Illegal iMac Knockoff: The U.S. Banned This PC - Krazy Ken’s Tech Talk

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eMachines copies Apple's homework and releases the eOne… which looks suspiciously like an iMac.

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SMALL CLARIFICATION:
When I compared the iMac specs to the eOne (7:09), I was showing the Rev. A iMac. To be more "fair", here's the Rev. D iMac specs, which released in April 1999: 333 MHz G3, 6 GB HDD, 32 MB RAM, $1,199 USD.

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[ComputerClan]

"Corporate needs you to find the difference between this picture and this picture." 🤔

[urmensch]

Fun Fact: if you put an E1 next to an M1 Mac you will get the first level of Doom.

[ChannelS]

This video just cast light onto a mystery that I've been unable to answer for years. Whenever I try to recall my family's first computer (early 2000s), I distinctly remember it having the iconic shape and color of the iMac, but at the same time I also seemed to recall it running some version of Windows. Having watched this video, I'm now 100% confident that this exact computer was the one we used to have.

[quinton]

PCMCIA actually stands for People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms. Get it together, Ken!

[xan]

For the noise, it might happen because for some ungodly reason the sound drivers in Win98 have enabled monitoring of the input jacks by default in the mixer. Disabling that (setting it to 0) should resolve any interference issues.

[technerd]

To be honest, I think the level of similarity between the eOne and iMac is quite common today and fewer lawsuits. Also, Apple has been guilty of the same thing as eMachines in Trade Dress cases.

[efficiencygaming]

When you degaussed that monitor, it brought back so many memories of the old PC I had growing up.

I remember randomly pressing the "degauss" button while messing around with the monitor settings and being highly entertained when the picture warped with that loud electrical sound. Man, I wish I still had a CRT monitor...

[johng.]

I really have to wonder what the legal argument went like? was it something like "granted while the eMachines customers would never mistake the two, BUT our customers are a bit clueless and stupid, so they would totally confuse the two"

[nataliekate]

I remember seeing the iMac for the first time and wanting on so badly 😂 24 years later I’ve finally purchased a box complete 1998 Lime Green G3. She’s sitting proudly on display in my dining room 😊

[Micharius]

Regarding the slow boot of Win98: There was well known problem back then, when Win98 was set to DHCP on one of the network interfaces, but wasn't able to get an IP. It basically screamed out for an IP for a very long time, which made the boot process very slow - you might check this. Finally, Windows would assign itself an "APIPA" IP-Adress, starting with 169.x.x.x, which was always a sign, that something did not work well. Good old days!

[lboston]

the image of that one computer lab at school filled with various color iMacs is still fresh in my head 20+ years later... and seeing these still makes me feel a sense of futurism

[cosmological]

If Apple decided to build a car they would sue anything that has 4 wheels for stealing their design

[johnnycha]

Here are a couple of notes I have from this video:

3:00 98FE was thinking that Mendocino Celeron was a Pentium II, because it basically is (just with the on-die L2 cache running at full speed)

Additionally, the eOne also came shipped with Windows Me (Millennium Edition) in the later part of the eOne manufacturing before they were discontinued in the later part of 2000. It’s just like how the iMac originally came with Mac OS 8 (more specifically 8.1) upon its release in 1998 and later came shipped with Mac OS 9 (starting with 9.0.4) in the slot-loading revisions from mid-2000 to 2003, when the iMac G3s were discontinued. However, taking from Ken's words, one is an OS that is less stable, and the other is more stable.

[AndrewCamarata]

I used an Eone as my first computer for years.

[arthuralford]

I had an E1 that I got for my son. Eventually it ended up with my mother for her to use, then it moved on to a neighbor of hers (by which time it was so old it could collect Social Security). eMachines made some decent computers

[josephvetter]

I thought hard about getting one of these for college - the options and size made it the almost perfect dorm room computer.

[Grimdark_Replays]

I mean maybe there is something to be said about the shape of CRTs limiting the overall shape to some variation of a box or “teardrops” if one didn’t want a bunch of empty space.

[DavidHembrow]

The absurd thing about this is that the iMac was actually almost the same shape as a Lear Siegler ADM31 terminal from the 1970s.

[ratkingofphobos]

i've got one of these! i've still got it safely stashed away because it was this little gem i grew up with. it wasn't till a few years ago i learned about its history. glad you did a video on it! :D

[thtwirdgrl]

I distinctly remember my elementary school having two computer labs, one for the iMac and one full of the eOne. Even as an 8 year old I was staunchly Anti-Apple, so I always went to the eOne lab over the Mac lab!