Consumer electronics

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Consumer electronics once had a color. American sellers called them black goods, named for the dark casings that housed so many of these everyday devices. The label set them apart from white goods, the washing machines and refrigerators built for housekeeping. In British English, producers and sellers reached for a different shade and called them brown goods. These are the electronic devices intended for everyday household use, the ones built for entertainment, communication, and recreation. But the color-coded distinction would not survive. Since the 2010s, it has vanished from the big box stores, where entertainment, communication, home office gear, and home appliances now share the same floor. How did a turntable with no electronics at all become the ancestor of a smartphone packed with rare earth elements? Why does an industry famous for falling prices also leak billions of dollars in wasted power every year? And what happens to all these devices once we are done with them?

• 2. From Mechanics To Silicon

  ›

  For its first fifty years, the phonograph turntable did not use electronics at all. Its needle and sound horn were purely mechanical. Radio broadcasting changed the foundation in the 1920s, when it became the basis for mass-producing radio receivers. The vacuum tubes that made radios practical were soon paired with record players too, amplifying sound so it could play through a loudspeaker. Television arrived soon after, yet it stayed insignificant in the consumer market until the 1950s.

  John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain built the first working transistor, a point-contact transistor, at Bell Labs in 1947. That breakthrough drove serious research into solid-state semiconductors in the early 1950s. The transistors developed at Bell led directly to transistor radios, which seeded the home entertainment industry beginning in the 1950s. Much of that momentum came from Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, now Sony, which commercialized transistor technology for a mass market with affordable transistor radios and then transistorized television sets.

  Integrated circuits came next, when manufacturers built whole circuits on a single substrate, often for military purposes, wiring the connections inside the chip itself. That technology made consumer electronics more advanced and cheaper, producing transistorized televisions, pocket calculators, and by the 1980s, video game consoles and personal computers a middle-class family could afford. Beginning in the 1980s and running into the early 2000s, televisions and stereo systems underwent digitization. Compact discs and personal computers signaled the broader shift, and image quality on televisions improved as digital signals worked their way into consumer devices.

• 3. Moore's Law And Falling Prices

  ›

  One characteristic overrides all others in this market: prices that never stop falling. The decline is driven by gains in manufacturing efficiency and automation, by lower labor costs as production moved to lower-wage countries, and by steady improvements in semiconductor design. Semiconductor components ride Moore's law, the observed principle that for a given price, semiconductor functionality doubles every two years. That same principle powered the rapid rises in processing power and the cuts in cost and size that reshaped earlier devices.

  Digital technologies came to dominate most consumer electronics in the 2010s, merging the field with the computer and video game industry. The trend earned a name: the consumerization of information technology. The industry has also merged heavily with the software industry. Embedded software now lives inside the hardware of devices like mobile phones, while camcorders and digital cameras rely on companion software running on a personal computer.

  Connection has become a default expectation. Many products now reach the internet through Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, EDGE, or Ethernet. Televisions and Hi-fi equipment, once unrelated to computers, now connect to the internet or to a home network to pull in digital material. The appetite for high-definition material pushed the industry to develop technologies such as WirelessHD and ITU-T G.hn, both optimized to move HD between devices inside a home.

• 4. A Global Industry

  ›

  By 2004, the consumer electronics industry was worth 240 billion US dollars annually worldwide, spanning visual equipment, audio equipment, and games consoles. The market had gone global and split across regions. Asia Pacific held a 35 percent share, Europe 31.5 percent, the United States 23 percent, and the rest of the world owned what remained. The household names competing for it included Sony, Samsung, Philips, Sanyo, and Sharp.

  Most of these devices are manufactured in China, a choice driven by maintenance cost, the availability of materials, quality, and speed compared with countries such as the United States. Shenzhen and Dongguan grew into important production centers, drawing companies including Apple Inc. The work happens in automated or semi-automated factories that turn out the devices contemporary society depends on.

  The industry runs on hard bets. It faces consumers with unpredictable tastes, suppliers prone to delays and disruptions, and challenges inside the production process itself. A high rate of technology evolution demands large investments with no guarantee of profitable returns, so the big players lean on global markets to reach economies of scale. Even rivals sometimes cooperate, particularly on standards, to lower the risk of those investments. Lizabeth Cohen captured the logic in her book A Consumers' Republic: "Only if we have large demands can we expect large production".

• 5. What People Actually Buy

  ›

  Some products ship in numbers that dwarf the rest. The compact disc tops the list, with an estimated 200 billion shipped across its production years from 1982 to 2007. The cassette tape follows at 30 billion, produced from 1963 to 2019. The DVD reached 20 billion between 1996 and 2012, while the mobile phone hit 19.4 billion from 1994 to 2018. Smartphones counted 10.1 billion from 2007 to 2018, and the VHS video cassette reached 10 billion from 1976 to 2000.

