Gateway refreshes eMachines desktop lineup

Coming off a holiday season with historic lows in desktop PC prices, Gateway introduced four new low-cost eMachines desktops on Thursday, including one that brings a DVD burner to the low end of the market.

Price-conscious buyers had much to celebrate during the 2004 holiday season. The average price of a desktop PC fell to around $670 in the fourth quarter, according to preliminary numbers, which would be a record low, said Stephen Baker, director of industry analysis for NPD Techworld in Reston, Virginia. All of eMachines’ new systems are priced below that figure, and two of the new desktops cost less than $400, after $50 rebates.

PC companies this year are trying to get their customers at all price levels to use their PCs as part of a digital media lifestyle. Some high-end PCs come with Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Center Edition, which allows consumers to connect their PC to TVs and find their music, pictures, and video through a simple interface using a remote control. Media Center PCs enjoyed their best quarter during the fourth quarter of 2004, Baker said.

However, the Microsoft software is too expensive for eMachines’ budget systems, so the company is trying other ways to encourage its customers to think of their new PCs as multimedia hubs. One way to do that is with DVD burners, readers for multiple expansion card formats, or multiple USB (universal serial bus) ports for peripherals such as music players or digital cameras.

The new eMachines T3958 comes with a DVD+/-RW drive for $499, after a $50 rebate. It’s hard to find a DVD burner on most PCs in that price range, but most consumers who want to purchase low-end PCs don’t consider DVD burners a must-have feature, Baker said.

“DVD burners haven’t been a compelling upgrade for most people. If you’re just looking for a PC, and have $400 to spend, it’s not likely a driving force,” Baker said. Buyers in this price range tend to be more conscious of the final price rather than the configuration of the PC, he said.

The two least expensive PCs in the new eMachines lineup do not feature DVD burners, but each has six USB ports and the T3828 sports a card reader that supports eight different types of portable storage media. The T3624 costs $359 after a $50 rebate with a Celeron D 330 (2.66GHz) processor from Intel, 256M bytes of memory, a 60G-byte hard drive, and a CD-RW drive. The T3828 costs $399 after a $50 rebate with a more powerful Celeron D processor, a larger hard drive, and a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive.

The T5026 comes with Intel’s Pentium 4 519 (3.06GHz) processor, 512M bytes of memory, a 160G-byte hard drive, a DVD+/-RW drive, and a second CD-ROM drive for $599. It has seven USB ports, an 8-in-1 card reader, and three IEEE1394 ports for downloading video from digital video recorders.

All the new PCs ship without monitors, but eMachines monitors can be purchased from retailers for $119, after a $50 rebate.

The new PCs are available immediately at U.S. retailers such as Best Buy. EMachines sells products in Europe and Japan, but those systems use different model numbers and have different configurations, the Gateway spokeswoman said.

It has been almost a year since Gateway announced its acquisition of eMachines, and the Irvine, California, company has kept many of the eMachines product lines intact since the acquisition was finalized last March. EMachines refreshed its entire PC lineup once every quarter as a stand-alone company, just as Gateway now does with the product line, a Gateway spokeswoman said.