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Technology

$113.5 billion worth of electronics sold in 2004 93

Posted by CmdrTaco from the thats-a-lotta-gadgets dept.
ravy writes "Americans bought $113.5 billion worth of electronics in 2004 and by 2005 the number will reach $127.5 billion. Digital television sets, MP3 players and flash memory cards were the best-sellers percentagewise, while PCs and cell phones enjoyed more steady growth in terms of sales. Google Zeitgeist also lists ipod, digital camera and mp3 as the most popular consumer electronics queries for the year past."
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$113.5 billion worth of electronics sold in 2004 More

$113.5 billion worth of electronics sold in 2004

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  • Longevity? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Odo ( 109839 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @09:46AM (#11378558)
    That is indeed a lot of gadgets. But the other (missing) half of the statistic is how long will these devices last? Will the all be thrown out next year, making this a running cost? Or will they be in use for years to come, making this a capital cost?

    The calculator on my desk was purchased in 1972. The PC I'm writing this on was bought in 1999. Both are expected to last me for many more years to come. My fear is that the $113.5b figure in the article is mostly the result of people burning money for no reason.

    • Re:Longevity? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Sun Tzu ( 41522 )
      I've got a server that's been hosted by a local provider since 1999... It's a Celeron 366 Slot 1!.

      My calculators are at least 10 years.

      However, I seem to be sending more and more money to Apple lately... The trend continues.
    • The calculator on my desk was purchased in 1972.

      It's not fast enough anymore. You'll soon have to buy a new one...
      • I know it sounds funny, but they are coming out with new calculators each year. If you do any kind of calculus, having a calculator that can work on problems symbolically is a real time saver. Just adding and subtracting numbers isn't enough for me. Still waiting for a handheld calculator as powerful as mathematica. Maybe someday...

        • Still waiting for a handheld calculator as powerful as mathematica.

          Out of curiousity, why wouldn't a laptop computer do (with either the real Mathematica, or something "free" like Maxima)? (Aside from the sheer coolness factor, that is?)

          As cool as a "portable mathematica" would be, I can't see the market for such a device being very large (i.e., no one would make any money off it, unless it was very expensive, and then it would not sell well, due to competition from laptops).

          (Side note: free, t

    • Many automobile parts are built to fall apart with time and use. (about the time the warranty expires.) I suspect certain components of a 1999 PC will fail within a couple of years, and as time goes by it will become increasing difficult and/or expensive to upgrade. Industry maximizes its profits, and frivolous consumption is really a secondary problem.
      • A couple of years have passed, and they're still running on that 1999 PC. It's cheaper to replace PCs after a few years, as parts and sales/purchasing labor are cheaper than diagnostic/repair labor. But in their case, that apparently hasn't been necessary. Other than the fan and disk, which can be upgraded economically, what other parts even suffer "wear"? I guess the CPU transistors will sputter their cathodes across to their anodes eventually, after several decades or a century, and maybe the power supply
        • what other parts even suffer "wear"?
          CPUs suffer long term issues from solder fatigue, corrosion, diffusion, intermetallic growth, etc. I believe that reliability models for these things are based on ensuring you don't run into issues for 7 years.
    • That is indeed a lot of gadgets. But the other (missing) half of the statistic is how long will these devices last? Will the all be thrown out next year, making this a running cost?

      Really. How many of these gadgets get looked at a week after purchase.

    • The vast amount of electronic junk taking up landfill is a problem that we should take at least some responsibility for.
      Allow me to suggest a project to build biodegradable computers. Aside from those two words, I don't have any idea as to how to do it. But if Man can put and man on the moon or create an open-source alternative to Microsoft from the mud up, we can face the challenge of building a biodegradable computer.
      The first hurdle is the massive lack of imagination needed to find currently prod

  • Gross (Score:1, Troll)

    by Malicious ( 567158 )
    It's sickening to know how inexpensive it is to produce all of the above, vs the amount that is charged for said items. Do the margins really need to be that high? Where is all the profit going? I remember back in the day when 128MB of SD RAM cost $2/MB, while the chip it's self was about $0.02 to produce. As a retailer we were making a 10% margin on the stick, while the distributer was making about the same. Where did the other $200 go?

