intel Celeron processor. The names aren't very interesting, but they do come in a variety of fun colors, including purple, blue, green, and rose gold, as well as black. On the higher end is the Gateway Creators series, two 15.6-inch laptops meant for media editing and gaming. No funky colors on these -- they only come in black -- but they do seem to have some decent specs. You can choose the $799 rig with a Ryzen 5 4600H and an Nvidia GTX 1650 GPU or a $999 model with a Core i5 and an RTX 2060. That puts them a step above the Ultra Thin series in price, but they're still fairly inexpensive as creator-focused machines go. I would guess that's at least partially because they don't seem to have a lot of storage -- only 256GB each.
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Gateway is Back, And It's Selling AMD-Powered Budget Laptops at Walmart More

Gateway is Back, And It's Selling AMD-Powered Budget Laptops at Walmart

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  • So...... (Score:3)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Monday September 28, 2020 @12:11PM (#60550710) Journal
    So someone bought a logo?

    Anyway I need to get back to fixing some node bugs I found. It's open source, you know, you can do that.

  • Not really (Score:4, Informative)

    by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Monday September 28, 2020 @12:24PM (#60550750)

    Acer owns the name, not the company. They have licensed the name to some Chinese company.

  • Wal-Mart is well known for getting suppliers to manufacture WM-specific products with every corner cut, so that they can boast lower prices than anywhere else and unsuspecting consumers think they are getting the brand's normal quality. Maybe for a $180 laptop that I could take anywhere and not worry if it was lost or stolen, but I can't imagine buying one of these if I actually cared about it.

  • Back in the race to the bottom. (Score:3)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Monday September 28, 2020 @12:30PM (#60550770)

    Back in the Mid to Late 1990's Gateway Computers were considered a bit more pricier than other PCs you could get, but they were worth it, because of better build quality, and better components. Then they wanted to Compete against the low priced PC market. Where in the midst of the Mhz War (where the only selling point of a computer was the CPU Clock Speed) They started cost cutting, using crapier components that caused more failures, and lower end CPUs like Celerons that had high Mhz speeds, but would be very buggy and unreliable. Leaving Gateway no longer considered a good brand to buy and avoided by people who wanted a quality product (in which Dell at the time was known for) So they keeps on getting cheaper and cheaper, and competing with other Companies like Compaq and e-machines that were crap too. Where it came to a point if you want a garbage PC, the Name Brand no longer mattered.

    • Wish I had mod points today.... I would certainly mod you up as informative.

      That's certainly the way I remember it too. And while I've built most of my personal computers in the last 45 years or so, I do recall lusting a bit after the Gateway as a great choice in a pre-built system. But, as you say, that did not last very long.

  • The last somewhat mid-level AMD laptop -- a Lenovo -- I got from work was crap. This has been less than 3 years ago. It wasn't a 199.00 job, either. Specs were in the range where it should have been an OK laptop. Not a speed demon, but at least usable. Man, what a dog.

    I understand AMD has some high-end stuff now that is giving Intel a run for its money. Good for them. I wouldn't get any low-end AMD stuff for anything I was actually wanting to use for anything. I have absolutely nothing against AMD and if th

    • Corporate laptops are often slow due to software demands from corporate networks, etc. May not have much to do with the hardware.

      • Agreed. Corporate-mandated AV, NAC, and communications stupidity can cause the best hardware to slow to a crawl. Especially when security admins don't configure them to mitigate performance issues.

      • Given the timeframe, it might also have been one of the pre-Ryzen laptop.
        Those definitely weren't stellar in performance.

        And that's already before all the bloatware that the IT department installs on the CEO's orders.

        Regarding bloat: I am lucky, I work in the academics in research(*), so the first thing I get to do after the laptop is out of the box is to wipe whatever crap is on it, and install a proper Linux distro.

        ---

        (*) research in Virology. I haven't slept since March.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pascoea ( 968200 )
      "Mid-High-Range" is where it typically aim my personal computer builds. My personal opinion, this is the area where AMD shines. The same performance is about $100 cheaper for AMD. I can't speak to the high-end stuff, I've never spent $600+ on a CPU.

  • Nothing screams quality and integrity like "we were forced to hit a lower price point by this store, and the corners we cut mean we're unwilling to even slap our own name on the results"!

