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$113.5 billion worth of electronics sold in 2004
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."
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.
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?
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?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
This talks about sales in the US. How much did other countries spend?
Agile Artisans
Maybe it went back into R&D to make it cheaper down the line?
Imagine there's no heaven, It's easy if you try.
If you don't like, buy cheaper stuff. PC stuff is pretty damn cheap compared to what it used to be 15 years ago.
See, the problem with that, is that do you really want to work in factories, and also, they provide damn cheap labour, 14 cents a week in some cases. Now, still want to stop China production lines?? Some people want to stop it, but most just want to buy their stuff for cheaper. And here is a big plus for you, you can waste your insignificant life on something else then building stuff.
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.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
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.
Something does not compute.
You guys don't get it.
If one is manufacturing wicker baskets, T-shirts, or tennis shoes, by hand, then the cost of labor is a significant percentage of total cost.
Make that wicker basket by machine, and labor costs go way down. Productivity goes up.
Near-slave labor does not provide the cheap goods that are sold to us. Real and true slave labor would not provide enough cost savings either.
The labor costs are not a signigficant part of a Dell Laptop.
The real cost is paid by the tax-payers of the country of manufacture.
The Chinese, Korean, Tiwanese, Japanese, etc, peasant is paying for your fun stuff, with their taxes.
The example of DRAM is a good one. A recent headline reported that a major manufacturer of DRAM in Japan was going to pay a $100megabuck fine for "dumping". Selling in the US at below the cost of manufacture.
That Dell Laptop that costs a so unbelievably small amount of money to you, actually cost more to manufacture than it was sold for. Same with cell-phones and all the electronic fluff.