Consumer electronics, also known as home electronics, are electronic devices intended for everyday household use. Consumer electronics include those used for entertainment, communications, and recreation. Historically, these products were referred to as "black goods" in American English due to many products being housed in black or dark casings. This term is used to distinguish them from "white goods", which are meant for housekeeping tasks, such as washing machines and refrigerators. In British English, they are often called "brown goods" by producers and sellers because they were historically housed in wooden cases. Since the 2010s, this distinction has been absent in big box consumer electronics stores, whose inventories include entertainment, communication, and home office devices, as well as home appliances.
Radio broadcasting in the early 20th century brought the first major consumer product, the broadcast receiver. Later products included telephones, televisions, calculators, cameras, video game consoles, mobile phones, personal computers, and MP3 players. In the 2010s, consumer electronics stores often sold GPS, automotive electronics (vehicle audio), video game consoles, electronic musical instruments such as synthesizer keyboards, karaoke machines, digital cameras, and video players. Such video playing equipment included VCRs in the 1980s and 1990s, and eventually DVD players and Blu-ray players. Stores also sold smart light fixtures, network devices, camcorders, and smartphones. Some of the modern products being sold include virtual reality goggles, smart home devices that connect to the Internet, streaming devices, and wearable technology.
In the 2010s, most consumer electronics were based on digital technologies and increasingly merged with the computer and video game industry, in a trend often referred to as the consumerization of information technology. Some consumer electronics stores also began selling office and baby furniture. Consumer electronics stores may be physical "brick and mortar" retail stores, online stores, or combinations of both. Annual consumer electronics sales were expected to reach by 2020. The sector is part of the electronics industry, which is, in turn, driven by the semiconductor industry.
History
For its first fifty years, the phonograph turntable did not use electronics; the needle and sound horn were purely mechanical technologies. However, in the 1920s, radio broadcasting became the basis of the mass production of radio receivers. The vacuum tubes that had made radios practical were used with record players as well. This was to amplify the sound so that it could be played through a loudspeaker. Television was invented soon after, but remained insignificant in the consumer market in the Global North until the 1950s, after the end of world war 2. Television would not become widely adopted elsewhere worldwide until the 1970s.
The first working transistor, a point-contact transistor, was invented by John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain at Bell Labs in 1947, which led to significant research in the field of solid-state semiconductors in the early-1950s. The invention and development of the earliest transistors at Bell led to transistor radios, in turn promoting the emergence of the home entertainment consumer electronics industry starting in the 1950s. This was largely due to the efforts of Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo (now Sony) in successfully commercializing transistor technology for a mass market, with affordable transistor radios and then transistorized television sets.
Integrated circuits (ICs) followed when manufacturers built circuits (usually for military purposes) on a single substrate using electrical connections between circuits within the chip itself. IC technology led to more advanced and cheaper consumer electronics, such as transistorized televisions, pocket calculators, and by the 1980s, video game consoles and personal computers affordable for regular middle-class families.
Beginning in the 1980s and accelerating in the early 2000s, many consumer electronics, such as televisions and stereo systems, underwent digitization. The introduction of compact discs (CDs) and personal computers during this period signalled a broader shift as digital computer technology and digital signals were increasingly integrated into consumer devices. This transformation significantly altered their functionality and led to improved performance, such as enhanced image quality in televisions. These advancements were largely driven by Moore’s Law, which enabled rapid increases in processing power and reductions in cost and size. At the same time in the 2000s, the internet and personal computers were adopted worldwide.
In 2004, the consumer electronics industry was worth US $240billion annually worldwide, comprising visual equipment, audio equipment, and games consoles. The industry became global, with Asia Pacific having a 35% market share, Europe having 31.5%, the US having 23%, and the rest of the world owning the remainder. Major players in this industry are household names like Sony, Samsung, Philips, Sanyo, and Sharp.
Due to technological convergence, one single device such as a smartphone can perform the tasks of several separate devices such as a camera, radio, TV, video camcorder, etc.
White goods The increase in popularity of such domestic appliances as 'white goods' is a characteristic element of consumption patterns during the golden age of the Western economy. Europe's White Goods industry has evolved over the past 40 years, first by changing tariff barriers, and later by technical and demand shifts. The spending on domestic appliances has claimed only a tiny fraction of disposable income, rising from 0.5percent in the US in 1920 to about 2percent in 1980. Yet, the sequence of electrical and mechanical durables have altered the activities and experiences of households in America and Britain in the twentieth century. With the expansion of cookers, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines, radios, televisions, air conditioning, and microwave ovens, households have gained an escalating number of appliances. Despite the ubiquity of these goods, their diffusion is not well understood. Some types of appliances diffuse more frequently than others. In particular, home entertainment appliances such as radio and television have diffused much faster than household and kitchen machines."
