i-Opener - The $99 Computer That Cost a Company Millions

How did they make a profit losing $400 per unit? ... Volume.

Why did the box look like a kids toy 😂

Brother, that is not the i-opener, that is The Incredibles logo with Jack Jack.

Bought one back in the day, pretty much the very instant I heard about its hackability. I was lucky enough to hear about these pretty early on, so was able to get a Version 1.0 unit. Completely open, IDE pins present, no locked down BIOS. So hacking it was a breeze. Bought one of Ken's kits because I really couldn't be bothered hacking up an IDE cable, plus you kinda needed the hard drive bracket if you wanted to properly mount the hard drive. (This was before SSDs, so I wanted to actually properly mount the drive, instead of doing an Action Retro style jank mounting job and having it rattling around in there, which would have probably been Very Bad for a ye olde spinning rust hard drive.) Ran Linux on the thing, and it made for a pretty decent little workstation, certainly well worth the $99 and the time and trivial expense involved in hacking it. When I outgrew it I handed it off to my partner, for whom it was a perfect fit (only needed to do basic internet and document creation type tasks.)

The funny thing is I'm pretty sure the iOpener wasn't the only device like this where the company sold them at a loss but it ended up biting them in the backside. If memory serves, there was another device that came AFTER the iopener that instead of a full on computer, it was just a set top box that plugged into your TV, but it was a similar "get people online" type thing. So basically an white-label WebTV. However it was similarly sold at a loss, and was also quickly hacked. You'd think they would have learned their lesson from the iOpener, but nope. Unfortunately I never managed to get ahold of one of those devices. I can't even remember who made them or what they were called.

Yeah, I remember those. Thought briefly about getting one as a Linux desktop, decided not to bother.

Just email yourself everything. No need for a harddrive

This was a great PC for people who just wanted to re-emails and browse the Internet lightly. It was originally a great idea by the manufacturer. Unfortunately, they should have charged more for it. Sadly for them, they never anticipated the will of others to be able to hack into this thing and make it their own.

I loved that sports article showing that Tom Brady took over for an injured Bledsoe and went 10-3 for the season, and making the Pro Bowl. Go Brady! 😊

The idea was good ...if anything it's in the same idea as tablets and modern phones with applets windows into the web. Just poorly executed and the cost cutting just went too far

I used AT&T worldnet when I was a kid

🍕

One, do you take back in then?Make it the setup older in order

In the 80's and 90's, my entire childhood, gas rarely hit $1/gallon. After I started driving in the late 90's, the cheapest I saw and bought gas was $0.74/gallon. Gas doubled in price suddenly before Clinton left office, so yea, that was expensive back then. And the start of my debt avoidance lifestyle lol.

Our family's first computer was a Gateway, Frankensteined together from Ebay. It barely played Age Of Empires and didn't have sound. I didn't even know what my own games sounded like until my older brother got his computer lol Morrowind blew my mind.

the email reminds me of the old ROBLOX website

My familys first computer was a shitty emachine from Costco. It was so damn full of bloat. The desktop was about half full of icons... out of the box!

The pizza key is better than the Copilot key.

The mouse quite literally cost 1/5 of the total cost of the machine. 😂

Boy, that "you know what hasn't faded into obscurity?" transition to the Linode ad has NOT aged well.

Yet another piece of garbage to littler the giant landfill of tech junk. Laughable crud.

Buttock?

This would have been great and they probably wouldn't have lost as much money if they marketed it more towards hospitality businesses like hotels or cruise lines. That's where you would mostly see PC's similar to this.

But can it run Doom?
(Someone had to say it)

I want to play Quake 1 on this weird PC

im so old i remember this lol

To for 1999 this device looks really cool.

They were so ahead of their time subscription model and everything

Can you run a modern chromium based on it?

One thing I really admire about this device (and others like it) is how the designers and developers worked to make the user interface actually understandable to the average, non-techy user. These days, it feels like there is absolutely no desire to create an experience that beginners can partake in. So many people who are elderly or have cognitive / learning disabilities struggle to use technology, and creating more intuitive and understandable products/services for them could really help empower those users. There's certainly still a space for the modern, advanced interfaces that power users have grown accustomed too, but I would love to see more products and services take notes from devices like this one.

$1.59 per gallon... 🥲

In early 2000, when I was in my early 20's, I was one of the suckers that bought the i-Opener. Later that year I bought an overpriced crappy Gateway PC with a Celeron and Wndows Me. At least. it let me download free songs with Napster. The i-Opener as is couldn't do any of that shit lol.

How is it I had never heard of these before today?!? I think they just arrived too late. If these had come out in 1990, when people were using bulletin boards and AOL, I think they would have made a splash. I bought a WebTV in 1998, which was similar in function, but yes, by the time these i-Openers tried to gain traction in the market they were already sunk by the eMachines free PC with Compuserve offer (which I ALSO did.) I miss those days.

Is there a follow up video?

Imagine in 1999 you could fit an OS on 16MB. Now you can’t even fit a bootloader.

My wife wasn't (and it's) at all tech-savvy, so I got one of these for her in early 2000. She got a lot of use out of it for probably 2 years. It was a decent device for who/what it was designed.

99 dollars would be 10,000 dollars in today's money.

AAA

That logo just screams late 90s design. Not the greatest aesthetic we’ve come up with as a culture but 25 years on I kind of miss it. More than I’ll miss the soulless Alegría/Big Tech design that’s everywhere these days.

21 dollars a month for a loss on a computer is a great idea even today

I absolutely love the idea of modifying a keyboard to have its very own PIZZA BUTTON?? That's honestly hilarious. Though it would be super convenient even nowadays.

I got my laptop for $83 and it still works like new, overstock sales are great

Reminds me of the endless os computers

i got nausea watchign thsi shittiy device doesnt even worth 99$ and i feel sorry for people who bought it back in time thinkign they had made a good deal cuz they were obviously scammed and very disappointed !