I recall there were two things that were "zesty" about the Packard Bells my family had:
1. The motherboards/cases were those weird nonstandard form-factors (possibly some flavour of LPX, but that was hardly a standard of much value). This meant you couldn't easily swap in a spare mainboard. In 2023, when you want the machine as a snapshot of 1995, that's not a big deal, but when it's 1998 and that Pentium 75 with no cache is beginning to feel a bit poky, it means yet another part that needs to be upgraded to swap out.
2. One had unique hard disc system-- iapparently it was a Conner CFS-2113 -- a 1.2Gb and an 850Mb drive that masqueraded as a single 2Gb unit in firmware. While technically fascinating, it seemed to be less than healthy when it got retired, and didn't respond well when I wanted to bifurcate the drives to use them independently.
It's interesting that on the one hand, they were famously a bottom-feeder, but that didn't result in them just outsourcing more engineering-- designing custom cases and mainboards and those sound/modem/tortilla press cards would likely be more costly than tapping into existing lowest-bid suppliers, unless there was a huge cost and assembly overhead savings associated with integration.