  The categories themselves sort into three uses. Entertainment covers flatscreen TVs, MP3 players, video recorders, DVD players, and radio receivers. Communications covers telephones, mobile phones, desktop computers, laptops, printers, and paper shredders. Recreation covers digital cameras, camcorders, video game consoles, ROM cartridges, radio-controlled cars, and robot kits.

  The smartphone sits at the technical extreme of this list. It combines mobile telephone and computing functions in a single unit, distinguished from a feature phone by stronger hardware and an extensive mobile operating system. Inside, it typically holds a number of MOSFET integrated circuit chips alongside sensors such as a magnetometer, a barometer, a gyroscope, and an accelerometer. A feature phone, by contrast, offers only the basic capabilities. The cellular network behind both connects through a mobile phone operator to the public switched telephone network.

• 6. Where Devices Are Shown And Sold

  ›

  Las Vegas, Nevada has hosted the Consumer Electronics Show every year since 1973. The trade show began with 100 exhibitors in its inaugural year and grew to more than 4,500 exhibiting companies in its 2020 edition, where it features the latest devices, speeches by industry experts, and innovation awards. Berlin, Germany has run the IFA Berlin trade show since 1924, presenting new devices and speeches by industry pioneers.

  The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the world's largest professional society, runs many efforts to advance the field. It maintains a dedicated body of thousands of professionals called the Consumer Electronics Society. Its flagship event, the IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics, is in its 35th year, and a separate IEEE Symposium on Smart Electronics Systems is in its 9th year.

  Selling has shifted toward the very large and the very online. In the United States, dedicated stores have mostly given way to big-box retailers such as Best Buy, the country's largest consumer electronics retailer. Smaller dedicated stores survive, including Apple Stores and specialist shops for audiophiles, such as the single-branch B&H Photo store in New York City. Broad-based retailers like Walmart and Target stock these devices too. In April 2014, retail e-commerce sales were highest in the consumer electronic and computer categories, with some retailers offering extended warranties through programs such as SquareTrade.

• 7. The Cost After Purchase

  ›

  An average house holds dozens of electronic devices, and that sheer number carries a price the buyer rarely sees. The EIA estimates that electronic devices and gadgets account for about 10 to 15 percent of the energy use in American homes. Redefine the term to include refrigerators, dryers, clothes washers, and dishwashers, and that figure climbs to roughly 50 percent of household consumption in America and Europe.

  The waste continues even when devices are off. Standby power accounts for 5 to 10 percent of total household energy consumption, costing the average United States household 100 dollars a year. A study by the Department of Energy's Berkeley Lab found that videocassette recorders consume more electricity over a year in standby than when actually recording or playing. Satellite boxes drew almost the same energy in their on and off modes. A 2012 study by the Energy Saving Trust in the United Kingdom found UK households could save up to 86 pounds a year by switching devices off rather than leaving them on standby. The International Energy Agency reported in 2014 that 80 billion dollars of power is wasted globally each year through inefficient devices.

  The materials inside are as demanding as the power. A smartphone uses 40 rare metals and rare earth elements on average, extracted and refined through water and energy-intensive processes. Those same metals feed the renewable energy industry, so consumer electronics compete directly for the raw supply. In 2017, Greenpeace USA published a study of 17 of the world's leading consumer electronics companies, examining their energy, resource consumption, and chemical use.

• 8. Discarding, Reusing, And Aching

  ›

  Electronic waste describes discarded electrical or electronic devices, and what it contains makes disposal hazardous. Scrap components such as CRTs may carry lead, cadmium, beryllium, mercury, dioxins, or brominated flame retardants. Recycling is limited and energy intensive because electronics mix many different metals at low concentrations. Large amounts of e-waste from developed countries are exported and handled by the informal sector in countries like India, even though exporting it there is illegal.

  E-waste policy has shifted in stages since the 1970s. The first priority was safer disposal because of the toxic materials involved. Attention later turned to recovering valuable metals and plastics, and more recently to reusing entire devices, with new guidelines promoting preparation for reuse. The value being thrown away is real. In the UK, 160,000 tonnes of electrical and electronic equipment in regular waste collections were estimated to be worth 220 million pounds, and 23 percent of such equipment taken to Household Waste Recycling Centres was immediately resalable or would be with minor repairs. Barriers remain, including mistrust of used equipment and the stigma of owning second-hand goods, yet reuse could give lower-income households access to previously unaffordable technology.

  Not all the harm lands on the planet; some lands on the body. Desktop monitors and laptops can contribute to repetitive strain injuries, including chronic neck and back pain when users bend to see screens better. The best-known of these is carpal tunnel syndrome, with related conditions such as de Quervain syndrome, which affects tendons in the thumb. Even bedtime use carries a toll, as electronic use before bed is linked to poorer sleep quality and shorter sleep, which in turn ties to obesity and diabetes. In 2013, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a renewed appetite for analog sound from devices such as phonographs sparked a noticeable rise in business for the local electronic repair industry.