How much a part of our lives is the Personal Computer?

How much a part of our lives is the Personal Computer? According to a 2007 Wikipedia article, there were a BILLION PC’s in use worldwide and another billion expected by 2014. AMD estimated the population of Internet users to be 1.5 billion as of January 2009. Simply put, everyone has access to a PC and ¼ of the world’s adult population owns one. In the United States, there are more computers in use than there are adults ¹. The computer has become as much a part of our lives as the toaster and the telephone.

Unlike the toaster – well, maybe a little bit like the telephone – the nature of the PC is very personal. The PC is an appliance which the user touches. It takes hours of use to “break in” a new mouse or keyboard to the point where we are comfortable using it, and once we’re comfortable it would take hours to switch back to our old one. This “personalization” doesn’t apply to the PC hardware, but only to the peripherals we touch all day. We don’t buy peripherals based on price or function, we buy them based on design and performance. Sure, if a peripheral is provided to you – say, your company’s computer guy buys you a new keyboard – it may be chosen on price, but if you make the decision yourself you want a product that looks, feels, and performs well. MANHATTAN makes products like this, and we’ve been doing it a long time.

The purpose of this blog is to discuss advances in PC peripheral design and technology. We’ll blog about industry trends and new technologies that directly affect you. Hopefully, we’ll inspire some dialogue from you about what products, trends, technologies, and styles you are interested in.

¹ The United States Census Bureau estimates the population between age 15 and 64 to be 205,794,364 as of July 2009. eTForecasts & Computer Industry Almanac Inc estimates that there were 214,760,000 PC’s sold from 2006-2008.