Gateway trims desktop prices
Looking to brighten its appeal to "growing businesses," Gateway on Friday cut prices on some of its PCs by up to 10 percent.
The price cuts extend across the company's E series line of desktop PCs. Gateway said that the base price of the high-end E-6100, for instance, has been reduced by $100, dropping to $899. That price gets a system with a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 processor, 256MB of memory, an 80GB hard drive and a CD-ROM drive, but not a monitor. Gateway's Web site also shows the same price for a system with a 2.6GHz chip and a 40GB drive; the company says that price will change Monday.
The midrange E-4100 and entry-level E-2100 machines will now cost $50 less apiece, at $799 and $649, respectively. Desktop upgrades like hard drives, memory and optical drives will also become cheaper, Gateway added.
Gateway is amid some major changes. The Poway, Calif.-based PC maker is poised to complete its merger with eMachines, a company known for its low-priced desktops. The combined company would have annual shipments of about 4 million PCs, making Gateway the third-largest PC manufacturer in the United States.
There are also job cuts in the offing. This week, the company indicated that about 1,000 of its employees would lose jobs but said that the move was not linked to the merger plan. Last September the company began restructuring, and part of that action included closing down its PC manufacturing plant in Hampton, Va., and outsourcing the manufacturing of consumer PCs to a third party.