  • Might be good to remember that the Gateway brand was different name in the 90s. I still have a server with the Gateway2000 logo on it somewhere in storage ...

  • Brand name reuse is consumer fraud (Score:3)

    by vinn01 ( 178295 ) on Monday September 28, 2020 @01:14PM (#60550896)

    Brand name reuse is consumer fraud. Selling a product under a reused brand name is nearly the definition of "deceptive".

    The whole point of brand names is to associate the attributes of the company, or brand, and the product. If the company sells out, it's deceptive to use that same brand on other products. I never understood how that is legal.

  • No shit, I just got a "502 Bad Gateway" the first time I tried to load this page.

  • At one point Gateway was kind of respected, but they sort of drove it into the ground... that was a long time ago though, would anyone remember Gateway at all now?

    About the best you could hope for was the memory of the poor Gateway end-game products had faded from mind.

  • Ugh. I'm old enough to remember when Gateway made good computers. We ditched Dell at work because if you did have an issue, you got real customer service from Gateway rather than a script monkey. Yes, at that time small businesses were getting Dell script monkeys. With Gateway, you described the issue, they asked a couple of questions and if it needed a new part, they shipped. I was quite sad when mine finally died.
    I wonder how many people are going think that they are actually getting a real Gateway instea

  • I bought 3 laptops in the last year: one for my son (a gamer), one for my wife, and one for my dad (both general application use). Each time I tried to buy a laptop with a Ryzen it was out of stock. That includes: Micro Center, Staples, and NewEgg. For my son's gaming laptop with the 4800H (an Acer Tuf), I had it on backorder for 5 months (Mid-April to August) before I canceled. I canceled in late August because he needed a laptop for school - I tried to swap it out for 2 other models with AMD chips and

    • I held out until I finally found one... couldn't bear the thought of throwing away more cycles to speculative execution bugs. It is a 15", but that's fine by me since I have it plugged into a 32" monitor when I can, and I like the battery savings when I can't.

      I'm not sure what you think the screen size has to do with the CPU or chipset overheating... I'm guessing the shortage is because someone failed to anticipate the demand. Either the OEMs making your favored 17" didn't provision enough from AMD, or AMD

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Pascoea ( 968200 )
        Laptops in general have been more difficult to find, especially in the $5-600 range. I assume it's the "everybody is buying them for home schooling" thing.

  • You almost have to be a geezer like me, to remember when Gateway was a really excellent brand of PC. They went bust, the name was bought up, abused for a while, and went dormant. So...why bring the brand back now? Are they trying to suck the last dregs of value from it? That really doesn't make any sense. People old enough to remember the original company also know what happened to it. People younger than that - well, it's just a meaningless name, no different from some new name Walmart marketeers might hav

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jred ( 111898 )
      Actually, grandparents will remember it, and not be aware of the difference. They'll just recognize the name, assume that if it's been around that long it must be ok, and buy them for their grandkids for Christmas. Let's face it, the people who buy computers at Walmart aren't exactly knowledgeable about technology.

  • But WTF? Is this 2010? 2Gb of memory on a tablet? (Both the 8 and 10 inch versions) and the 32Gb "storage" isn't really all that good.

    My phone has 4gb of memory.

    Oh and let's not forget the impending doom of a one and done system update from "Gateway" on the tablets.

  • This is not and has nothing to do with the original Gateway. The license to use the name was leased by Acer to a Chinese company. So, buyer beware. Multiple Free Big Brother spy apps with every machine.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Memories..... (Score:3)

    by boxless ( 35756 ) on Monday September 28, 2020 @07:41PM (#60552118)

    First PC. September 1991. As I recall, it was a 486dx with 4 or 8MB RAM, and an 80MB disk. Diamond SpeedStar Graphics.

    My job only had 386's, and the performance boost on this one was very noticeable.

    i didn't tell them I bought it, for fear they would ask me to do work on it.

    That was when PC Mag was as thick as a book, and could probably stop a bullet. There were so many clone vendors, it was hard to keep them straight and buy the right one. But, at that time, GW was one of the more respected brands. Yeah, they went downhill after that.

  • ...Worked fine. I liked their ads a lot. Cow spotted boxes.

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