Americans spent $113.5 billion on consumer electronics last year

By our calculations you guys probably account for a good $20 or $30 billion of this, but the Consumer Electronics Association estimates that last year the citizens of our great nation spent a record $113.5 billion on consumer electronics, and they're projecting that we'll drop a tidy $125.7 billion on iPods, flat screen TVs, robotic dogs, and USB cup warmers this year (and these figures aren't including computer equipment).

To put this in perspective, Americans only purchased about $11.9 billion worth of music in 2003 (the entire planet only spent $40 billion). That's less than one-tenth what the consumer electronics industry hauled in, which is why it's frustrating to see the tail wagging the dog when it comes to
recent Congressional legislation. Look, we respect the need of the copyright industries (film, music, software, etc) to do what they need to do to protect their intellectual property—heck, Engadget has a copyright symbol at the bottom of each page for a reason—but what we don't dig is the government passing laws requiring built-in DRM or mandating what features companies can or cannot include with their products (see TiVo's recent entanglement with the FCC for a prime example of this). When you pass laws specifically to protect certain aging industries from the forward march of technology, all you're doing is stifling innovation and essentially having the government—rather than consumers—picking who wins and who loses.

[Via Slashdot]