Imagine paying $99 every TWO years to get the fastest pc.
Sounds expensive, definitely wouldn’t take that deal
Will still probably work as a local server somewhere
I can see her ports!
A home pc that came with Win98LT… Lite! As in you didn’t need the full version which had the nice network components (home server services, network neighborhood, windows firewall, etc).
Reading the tag it’s saying you can spend $99 to upgrade to the latest model every two years as you would a cellphone, fulfilling the promise of you never having an obsolete pc.
Fine print. Probably didn’t work out well.
Special eMachines™ Upgrade for $99 to eMachines™Network Members Only
Subscribe to the eMachines™ Network for 24 consecutive months and we’ll upgrade your eMachines™ for only $99 (plus shipping)!
Here’s how it works: If you live in the contiguous U.S. or Canada, we’ll contact you after you’ve subscribed to The eMachines™ Network for 24 months and offer to upgrade your eMachines™ PC to whatever processor technology is built into whatever eMachines™ PC you can buy at the time of the upgrade for whatever you paid for your original machine. For example, let’s say your eTower* PC was priced at $399 (not including promotional discount) and runs a 366 MHz processor, but at the time of the upgrade $399 would buy an 800MHz eTower. We’ll upgrade your eTower* to 800MHz.
All you have to do is ship us your PC within 90 days, plus $99 (or Canadian equivalent), proof of purchase and payment for return shipping. We’ll promptly upgrade it and return it. Note: you’ll have to back-up your data to avoid accidental loss, and use the original packaging (we have replacement packaging available). See more detailed information"
whatever eMachines™ PC you can buy at the time of the upgrade for whatever you paid for your original machine
“All our current PC’s are priced higher than your was, eat shit”
It was obsolete before you even bought it. It has a shitty celeron.
I miss the old Gateway cow PCs. This would make a pretty sick sleeper PC to bring to LAN parties.
Just missing this sticker
I was there, Gandalf. IIRC this was because emachines had a type of subscription program for upgrades. They were shit machines, btw. The power supplies were trash and had a non-standard form factor.
On the right side, upgrade to the latest every 2 years for $99.
However, you had to ship the current machine back to them at your own expense, and have no computer while you waited on the new one.
It was an upgrade scheme carefully crafted to be such a pain in the arse that nobody would use it.
It was obsolete thirty minutes after the photo was taken.
64 MB RAM and 3D graphics? That’s more than most of us can afford nowadays!
DVD drive was hella fancy for a windows 98 system.
People were calling this out for the bullshit it was back in the day… Marketing wank is marketing wank.
That RAM’s gotta be worth a pretty penny
Hide it from Sammy
This annoys me every time it comes up because if you read the fine print, they’re not literally saying that the computer will last forever as-is, they’re selling a subscription service. I mean you can literally read what it says in the pic: for $99 you can upgrade to a new PC ever two years, effectively meaning that your PC will never be obsolete, so long as you keep paying the fee.
Honestly I think a big part of it was the advertising the browser lmao
Sure, but unless the company is still in business (I assume it is not), the joke still stands.
Going by the specs (and the DVD + AOL 5.0 sticker) this particular PC was released in 1999. eMachines lasted until 2013, therefore if you paid the subscription fee, you could have owned seven new PCs over the course of a decade and a half for under $700. That’s an insanely good deal. I imagine that they could recoup the funds by recycling the old machine and also counting on a lot of people paying the fee and then never upgrading (like how gym memberships work. The more people that sign up and then never go to the gym, the better).
Unfortunately, e machines were crap and always had massive issues
Sweet. An ewaste subscription.
Lots of stuff is like that now. It’s not great, but just that it’s basically the exact same.
Basically lol
Those cases were beast, it’s theoretically true, but it isn’t likely possible due to the company itself likely becoming obsolete and if not, it’s certainly not $99 anymore.
Hey but the CRT it came with still works today and looks better than anything over VGA on dreamcast!