Products
Consumer electronics devices include those used for: Entertainment (Flatscreen TVs, television sets, MP3 players, video recorders, DVD players, radio receivers, etc.) Communications (telephones, mobile phones, email-capable personal computers, desktop computers, laptops, printers, paper shredders, etc.) Recreation (digital cameras, camcorders, video game consoles, ROM cartridges, radio-controlled cars, robot kits, etc.).
Consumer electronics products such as the digital distribution of video games have become increasingly based on the internet and digital technologies. The consumer electronics industry has primarily merged with the software industry in what is increasingly referred to as the consumerization of information technology.
+ List of top consumer electronics products by number of shipments Electronic device Shipments (est.billion) Production years included Compact disc (CD) 200 1982–2007 Cassette tape 30 1963–2019 Digital versatile disc (DVD) 20 1996–2012 Mobile phone 19.4 1994–2018 Smartphone 10.1 20072018 Video cassette (VHS) 10 1976–2000
Trends
One overriding characteristic of consumer electronic products is the trend of ever-falling prices. This is driven by gains in manufacturing efficiency and automation, lower labor costs as manufacturing has moved to lower-wage countries, and improvements in semiconductor design. Semiconductor components benefit from Moore's law, an observed principle which states that, for a given price, semiconductor functionality doubles every two years.
Although consumer electronics shows a trend towards convergence, consumers still face varied purchasing decisions. Product information therefore needs to remain current and comparable for the consumer to support informed choices. Factors such as style, price, specification, and performance all play a role in these decisions. At the same time, there is a gradual shift towards e-commerce web-storefronts.
Many products include Internet access using technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, EDGE, or Ethernet. Products not traditionally associated with computer use (such as TVs or Hi-fi equipment) now provide options to connect to the Internet or to a computer using a home network to provide access to digital content. The desire for high-definition (HD) content has led the industry to develop a number of technologies, such as WirelessHD or ITU-T G.hn, which are optimized for distribution of HD content between consumer electronic devices in a home.
Business competition The consumer electronics industry faces consumers with unpredictable tastes on the demand side, supplier-related delays or disruptions on the supply side, and production challenges occurring in the process. The high rate of technology evolution or revolution requires large investments without any guarantee of profitable returns. As a result, the big players rely on global markets to achieve economies of scale. Even these companies sometimes have to cooperate with each other, for instance on standards, to reduce the risk of their investments. In supply chain management, there is much discussion on risks related to such aspects of supply chains as short product lifecycles, high competition combined with cooperation, and globalization. The consumer electronics industry is the very embodiment of these aspects of supply chain management and related risks. While some of the supply and demand related risks are similar to such industries as the toy industry, the consumer electronics industry faces additional risks due to its vertically integrated supply chains. There are also numerous supply-chain-wide contextual risks that cut across the supply chain especially impacting companies with global supply chains. These include cultural differences in multinational operations, environmental risk, regulations risk, and exchange rate risk across multiple countries. Whether or not demand is comparable across countries affects the extent of the gains from international integration. In addition, consumer preferences change over time to disturb existing patterns of behavior. A feature of some industries is that demand for variety increases as the market moves from first-time buying to replacement demand. A resource to further understand this idea of consumer preferences can be observed through Lizabeth Cohen's book titled, "A Consumers' Republic", "Only if we have large demands can we expect large production".
Industries
The electronics industry, especially consumer electronics, emerged in the 20th century and has become a global industry worth billions of dollars. Contemporary society uses all manner of electronic devices built-in automated or semi-automated factories operated by the industry.
Manufacturing
Most consumer electronics are manufactured in China, due to maintenance cost, availability of materials, quality, and speed as opposed to other countries such as the United States. Cities such as Shenzhen and Dongguan have become important production centers for the industry, attracting many consumer electronics companies such as Apple Inc.
Electronic component
An electronic component is any essential discrete device or physical entity in an electronic system used to affect electrons or their associated fields. Electronic components are mostly industrial products, available in a singular form, and are not to be confused with electrical elements, conceptual abstractions representing idealized electronic components.
Software development