Acer owns Gateway/Emachines
I'm aware. eMachines have always been craptastic and are a perfect fit with Acer's brand. Gateway OTOH, especially when it was run by Ted Waitt, did build some nice machines that were easily on par with their contemporaries. It's a sad shame that they were scooped up by Acer along with eMachines.
- the reason more Acers break down than other brands is because they also play ball in the 200-500 dollar laptop range. Honestly of PCs I fix, I don't see too many Acers, even the low end ones. Come to think of it, I have never seen a high end Acer... in any setting, repair or retail.
I've been servicing PCs professionally for the better part of the last two decades and I can honestly say that most of the issues I've seen with Acers are due to poor design, low-end parts and a general disregard for quality.
In more recent years, I've had a field day replacing Acer laptop screens due to cracks. When you pry the bezel off, what you find is a distinct lack of any kind of structural support or bracing. It's easy for someone to stick it in a laptop bag with a book and with just a little bit of pressure, put a crack in the screen. That could easily be averted with even a modicum of padding or bracing inside the display casing. They could care less about this as they design the product to be disposable. It's not about delivering a good product, it's just about undercutting the other guy and selling something.
Acer is the epitome of the typical Taiwanese conglomerate that has risen from an electronics assembler for other companies to a full-line consumer electronics company by doing it cheaper than anyone else can. They have no penchant for innovation or design and can only copy what the rest of the industry does while simultaneously cost-reducing it. They can't even bother to hire a native-English speaker to help them write manuals or a website. A lot of their stuff is written in "Engrish".
They like to think of themselves as being on par with HP, Dell or even Apple, but the truth is, if it weren't for the ignorance of consumers who buy goods on price alone, they wouldn't be where they are today.
My hope is that as the industry continues to mature, it will become like the automotive market is today. While people certainly shop on price, they also consider quality, total cost of ownership and reliability. One could argue that with the relatively recent resurgence of Apple, that's starting to happen. But there's still plenty of people who scoff at the cost of a MacBook, considering that you can buy two Acer crap-boxes for the cost of one Mac.
Oh boy, I really went off on a tangent. Sorry, didn't mean to derail the thread.
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