The days of Compaq and Gateway laptops are long gone. But if you have fond memories of buying your first Compaq laptop down at Circuit City, there’s good news. The brand is back — but in a different form.
As noted by Gadgets 360, Ossify Industries, an Indian electronics maker, will soon be reviving the Compaq brand name on its smart TVs. The first Compaq-branded products are expected to come later in 2020, but we don’t know much more about the products at the moment outside of its geographic focus on India.
This isn’t the first time Compaq has experienced a rebirth. In the mid-1990s, Compaq had set what was then the gold standard of computing, pushing out portable Windows 95 notebooks like the Compaq Armada 4160T and multimedia desktop PCs meant for the home and office like Compaq Presario 4122.
The company reached the height of its popularity and financial success in 1998, but started to struggle against cheaper competitors like Dell. In 2002, HP acquired Compaq for $24.2 billion and started selling laptops with the brand name. The merger was big news, but it turned out not to benefit HP all that much. By the mid 2000s, all Compaq products have been rebranded to HP, and most of the former Compaq employees had been laid off. The brand was officially killed off in 2013.
No one’s heard a peep of the old PC brand since the 2000s. An Argentine company did license the brand for a couple of Presario notebooks for its local market in 2015. HP lives on as one of the few laptop makers to survive the era, with Compaq as a mere footnote in PC history.
The idea of a company playing on any goodwill consumers might still have for the brand has us nostalgic for the simpler days of electronics.
Will a focus on smart TVs bring the Compaq name back to its former glory? Will we see Gateway smartphones or IBM wireless earbuds next? Let’s hope not, but it’s always a fun exercise to see just how far laptops have come in the past fifteen years and which brands managed to win out in the long run.
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
Tired of typing the same details into every form?
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.