    • Re:Gross (Score:5, Insightful)

      by WIAKywbfatw ( 307557 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @09:51AM (#11378579) Journal
      Maybe to people higher up the distribution chain, including the manufacturer? Those chips may have cost $0.02 to produce but you conveniently forget that the first chip cost several orders of magnitude more than that to make. You didn't think that fabrication plants grew on trees, did you?

    • Re:Gross (Score:2, Insightful)

      by N0N1337H41 ( 827727 )
      Maybe it went back into R&D to make it cheaper down the line?

      • Re:Gross (Score:3, Insightful)

        by MagicDude ( 727944 )
        A decrease in production costs in a product rarely results in the decrease in retail price. Or if anything, a $10 decrease in production cost will result in maybe a $1 retail price cost. The retail price will always be finagled to what the public will pay for a product, relatively independent of the production cost of the item. Cutting costs will mainly result in a higher profit margin for the company.

    • Re:Gross (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Rotten168 ( 104565 )
      Where did the other $200 go?
      It costs that much to physically produce, but the chips have to be designed, engineered plus everyone at every level has to make a profit.

      If you don't like, buy cheaper stuff. PC stuff is pretty damn cheap compared to what it used to be 15 years ago.

    • Price = status (Score:3, Interesting)

      by navegan ( 775416 )
      Keeping the prices up helps keep the status up. It would be harder for them to create an iPod craze if the iPods were only $10 and everyone could afford one.
      • I heard a rumour that folks were buying ipods, smashing the cases, and using the disks in other equipment. Why? Because that was cheaper than buying the disks.

        Having said that, the poster has a good point. This is why many products come in threes.

        1. There is the high-price version, which should be avoided because the price:value ratio is set too high, to suck in the status seekers.
        2. Then there is the low-price version, which is often over-priced junk with such low value that the price:value ratio is too
    • while the chip it's self was about $0.02 to produce,

      Take a course in economics. Production cost is only a very small fraction of the total cost of the chip. You still have the billion dollars in investment it takes to buld the fab plant, the immense R&D costs for the physics behand these things, the costs for sales, marketing, advertising, distribution, administrative costs to run the company and yes dare I say it PROFIT!!! for the stockholders who have sunk their hard-earned 401K money into the compa
      • Still, don't you honestly think the profit margin for most items sold nowadays is too high? I'm not affirming it is -- I would actually like to see evidence to support what you say (an actual report on how much it cost to fund the various phases that led to the availability of the final product), otherwise I can only take it as a mere assumption. I'm not demanding this kind of data from you, of course, nor am I seeking confrontation. I just think the GP post has some reason in what it says, and that you're
        • I would actually like to see evidence to support what you say (an actual report on how much it cost to fund the various phases that led to the availability of the final product), otherwise I can only take it as a mere assumption.

          The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission requires that every company that issues stock publish exactly this data in an annual report. These reports and data from them are avaiable from company web sites, government sites and various financial data sites.

          It is not an assumption
    • Infineon execs are in jail for DRAM price fixing. [pcworld.com] Here's the indictment. [usdoj.gov]

      Gunter Hefner, formerly Infineon's vice president of sales for memory products, is now US Inmate #98184-011, according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. [bop.gov] Heinrich Florian, former vice president for sales marketing and logistics for memory products, is now US Inmate #98182-011.

      Infineon had to pay $160 million in fines.

      Samsung, Hynix, and Micron have also been implicated. The investigation continues.

  • MP3s are consumer electronics now? Does that mean PDFs are too? And maybe DOCs? lol.
    • This is an interesting point. With the rise of pay-per-file digital media services such as iTunes, could less CD sales (and eventually, perhaps, DVD sales) subtract from consumer electronics sales? Do services like Steam distort sales and economy totals?

  • Elections Sold (Score:5, Funny)

    by BobPaul ( 710574 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @09:48AM (#11378569) Journal
    I first looked at the headline without my glasses and read:

    $113.5 billion worth of elections sold in 2004

    I thought to myself, "Well, that explains that!"

