Berlin in September: Consumer Electronics Is Rethinking What a Computer Is

From Radio to Compute

IFA Berlin carries more than a century of history. It has watched radio, television, the video recorder and the rise of the personal computer. Today it is watching another transition — computing power turning from a device you own into a capability diffused through the spaces you live in.

That is not an abstract statement. Walk the halls and you find refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners and even door locks shipping with processors, memory and network connections inside. They are no longer endpoints that get controlled; they are nodes capable of making local decisions.

Smaller Footprints, Larger Deployments

Running in parallel is the continued shrinking of computing hardware. A complete x86 system now fits on a circuit board the size of a palm, while compute density keeps climbing. Where these two curves cross, the way computing gets deployed changes fundamentally.

Previously, an organisation acquired computing power by buying computers. Today it may need a number of silent endpoints across an office, several high-density nodes in a server room, and a set of small machines running unattended for months at the edge. Unit count rises, individual footprint shrinks, and deployment scenarios multiply.

Efficiency Becomes the Core Metric

Once device counts climb from dozens into hundreds and thousands, energy consumption stops being a variable you can ignore. In Europe, energy cost and environmental regulation press from both sides, which is pushing performance-per-watt to equal footing with — and sometimes ahead of — peak performance as a procurement criterion.

That shift places new demands on hardware design. The old optimisation was "extract the most performance within a power budget". Now there is a second question to answer: under a typical workload, how much electricity will this unit draw in a year? And how quiet can it be while idle?

Long-Term Thinking Makes a Comeback

One quieter trend deserves notice: product lifecycle is being taken seriously again. In an industry defined by rapid iteration, the words repairable, upgradeable and long-term availability are returning to procurement checklists.

Regulation is part of the reason; maturing customer awareness is another. When total cost of ownership is calculated properly — energy, maintenance, replacement, downtime — the product with a slightly higher purchase price and a longer service life often wins on economics.

After Berlin

IFA has never been a show that wins attention with hardware specifications. Its character is closer to a long-form report on how people live. And this year that report reaches a clear conclusion: computing is becoming ubiquitous, and precisely because of that it has to be dependable, quiet and built to last.

For everyone who builds things in this industry, that is good news. Because once computing power diffuses into every corner of daily life, what decides success is no longer the flash of a launch moment, but a decade of uneventful, reliable operation.