GoKawiilIt’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. Emachines was for a time a very popular line of inexpensive PCs, and the company held its initial public offering March 23, 2000, after selling 2 million PCs in 1999.
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 funny because it’s absurd on the surface. It was a basic PC that was going to be obsolete within a year or two.
And it 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.
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