We found out who makes Walmart’s new Gateway laptops, and it’s bad news

Enlarge / Fun colors—but we're waiting to see what the innards look like. (credit: Gateway)

Back in 2007, Taiwan-based PC manufacturer Acer bought the once-iconic Gateway brand in order to stick a thumb in the eye of rival OEM Lenovo and increase its US market presence. In the 13 years since, the Gateway brand has languished largely unused, while Acer built up its own name in the United States directly. The cow is officially back now, though, with a new line of mostly budget, Walmart-exclusive Gateway laptops.

The new line ranges from $180 to $1,000, and several models seem interesting—but when we looked closer, we found a familiar and not particularly attractive name behind the brand. Gateway is also making two models of Android tablet—an 8" GWAT8-1 which doesn't appear to be available retail yet, and a 10" model available at Walmart for $67. Trying to find more detail on the GWAT8-1 led us to a surprising discovery—it's actually made (or imported) by EVOO.

In June of this year, we reviewed and absolutely despised a $140 EVOO laptop—a device powered by an AMD A4-9120e CPU, just like the cheapest model of Gateway laptop in the table above. The new GWTN116-1BL has twice the RAM and storage compared to the effectively uncooled, drastically underclocked, and absolutely bletcherous EVOO EV-C-116-5—but when we went sleuthing, we discovered shipping records indicating that it, too, is an EVOO system.

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