General Consumer Electric (GCE)
Consumer electronics or consumer electronics is electronic (analogue or digital) equipment designed for everyday use, usually in private homes. Consumer electronics includes devices used for entertainment, communication and recreation. They are commonly referred to as black goods due to the fact that many products are placed in black or dark cases. The term is used to distinguish them from "household goods" designed for household tasks such as washing machines and refrigerators, although they are now considered black goods, some of which are connected to the Internet. In British English, manufacturers and sellers often refer to them as home appliances. In the 2010s, this distinction is missing from major consumer electronics stores that sell devices for entertainment, communications, and home office,
Broadcasting in the early 20th century brought with it the first major consumer product, the broadcast receiver. Later products included telephones, televisions, and calculators, followed by audio and video recorders and turntables, game consoles, mobile phones, personal computers, and MP3 players. In the 2010s, consumer electronics stores often sold GPS, car electronics (car stereos), game consoles, electronic musical instruments (such as keyboard synthesizers), karaoke machines, digital cameras, and video players (VCRs in the 1980s and 1990s). years, then DVD and Blu-ray players). The stores also sell smart lights and home appliances, digital cameras, camcorders, cell phones and smartphones.
In the 2010s, most consumer electronics began to be based on digital technologies. They have essentially merged with the computer industry in what is increasingly being called the consumerization of information technology. Some consumer electronics stores have also begun selling office and children's furniture. Consumer electronics stores can be physical retail stores, online stores, or combinations of both.
Annual sales of consumer electronics are expected to reach $2.9 trillion by 2020. It's part of the wider electronics industry. In turn, the driving force behind the electronics industry is the semiconductor industry.
Story
For the first fifty years, the phonograph player did not use electronics; the needle and the mouthpiece were purely mechanical technologies. However, in the 1920s, radio broadcasting became the basis for the mass production of radios. Vacuum tubes, which made radios practical, were also used with turntables to amplify sound so that it could be played through a loudspeaker. Television was soon invented, but it remained insignificant in the consumer market until the 1950s.
The first working transistor, the point transistor, was invented by John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain at Bell Laboratories in 1947, leading to significant solid-state semiconductor research in the early 1950s. The invention and development of the first transistors at Bell led to the creation of transistor radios. This led to the emergence of a consumer electronics industry for home entertainment starting in the 1950s, mainly due to the efforts of Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo (now Sony) to successfully commercialize transistor technology for the mass market with affordable transistor radios and later transistor televisions.
They were followed by integrated circuits (ICs), where manufacturers built circuits (usually for military purposes) on a single substrate, using electrical connections between circuits within the chip itself. Integrated circuit technology led to better and cheaper consumer electronics such as transistorized televisions, pocket calculators, and by the 1980s, affordable game consoles and personal computers that ordinary middle-class families could buy.