What's holding back Apple? How about not selling a budget-priced Mac to compete with $400 entry-level PCs -- or the $200 and $300 Linux desktops at Wal-Mart's online store?
If desktops and laptops remain largely dull, the picture is brighter among the gadgets that connect to computers. WiFi wireless networking remains the best addition you can make to a multi-computer household (add a $100 to $300 wireless media receiver and you can also listen to breathtakingly varied Web radio on your stereo).
| | | | ___Personal Tech E-letter___ Washington Post personal technology columnist Rob Pegoraro answers reader e-mail and expands on themes he touches on in his weekly newspaper column. The e-mail version of this weekly feature includes links to the latest gadget and software reviews.
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Handheld organizers are getting cheaper but haven't dropped below $100, and such highly capable smartphones as the Sidekick II and the Treo 650 leave less appetite for separate handhelds.
Digital cameras now compete with film on just about every level -- especially price, if you factor in usage costs that drop with every cut in the price of digicams' flash memory.
Lower prices also greased the skids for digital video recorders and digital television this year. So-called DVRs are now mainstream items -- thanks, not to TiVo and ReplayTV, which pioneered them, but to cable and satellite operators that offer their own, far cheaper models.
Digital high-definition TVs are now well past early-adopter price gouging. You can buy a CRT-based HD set for about $500; sexy flat-panel LCDs and bigger but thicker digital-projection sets are diving under $2,000.
And 2004 was the first year that broadband subscriptions outnumbered those for dial-up access -- yet America Online chose to put itself on the wrong side of this trend by moving to stop selling broadband access. One result: About 2 million customers walked away from AOL this year.
The future increasingly belongs to incumbent cable and phone companies -- unless wireless technologies (either upgraded WiFi or something like Verizon Wireless's BroadbandAccess) can crack the market open again.
The content available to all these users, dial-up and broadband, continued to expand in 2004, thanks largely to the explosion of self-published blogs. Getting on the Internet may feel like an unhealthy risk to too many users, but the stuff that awaits there is more diverse and democratic than ever.
Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at rob@twp.com.
