How the Apple of the Midwest fell apart

Their service to institutions might have been good at one point, but their service to consumers was horrendous. I bought a PC from them at around their height and about 1 month later the hard disk died. It took a few customer service calls (each requiring a wait of 45 minutes to an hour to talk to someone) before they agreed the hard disk was bad. They send out an empty hard disk and I had to take the time to re-install all the software from a huge number of floppies. I also had to take time to package up the old drive, go to UPS and pay the postage to ship the broken drive back to them. (I remember they preemptively billed my credit card for the hard disk and later credited me. I guess they assumed their customers were scum bags like themselves.) I realized that when taking my time into account, I would have been much better off just paying for the hard drive myself and ignoring the warranty. Companies like they deservedly belong in the ash heap of history.

Dude, you're getting a Dell.

Sounds like it was an AMD and/or driver issue. We never had trouble with our intel GWs.

They did have retail stores, which as a person younger than the average on here is something that differentiates Gateway from say Compaq or eMachines in my mind

Certainly wasn't Apple but as a kid, until Dell started it's advertising blitz, Gateway definitely felt... authoritative?, functionally first party? in a way that none of the other DOS/Windows boxen did.

I wanted one because of the cool cow boxes

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.

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!

I used that keyboard at work for a while. Programmed Ctrl+Alt+P to type my password + ENTER! The "easy button". Later I told the Unix guy, and he groaned. :-)

There was a lot of consolidation in the space. Lots of mom-and-pop shops, IBM, HP, Compaq, Packard Bell, Dell, and many, many more (my first computer was an AST). They all did the same thing, and there wasn't space for that many players. The most telling bit was that IBM, the company that defined what all the others would clone, sold off that business to Lenovo.

Dell survived. Nothing to be ashamed of making clones, they enabled the growth of the PC industry.

Decades of brain drain have made many small towns rather unattractive prospects besides cost for many who work in skilled corporate jobs.

Those small towns don't want y'all liberal types invading. So much brain drain, all that's left are angry unskilled locals wondering why their life sucks.