I always considered Motorola to be more of the Apple of the midwest tbh
How the Apple of the Midwest fell apart
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Re: How the Apple of the Midwest fell apart
#12Apple of the Midwest? It was a run of the mill IBM/PC clone that wasn't special in any way.
I wanted one because of the cool cow boxes
Re: How the Apple of the Midwest fell apart
#13My second computer was from Gateway 2000, this was before the whole retail store experiment, back when they had the awesome ads in Computer Shopper and the other mags (PC Magazine, etc). I think this was really their heyday. Awesome systems, cool accessories. Anyone remember the AnyKey keyboard? A (re)branded 124-key keyboard and you could program a macro of like 128 key strokes into any single key. It was awesome. I…
I used the programmable AnyKey to write a macro that could grind a bunch of money in Wasteland by recruiting a new ranger, walking into town, selling their gun, and dismissing the ranger, in a loop (if I held the key down with a book).
Great keyboard!
Re: How the Apple of the Midwest fell apart
#14Calling Gateway a tech company shows how meaningless that term is in 2022. Nobody would have called it that in 1995. A computer company, sure. But not a tech company.
What's the difference? They didn't develop any technology. They built computers out of components others developed. Those components were available elsewhere. What Gateway sold was the service of putting them together for you and offering support.
Re: How the Apple of the Midwest fell apart
#15Apple of the Midwest? It was a run of the mill IBM/PC clone that wasn't special in any way.
I wanted one because of the cool cow boxes
They were identified so strongly with the box that in the later stages of the company they actually changed their logo from the gold letter "G" to the cow box itself. So the computer came in a cow box, and there was a cow box in isometric perspective on the computer.
Re: How the Apple of the Midwest fell apart
#16Apple of the Midwest? It was a run of the mill IBM/PC clone that wasn't special in any way.
There weren’t that many large, direct-to-consumer clone makers. Gateway 2000 was basically a peer to Dell for > half a decade.
Dell made the jump to web-driven build-to-order, which put them in position to ride the Wintel wave into servers. Gateway doubled down on the increasingly commoditized consumer market.
Re: How the Apple of the Midwest fell apart
#17Apple of the Midwest? It was a run of the mill IBM/PC clone that wasn't special in any way.
There weren’t that many large, direct-to-consumer clone makers. Gateway 2000 was basically a peer to Dell for > half a decade. Dell made the jump to web-driven build-to-order, which put them in position to ride the Wintel wave into servers. Gateway doubled down on the increasingly commoditized consumer market.
There was IBM, Packard Bell, Hewlett-Packard, eMachines, Compaq before the acquisition and here in Europe a number of more local brands (eg Tulip in the Netherlands, Escom and Vobis in a lot of countries) too. Gateway was a fairly big thing here too but Dell not so much in stores as they only ever sold online here. And that was still a bit 'scary' for most consumers when gateway was still a thing. Dell did more B2B because of that.
But I think there were a lot of them tbh. I'm sure I forgot many too :)
Re: How the Apple of the Midwest fell apart
#18What made them special was the service. I knew several people that worked there when they were the king of the hill. When I started grad school at Texas A&M, Gateway was the sole supplier of computers, in spite of the fact that they were a state school just down the road from Dell. According to my friends that worked there, Gateway decided service was too expensive, so they killed off the single reason they were popular. (The move may have been forced by the market, but it nonetheless eliminated the reason anyone had to buy Gateway.) I tried to buy a Gateway in 2002 and there was no way to get it delivered, so I bought a Compaq at Best Buy.
An interesting side note. North Dakota's current governor also started a billion-dollar tech company, in Fargo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Burgum
Re: How the Apple of the Midwest fell apart
#19Clickbait title - Gateway never really…created products, just licensed and repackaged them. It was pretty ubiquitous for a few years, however it obviously can’t be compared to Apple.
Re: How the Apple of the Midwest fell apart
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
There weren’t that many large, direct-to-consumer clone makers. Gateway 2000 was basically a peer to Dell for > half a decade. Dell made the jump to web-driven build-to-order, which put them in position to ride the Wintel wave into servers. Gateway doubled down on the increasingly commoditized consumer market.
There was IBM, Packard Bell, Hewlett-Packard, eMachines, Compaq before the acquisition and here in Europe a number of more local brands (eg Tulip in the Netherlands, Escom and Vobis in a lot of countries) too. Gateway was a fairly big thing here too but Dell not so much in stores as they only ever sold online here. And that was still a bit 'scary' for most consumers when gateway was still a thing. Dell did more B2B b…
None of those were direct-to-consumer in the US. They all sold through retailers.