consumer electronics

TechAltar's history of Philips, once Europe's largest tech company and a world leader in lighting, radio and physical media. It traces how the company sold off or spun out its businesses, until little remains but the licensed name.

Adam Curtis' multi-part documentary on how Freud's ideas and Edward Bernays' public relations shaped consumer culture and political control. It argues that business and government learned to manufacture desires.

The first part of Adam Curtis' documentary series on Sigmund Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays, who invented public relations. It shows how Bernays used Freud's ideas to link mass-produced goods to unconscious desires and create modern consumer persuasion.

First part of a four-part video history of Japan's electronics industry, covering the birth of the transistor and the rise of Japanese semiconductors. It appears to draw on NHK documentary material.

Strange Parts tours JLCPCB's large PCB factory in Huizhou, China, walking through the printed circuit board manufacturing process step by step. It shows the machinery, quality checks and scale behind cheap prototype boards.

Part one of Look Mum No Computer's series on buying a whole church pipe organ, covering how it was removed from its home. The series goes on to restoring it and rewiring it for MIDI.

Scotty Allen of Strange Parts travels through Shenzhen's Huaqiangbei markets and learns to upgrade an iPhone 6s from 16GB to 128GB by swapping its flash chip. It is part 3 of his custom iPhone series and shows the difficulty of the hands-on repair work.

Asianometry examines how East Germany tried and failed to build a native semiconductor industry despite heavy investment, including the espionage involved in acquiring Western microelectronics technology.

Strange Parts builds a working refurbished iPhone 6S entirely from components bought in the Huaqiangbei phone parts markets in Shenzhen. The video explains how the markets work and what the parts cost.

CBC Marketplace investigates locksmith scams in the Greater Toronto Area. It exposes networks of fake Google Maps listings and fake reviews, and uses hidden cameras to show how low quotes turn into overcharges.

Chapter 11 of the documentary The Corporation, on how marketing targets children, including the Nag Factor study that taught kids to nag their parents more effectively.

Breaking Taps tries to build semiconductor fabrication capability at home, working through decades of lithography history while chasing one-micrometer features. It documents the equipment, process steps and many setbacks along the way.

Bloomberg's Hello World episode in which Ashlee Vance visits Shenzhen, a hub of electronics manufacturing and cloning. He meets tech-fueled entrepreneurs working under an authoritarian regime.

A roughly 3.5-hour Gamers Nexus investigation into rising PC component prices, driven largely by AI data-center demand for memory and other hardware. It draws on interviews with industry figures to argue that personal computing and ownership are being eroded.

Part 3 of WIRED's Future Cities series on Shenzhen. It examines how attitudes toward patents and intellectual property differ from the West, and how shanzhai (copycat) manufacturing created an ecosystem of rapid iteration and distribution.