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What do sound cards, scanners, modems and network adapters have in common? If you're a long-time reader of PC Pro you'll know the answer. They're all categories of product we used to review on a regular basis, but which we now rarely cover.

Back in the day, a sound card was something you expressly budgeted for when you bought your PC. I remember playing Doom on my girlfriend's 486, using only the motherboard's built-in piezo sounder. It produced two sounds: a beep and a crashing noise. While fragging zombies in a world of two-tone audio had a certain Spartan charm, it wasn't some kind of deliberate neo-minimalist statement. It was more that a student's budget wouldn't stretch to a real sound card in a PC that cost £800 as it was.

Look at the way things are now. I can't remember the last time I saw a motherboard that didn't have high-definition audio built in. The sad truth for manufacturers of sound cards is that once we got 16-bit digital audio, people rapidly ceased to care about sound: it was good enough as it was and you couldn't tell the difference between cards, so there was no point in reviewing them any more. Manufacturers continue trying to flog us five-, six- and now seven-channel audio, but the ratio of the number of people who've bothered setting up seven surround speakers to the actual number of integrated 7.1-channel audio chipsets in the world is tiny.

Network adapters have suffered the same fate. The idea of having to pay £300 for a 10baseT add-in card (maximum speed 10Mb/sec) is bizarre

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in a world where Gigabit Ethernet adapters - sometimes two of them - come in £30 motherboards. Again, once they got to a certain speed, new models became irrelevant: people didn't care any more and there was nowhere for the prices to go but down.

Simple economies of scale and devices disappearing into an integrated computing fabric isn't the only reason people lose interest in reading reviews about a category of hardware, though. Scanners are a classic example, having once been multi-thousand-pound objects of desire. It turns out the idea of scanners was, for most people, the actual interesting bit. "Wow!" we would think to ourselves. "If only I had a scanner, I could scan my photos and see them on my computer screen!" It was an idea we all fell for, but was hilariously arse-about-face in a world before Facebook and Flickr. Witness the fact that we now spend lots of money on printing the photos that we've taken with our digital cameras, in order to get them off the computer screen.

Scanners aren't high technology any more, and the average consumer doesn't care about them. If you do happen to want to scan the odd photo you can pick up an A4, 24-bit colour flatbed for £30. Even the scanner manufacturers themselves rarely make a song and dance about new models: they just quietly seep into the market.

So what's next? Digital cameras are certainly in serious danger. Megapixel ratings, image stabilisation, big screens and high ISO capability once separated the high-end models from the budget ones. But competitive pressure has brought all of those features into the low end, leaving very little for the premium models to trade on. A random, highly unscientific search on www.jessops.com produced two examples. The Nikon Coolpix LS18 has 8 megapixels, high ISO capability and a 3in screen for £99. Or you can go for a Canon Ixus 960 IS: this has 8 megapixels, high ISO capability and a 3in screen for £270. Mobile phones are now sporting 5-megapixel cameras and autofocus. Give it a few years and the market may evaporate completely.