Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing! And this is the eMachines eOne 433
released in August of 1999 for $849 US dollars.
*computer booting noises*
Although it was available for way less because that's what eMachines did.
There was a $50 mail-in rebate and then there was a $400 rebate if you signed up
for three years of CompuServe 2000 dial-up internet for $21.95 a month.
*Windows 98 startup sound plays*
And yes one of these things is not like the other. The obvious, let's state
it: this was built explicitly to cash in on the late 90s Apple iMac craze
complete with a not-Bondi Blue translucent color scheme.
Gosh they just look... so similar I "can't tell" which is the real one in which is
the knockoff... And I got to give a huge thank you to Douglas for donating this
these are not commonplace machines at all and for good reason. Not only was the
eOne originally sold exclusively through Circuit City stores in the US but Apple
sued the crap out of them for daring to make such a blatant iMac ripoff. And
that's a suit that they won and settled in March of 2000 with eMachines agreeing
to cease all sales of the eOne as a result. And Apple did not stop there either, they
also sued Sotec, the Japanese firm who co-developed the eOne with eMachines, and
was also selling their own version of the eOne in Japan. Within a month the Tokyo
District Court ordered Sotec to cease all production. And finally Apple also
sued Korean firm Daewoo due to their own iMac knockoff, the E-Power PC. All
sales of the E-Power PC were barred by a judge in San Jose California and Apple
won a worldwide injunction against all sales of the E-Power PC as well as our
eMachines eOne. So yeah the fact that I have one
of these banned things in my possession is pretty wild to me, considering it was
only on the market a few months and apparently didn't sell very well even
when it was legal to do so. But before Apple buried them with litigation
eMachines marketed this as a computer for people who dug the aesthetic and
form factor of Apple's hugely popular Bondi Blue iMac, but wanted to run
Windows 98 instead of Mac OS 9. It was also less costly than an iMac by several
hundred dollars while technically including more features and higher specs.
For example you got a 433 megahertz Intel Celeron processor,
a hundred megahertz more than the '99 Revision D iMac. As well as 64 megabytes
of PC100 SD RAM, twice that of the iMac. An 8 megabyte ATI Rage XL AGP
graphics chipset, 2 more megs than the iMac. And a 6.4 or 8.4 gigabyte
IDE hard drive, again up to twice that of a base-model iMac. They
even included a keyboard that more closely resembled Apple's keyboard than
anything on the PC side of things at the time. Which is not a good thing in this case.
*plasticky keyboard sounds*
The layout is weird and cramped and it just feels plasticky and gummy to the
fingertips, even compared to the Apple board which I'm not super fond of either.
And instead of putting USB ports on each side like the iMac, eMachines went with
dual PS/2 ports instead, reminiscent of what Apple used to do with ADB.
You plug in a male-to-male cable on either side and then the mouse in the
opposite port. This means you can daisy-chain both devices into just one
compatible PS/2 port if you want. Although redundant in this case since it has the
individual ports on the computer itself. Still, eMachines drew the line at copying
Apple's famous hockey puck mouse, thank goodness.
I don't have the original mouse from the eOne but you can see what it looks like
here. It's just a stylized mouse to fit with the rest of it. I actually ran
across this Kensington mouse, that looks like it was made for the eOne, at Goodwill
a while back. So that's what I'll be using here, this color scheme of
translucent dark teal was just super popular at the time. And then one of the
biggest boasts of the eOne was that it had a 3.5 inch floppy disk drive, a
feature which the iMac famously omitted due to them betting on the future being
USB. A future Apple was correct about. But hey the eOne has USB *and* a floppy drive, so
that means it's better right? Ehh. At least it had a 24x CD-ROM drive.
Although with a non-motorized tray, not as impressive as the fancy slot loading
mechanism of the late 1999 iMac. But hey the iMac didn't have this chintzy
pop-out panel that reveals CD player controls with a monochrome LCD panel!
How's that for some late nineties technological curb appeal? Or what about
this little spot for connecting 3.5mm audio jacks
and a USB device in the front! Or around to the right side where you see these
composite video inputs. Yeah that's right, the eOne has video capture capability!
There's no tuner so you'll need something with a composite output, so
VCRs or cable TV boxes or a game console. Yeah that's right, you want to plug in
your Sega Genesis to your eMachines eOne, you can do that! Resolution is not
great and the colors are severely washed out but hey, it's here and it's pretty awesome actually.
