Another important number affecting the consumer market is the number of dollars, marks, yen, or whatever the product costs. Television sets and other consumer electronic products remain significantly cheaper than PCs. Relatively low prices make these products accessible to a broad base of consumers. Perhaps even more importantly, such products are simple and thus easy to use. However, since they are intrinsically communications products, a great deal of the intelligence can be placed up in the network, at the other end of the communication link to the appliance.
Television is the first viable delivery vehicle for information appliances.
Because of its ubiquity, and the telephone's, in the homes of consumers, it is very practical to create a device that uses the former for display, the latter for communication. Perhaps more important, the television set is already the mainstream method of choice for receiving information, though not yet for interacting with it. Eventually, other information appliances will become practical. Cellular phones are a great vehicle for information access. They cannot provide the high-bandwidth display of the television set, but they do offer the clear advantage of portability.