I'll respond to "who benefits from cheap transistors?".
The answer, IMO is that the consumer does directly, and indirectly, the industry desperately needs cheap(er) transistors. Why? Because electronics are still too expensive for the average person. Advocated Evil (sorry) said that he's (?) a computer geek and has 4 machines networked in his home. In the future that I and many others envision, that would be a pretty underdeveloped infostructure for a home. (Ie; a server/router, several Webpads, wireless access point, lots of smaller machines monitoring things like temp, security, watering, weather... personal GPS/comm in watch, portable wireless connected smaller Webpad for travel, you name it.)
But to do all this, this stuff needs to get dirt cheap! It's incredible that a Webpad is still a dream, and when it comes I'm still supposed to shell out >$1k for something I could likely accidently drop in the hot tub, not to mention all the other throwaway electronics I will have. Not to mention the current high price of bandwidth and the lack of it in the last mile. It's no wonder people have stopped buying this crap.
Look at this monstrosity I'm typing on right now for example. The damn thing is still the size of the first one I bought in '89. The boards got smaller, but the box stays the same. Noisy bunch of whirring fans, monitor and keyboard all tethered down with a mess of wires that I have to sit at a damn desk (I hate being inside!) to use. To add insult to injury, Bill makes me press CntrlAltDel to make sure I maintain manual dexterity on a regular basis. If it wasn't for the excellent content on the Internet (this thread being one of the sources of), I think I might have given up on PCs. Really, why pay out around $1k every several years to "update" such a beast to play Bill's overpriced bloatware?
I really think the industry has sat on it's hands in this area for years while they all congratulated themselves on their stock prices. Maybe now that they are dependent on real sales to real consumers instead of ripping off the investing public they'll get off their asses and produce something out of the box (or away from it.)
We need cheap, and we need innovation. Cheap means lots more sales. Lots. Innovation means we get away from clunky stuff that makes your back ache and your skin go pale and drives sales through the roof. Expensive and clunky means we are a niche market for the rich (and geeky, like me)and small sales as people have to update their clunky, crappy, PCs because of clunky, crappy OSes. It also means that lots of mankind will miss a better living in my opinion. So cheap and innovative is very, very good IMO. And this is what gets a kick when Silicon Valley turns down...
So, I have not come here to bury cheap, but to praise it... |