    • Funny, I had read it as:

      $113.5 billion worth of electrons sold in 2004

      And was trying to figure out if that was a reasonable price for electricity. I need to get some sleep.

  • What about the engineers? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So, out of that revenue, how much goes to the engineers? Betcha it's not that much. Makes me wonder why anyone in their right minds would want to go into EE these days?

  • It's good to see this type of trend in the tech market. Slow and steady is the way I would like to see it go, because sharp hills are almost always followed by sharp valleys. And I would certainly hate to see what few jobs that are opening up all be gone within two years time......again.

  • How does that compare to worldwide sales numbers? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jarich ( 733129 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @09:52AM (#11378584) Homepage Journal
    This talks about sales in the US. How much did other countries spend?

  • Top yahoo Searches (Score:2, Informative)

    by vivekg ( 795441 )
    And here is yahoo's list http://tools.search.yahoo.com/top2004/

  • HDTV's #1 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by vettemph ( 540399 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @09:55AM (#11378598)
    It's no suprise, with the cost a an HDTV you don't need to buy to many of them to put them at the top of the list. Their's nothing unusual about HDTV, just an increase in resolution and an excuse to get a step change in consumer cost that will never come down.
    • But 1080i just looks so good on a 57" HDTV... It's not just an increase, it's a giant leap in resolution.

      And I'm not sure what you're talking about, costs for HDTVs are definitely coming down.
      • No joke it's a huge leap; DVD is about twice NTSC resolution as it is, and HD is about twice DVD resolution... HDTV has about (that ois, VERY roughly) 16 times the pixels of your mother's TV set. I'm looking forward to a day when it is common to have a PC in the living room on HD.
        • DVD is not twice NTSC resolution. DVD resolution is 720x480 NTSC or 720x576 PAL. NTSC resolution is the same, 720x480, although a few lines are always cut off.

  • How much did they throw into landfills? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    How much did they throw into landfills?
  • Seems like the americans will soon enough be interested by electronic junk, then porn ($57.0 billion world-wide - $12.0 billion US). Ah well,
  • Sure XBOX is great for average Joe - he can't screw anything up, but he can't do much either with it's clunky controller.
    So instead of one universal programmable, extensible machine, sometimes refferes as PC he has: XBOX, DVD player that he had before xbox came out, TV set, maybe even an old VCR, calculator and tons of junk such as 300Kpixel camera.
    Now I see two trends:
    Every new product makes some other obsolete, so in fact they don't sell something revolutionary, something really creatively new, they just
    • VINYL - Tape - CD-ROM - mp3 - ?

      The advantage of, say MP3s, as far as I'm concerned is the much smaller space that they take up. Imagine a stack of 45s (one song per side for our younger readers) -what were they, 7 inches? And fairly thick in their cardboard sleeves. I'm not going to work out what size stack it would be, but several thousand tracks on a pocket sized device sounds far more space efficient.

      Tape isn't the same as vinyl - have you ever tried to record your own vinyl album without a recording

  • Speaking of purchasing technologies... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Lostman ( 172654 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @10:11AM (#11378643)
    How much longer until we have nationwide wireless internet access?

    I am not talking about "Wow, my cell phone can view lynx web pages" but rather portable computing with a dedicated hookup to the net 24 hours a day everywhere you go. And no, pointing to hobbling along with a GPRS enabled palm and a cell phone plan is not what I am asking.

    Perhaps we as humans NEED to disconnect from the net completely every so often. I sure as heck dont want to though. I go to the gym, go to work, forced to go shopping with wifey, have to see family etc. I want a pair of glasses hooked up to some unit about the size of a cigarette box that will allow me to get a netfeed, highspeed, anywhere. Or, barring that, cybernetic implants in the ol' eye to display them woulnd't be that bad (barring popups, or attacks by hackers).

    Yeah, I am an anime junkie but I want the world promised to us by Lain. Its just - I have gotten so used to having any information available at a whim, that to be disconnected whenever I leave the confines of a computer room is kinda.. sad. And that is kinda sad I know, but its the way I am - I cant be the only one.

