We get over to the USA two or three times a year, and it has been interesting
this past (2007) year to see the changes in the equipment on offer, and the
stuff which is NOT on offer at places like Fry's.

A year or so back, cabled networking was all the rage, now it is wireless.

Was, things like TFT, now it is giant plasma.

Was, PCMCIA interface card readers, now you'd be lucky to find one at any store.
We hunted for a PCMCIA card reader, and found one in three stores, everything
has gone USB.

Hard drives were 80-100gb, now they have 500gb and 1Tb on sale and people were
lapping them up in November when we were there.

Motherboards are now covered in copper cooling pipes, while a year or so back it
was all fan cooled.

Memory was SDRAM and relatively cheap, DDR was expensive, now DDR2 is chaper
than plain ol' DDR.

Parts to build PC's are still a mainline thing for Fry's at least, but there
seemed to us to be less people putting kit together, and more people shopping
for add-ons.

This year was our first visit to the Fry's in Phoenix, Arizona, previous years
we have been mainly to San Jose area stores.

Everything was made in China (of course) and it was interesting to see the
returns queue and what they were returning, particularly small USB/Firewire
adapters for laptops which didn't work, and the model helicopters which were
mostly crashed!

Just an observation.

Peter