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Electronics In Los Angeles, CA
By: Matthew Paolini
As the most populous city in Southern California, Los Angeles has a huge number of consumer electronics stores. With just about 50 Circuit City stores and 18 Best Buys, two of the most ubiquitous electronics retailers are well represented. Add to that, the over 1,000 specialty shops and chain stores and you can see a situation where the populace has many choices as they search for their next big screen television.
The term consumer electronics is associated with electronic equipment designed for everyday use. They are most often used for communications, entertainment and personal productivity. Mainstream consumer electronics products include PCs, telephones, audio equipment, TVs, and electronic calculators. The more popular brands of electronics include many large domestic and foreign manufacturers, such as Apple, Philips, Samsung, Sanyo, Sony and Toshiba, among others.
The Consumer Electronics Association projects 2007 nationwide consumer electronics purchases at 150 billion dollars. A very large portion of that originated in Los Angeles, and other major cites like New York and Boston.
As already noted, consumer electronics are made around the globe, though there is an extremely high concentration of manufacturing facilities in Asia, particularly China and Singapore. The newest consumer electronics are previewed yearly at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, NV, which is near to Los Angeles, at which many industry pioneers make speeches including Microsoft's Bill Gates.
One interesting characteristic of the consumer electronic industry is the longstanding trend of lower prices. Industry insiders posit that such a development is caused by gains in manufacturing efficiency and more use of automation, combined with many improvements in semiconductors. The widely believed Moore's Law, says that, for a specific price, electronics industry functionality doubles every 18 months.
Consumer electronics in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the country, and in the world, continue in a trend of functional combinations, wherein a DVD player and television convert to a media center, combining elements of several electronic items. Consumers face difficult decisions when purchasing electronics items. It is becoming more about a product's style and price, as opposed to its technical specifications and performance.
On the negative side, loads of consumer electronics result in e-waste. It is thought that in 2003 the United States alone generated over 2.8 million tons of electronic waste. Less than 10 percent of the noted amount was recycled.
Article Source: http://www.ezarticles.info
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