Acer Inc has embarked on the largely uncharted waters of one of the unnoticed legacies of IBM Corp’s early personal computers: the dirty beige colour of the casing. The San Jose, California unit of the Taipei-based Acer Group has unveiled its Acer Aspire – named with an obvious advertising campaign in mind, IBM take note – which come in a tasteful emerald green or charcoal grey casing. The bodywork is also contoured to appeal to home consumers who want to have their computer in as prominent a position as the television or hi-fi, without feeling ashamed. As with most alternatives to the standard box, the Aspire desktops bear an uncanny resemblence to Macintoshes. There are 11 models in the range, all with a two-way speakerphone for speech recognition software, which the company claims really works, and come pre-loaded with Microsoft Corp’s Windows95, in desktop and minitower configurations. Under the green or grey bonnet, they are serious machines, starting with an entry-level 100MHz 80486 machine costing $1,3 00. The highest price machine is $3,000 for a minitower 100MHz Pentium with 16Mb RAM and a 1,620Mb hard drive. These prices are without the monitors, however, which contain the speakers and the microphone. Prices for the monitors start at $300 for the 14 model. The machines are available almost immediately in an attempt to steal a march on IBM and Compaq Computer Corp, both of which plan product launches on September 13. Ronald Chwang, Acer America chief executive, said it is on track to ship as many as 350,000 personal computers in the US this year – about double last year’s number.
