Categories of Electronics:

The electronic devices were formerly divided as Brown or White depending on the skills required to use them, repair them and based on their sizes.

Small/ Brown: If you remember seeing olden days black and white T.V, screens packed in huge wooden boxes with shutters. They would look like brown wooden cupboards from outside, so also most of the radios and cassette players of old times where encased in wooden boxes. Such wooden boxes were used since plastic was still not so common and economical in those days. Wood serves as a protecting case, produces good base for the sound, it is safe as it is bad conductor of electricity hence contains any electric shocks, was readily available and was widely used in electronic devices in those days and hence the small devices were called “Brown electronics”.

These devices are mostly not so bulky, comparatively less complex, and hence somehow easy to repair. T.V., D.V.D, woofers, cameras, Mobile phones and landlines, etc. come in this category. As a matter of fact people still like those radio cassettes and woofers which have wooden body and /or are colored like wood, for instance “Geepas” woofers are more popular in small woofer category around East Africa.

Major/White: Unlike T.V. screens and radio cassettes which were colored brown in olden days, most of the bulky, not easy to repair, devices were colored white, for instance Refrigerators, most of them are still colored white. Other examples are Washing machines, Water heaters/ Geezers, Electric stoves, etc. Repairing these devices needs specialized technical help, most of them even work on higher watts and consume more power.