*Sonic the Hedgehog music and sound plays*
Also on this right-hand side of the machine, underneath a sliding panel, you
even got some expandability: an elusive thing in all-in-ones like this. Granted,
it came in the form of PCMCIA slots normally seen on laptops, so upgrade
options were kind of limited. But yeah this is also where you'll find the I/O
section for things like 10BASE-T ethernet, a 56k modem and fax connection,
RS-232 serial port, another USB port, two PS/2 ports, and speaker output for the
Cirrus Logic CS 4280 sound chip -- that is supposedly Sound Blaster 16
compatible, but more on that in a moment. And finally around the back of the
machine next to the power you get a parallel port for printers and such, and
a 15-pin game port for joysticks or connecting external MIDI devices.
eMachines also imitated the carrying handle on top like the iMac but it's
pretty awful. It's made of cheap plastic with sharp edges that kind of feels like
it'll slice your hand. And every time you lift it up it detaches itself from the
plastic on the front of the case. I'm gonna hazard a guess and say build
quality was not on the agenda. There's also this terrible little microphone
built into the top of the monitor housing and yeah just check it out, this
thing is... it's not good.
"Testing this crappy microphone."
*recording plays back terribly*
Hahaha!
Still, shoddy quality aside you got what appeared on paper
to be a fine list of features housed in an
"attractive" case that included a 15-inch CRT and stereo speakers. A rather soft
CRT with lackluster color reproduction and speakers that sound cheap and tinny,
but yeah an attempt was made. Speaking of speakers let's talk about
sound. You know the Sound Blaster 16 compatibility I mentioned? Well it's kind
of here, just listen to it trying to play Duke Nukem 3D's theme song.
*it's bad.*
*still really bad*
*it's getting worse.*
Well in case you didn't notice, it's missing half the notes! That's awkward.
It is at least pretty decent at doing PCM sound effects through Sound Blaster
emulation, but when I use this I swear you can hear a Yamaha engineer crying
somewhere in the distance. This is seriously one of the worst FM synth
emulations I've ever heard. Just listen to canyon.mid!
*canyon.mid plays, technically.*
*it is unfortunate.*
Argh! And no in case you're wondering, it does not have any general MIDI or
wavetable audio onboard. Or at least if it does the drivers that this one came with do
not support it. But as you saw the connection earlier you can connect
external MIDI devices if you really wanted to. Also interesting is that there
are zero monitor controls on the case, you have to do all the color, brightness, and
geometry adjustment through a control panel plug-in. That's not the most
unusual thing, but even the degaussing is done through software. That's something
I've never seen before. And yeah, despite a lot of crap, I mean, as far as late
nineties Windows games and software it runs that stuff pretty okay. At least for a
433MHz Celeron with an integrated 8 meg ATI Rage card. So you know, games
like Starcraft are totally fine, games like Quake 3 are not. But it's playable
so that's something. It was also available with a 500MHz CPU so
assuming it's not soldered to the board or something stupid like that, I guess
you could upgrade this thing. But that's something that I'm not going to dare
doing, I tried opening this up and it was an absolute nightmare. It's almost like
you had to destroy parts of it to get to what you really wanted to do, it's not
personally worth it to me to bother with that.
So 433 megahertz it is. And that is the eMachines eOne!
What a piece of junk. But an incredibly fascinating piece of junk
with a tarnished, legally dubious legacy. And you know what, I'm just kind of
partial to this translucent colored plastic that happened on several
computers and technology products of the time. It's admittedly cheesy and maybe
even a bit off-putting, but at the same time oddly attractive and very much
nostalgic. And you know I just like all-in-ones, so I like messing with this
thing. And yeah that's about it, I got no excuses I'm just weird. Speaking
of weird there was a follow-up of sorts for the eOne by Gateway, who purchased
eMachines in 2004. And I guess they liked the name and the idea so they released
the Gateway One in 2007. And thankfully this didn't seem to infringe on any
other iMac trademarks or design disputes or anything like that because it was
sold and forgotten. And well that's not a happy ending either but anyway, that's
all for this video. And I hope that you enjoyed watching what you just did!
I always like taking a look at bizarre computers from the past
and just talking about them if I can get my hands on them. And I've got a lot more
to talk about in the future so stick around there are new videos every Monday
and Friday here on LGR. And as always thank you very much for watching!