    How much longer do I have to wait? Anyone? Bueler?

  • Next Year Should Be Even Larger (Score:5, Informative)

    by Cylix ( 55374 ) * on Sunday January 16, 2005 @10:12AM (#11378646) Homepage Journal
    There are some interesting changes that have taken place this year alone and should effect next year's o so bloated number

    Flat panel monitors are now affordable. Just last week I noticed a 17 inch had fallen into the 200$ mark. This was pretty much the selling point for me and I suspect many others.

    The FCC has released a huge list of mandates for DTV conversion. So unless nothing changes we should see more full power DTV stations by July and then the last mile is July 2006. With that there is a slew of tuners to purchase, infrastructure upgrades and some even more expensive equipment to purchase by the broadcasters themselves. (Alone I've had various quotes for around 20k just for DTV guide data insertion).

    So the television industry itself should provide a significant over all increase on the consumer and provider level.

    I would be interested to know what other industries have seen some fairly signficant change and what cost expenditures are expected.

    • Flat panel monitors are now affordable. Just last week I noticed a 17 inch had fallen into the 200$ mark. This was pretty much the selling point for me and I suspect many others.

      For those people looking for these deals, note that both 1024x768 and 1280x1024 monitors are falling into this price range (although, IIRC, the 1024x768 ones sometimes fall even lower -- into the $150-$200 range). Make sure that you get the one you really want. ;-)

      (Also, good 1600x1200 monitors sometimes fall into the $60

  • Worldwide or US? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PornMaster ( 749461 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @10:35AM (#11378731) Homepage
    The article doesn't say if this is worldwide or the US, but given that it's about $378 per person if it's the US, I could see that being the case.

    I'd be interested in seeing comparitive numbers with Japan, who are some serious gadget lovers.
  • And here the US DOJ and friends are all for crippling our Electronic gadgets on behalf of the RIAA and MPAA's requests, citing piracy is ruining the economy.... I think they better focus on what is really fueling the economy. Movie and music sales are peanuts when it comes to the tech industry.

  • cheap electronics (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @11:51AM (#11379070) Homepage Journal
    The US GDP is about $10T:y; with increasing indebtedness and unbalanced trade, Americans probably spent over $11T in 2004. So even that big industry is only 1% of the American economy. Hell, even some single companies, like IBM, Microsoft, GM and Exxon rake in close to $115B every year, though some of that is "electronics", and maybe half is foreign sales. That number is actually surprisingly low: only about $375:American, while the average salary is about $35K; again, less than 1%, especially considering debt. The real story is perhaps how much can be bought for little money. We seem to be much more than 1% surrounded by all this electronic swag.
  • Mp3 players to listen to Ashlee Simpson. HDTV to watch Survivor. Digital Cameras to take more bad pictures than you did with film. Cell phones to talk on while driving so you crash. Ring tones for some unknown reason. It just seems like there is no real progress here, only just more junk.
    • The first rule of Kibble, is that Kibble drives out non-Kibble.

      Kibble is junk that seeps it's way into our lives unsuspectingly.

      Care of Philip K. Dick.
    • Or, for those not on a melodramatic drama queen rant...

      Mp3 players to listen to Ludwig Van. HDTV to watch Nova on PBS-HD. Digital Cameras to take pictures of your family. Cell phones to call home and see how your wife is. Ring tones for something fun and quirky.

      It just seems like there is no real progress here, only just more junk.....bitch bitch bitch.

  • This is why the DMCA must die (Score:3, Interesting)

    by argoff ( 142580 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @07:34PM (#11381754)

    When you look at the DMCA as a tool by which the "media sector" is trying to micro-regulate the "tech sector" for the sake of controlling revenue streams - this statistic alone basically shows why the DMCA is doomed along with all the industries that rely on it. I say a clash of the titans is comming of the likes of which we haven't seen in a long time.
  • We spent $65 billion on the war in Iraq! I'd rather have bought myself another computer...

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