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Read something similar the other day about the original Walkman. The engineers wanted to add recording function, thinking it would help with sales and to only
by jonplackett 4mo ago
Read something similar the other day about the original Walkman.
The engineers wanted to add recording function, thinking it would help with sales and to only cost a negligible amount to add.
Someone cleverer said no, because if you add that feature now people will be confused what it is for. If they don’t want to record audio, they’ll think the product isn’t for them.
- sph 4mo agoI have been thinking deeply about this problem. I bought a great, silent fan from Rowenta, with beautiful housing and does what it says on the tin with no fancy accessories. 3 speed + 1 very silent mode for sleep. Hey, it’s a European product, not some Chinese knockoff. At some point during design, one person must have said “you know, why not add a brilliant white light that turns on in silent mode? Wouldn’t that be cool?” and there was no one powerful or smart enough to stop their hubris. Every hot summer night, I turn off my bedside lamp, and scream internally when I notice I forgot to put a dark piece of cloth to obscure the blinding white light on the fan. In these nights, I dream of sending an email to Rowenta’s customer team, and asking them to present me the head of the person responsible for this. I am reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance lately and how technologists have made the world ugly by forgetting to keep in touch with Quality and Beauty, and this is painful reminder of it.
- chias 4mo ago[dead]
- lukan 4mo agoThat bright LED's became so cheap to allow putting them everywhere certainly had downsides. There are many devices now where I have to tape over to enjoy a dark sleeping place.
- ijk 4mo agoBack when red LEDs were the new cheap lighting option everything was great: red doesn't affect noght vision as much and at least for me it doesn't seem to prevent sleeping on the same way that the bright white LEDs do.
- phendrenad2 4mo agoMakes me wonder if e-ink could solve this. A red dot that's only visible in daytime, when you want it to be.
- wincy 4mo agoThis is my only complaint about the Bose QuietComfort Ultras. Nearly $400 headphones and they have an LED that glows while charging so I can’t charge them in my room at night unless I throw a shirt or something over them.
- moffkalast 4mo agoThere are many problems in life that a brush and some black acrylic brush-on primer can fix. This is one of those problems :)
- robocat 4mo agoI fixed a power wart LED today using black electrical tape, with a needle hole. Ideally instead I need some stick-on semitransparent dark-alpha stickers to reduce brightness. Maybe I should use two polarized stickers, and rotate the second until brightness is perfect. Are there non-linear solutions or HEV-sensitive photochromic solutions - so that LED brightness is low in the dark but bright enough in sunny conditions?
- moffkalast 4mo agoI sure wish that were a thing, if you happen to figure that out let me know. So far the only real solution I know of is active throttling with a photoresistor and a mosfet based on ambient light.
- robocat 4mo agoYeah, active electronics seems like the only solution that would vary brightness correctly. But electronics are too impractical for the simple problem of modifying existing LED lights. Some quick searching didn't find any photochromic films (Visible Light Activated) that were activated by say blue light rather than UV light. Plus it seems the chemicals don't darken as much (cf. familiar UV-sensitive glasses) and they work best with particular wavelengths (so might not work under different sources of lighting). I will stick with cheap plastic tape/film and pinpoint holes because of advantages (tidy, colour match the device, fitting around, easy to revert).
- moring 4mo agoAnd yet, you did buy the fan despite the bright LED (because you didn't know it was there when you bought it). Rowenta got your money, so from their perspective, they did everything right.
- torben-friis 4mo agoPeople don't talk enough about the effects of bright screens being cheap to keep on in urban areas. Every drug store, bus stop and storefront in my city is painful to walk around at night.
- sph 4mo agoWell, I know I will actively avoid the brand now. Perhaps when they see the declining sales due to bad design, marketing will suggest to add even more lights and useless features. The cycle of enshittification.
- altmanaltman 4mo agoI don't think they will care about 1 customer. If it sells well right now, it means its doing the right thing from its pov and it also means that while it might feel wrong to you, that is what the market wants. Lets say the sales do start dropping once you avoid it. At some point it will make sense to change it because most people likely want the change. But from their pov, nothing is really different right? They are always catering to the most common demand in the market. How will this affect them or teach them a lesson?
- mattio 4mo agoYou can buy the version without the bright light, but the marketing people made it 10 dollars more expensive x-) /s
- nottorp 4mo agoBlack... nail... polish... Solves every LED problem. Xerox, why did you think the power led on your multifunction should light up not only my home office, but the room next to it too?
- petcat 4mo agoBlack electrical tape is even better. Because then it can be trivially peeled off later instead of requiring polish remover and a brush.
- dpark 4mo agoYeah, but electrical tape looks like garbage. Trade off is aesthetics vs ability to remove easily.
- Modified3019 4mo agoThere are various sizes/shapes of stickers intended to either dim or block led lights if aesthetics are important.
- otterley 4mo agoElectrical tape sometimes leaves adhesive behind when you peel it off, so you might not be able to avoid using a chemical during the reversal process.
- ElijahLynn 4mo agoThank you for this tip! I have some Black 3.0 (blackest paint on earth) I'm gonna try this with!!!
- michaelbuckbee 4mo agoSomething that's improved my life has been buying a sticker sheet of those LED darkening dots. They're only a couple bucks and look much cleaner than other solutions I've tried while still allowing for _some_ light to come through.
- jonplackett 4mo agoSame problem with my electric toothbrush. And it’s super bright chafing light also FLASHES. Why? It must be a designer who hates everyone. It’s can’t be an accident.
- lukan 4mo agoI disagree here. That would be a marketing problem and I would have market it as for audio on the walk. With the focus on listening and the record option as a bonus.
- boomlinde 4mo agoDeciding on a product design that's easily marketable is also a marketing problem. You suggest adding it as a "bonus", but for whom? Recording what on the walk? How would you advertise that along the main feature people actually buy the thing for? If not, what purpose does it serve? It's a few cents, but that's still a few cents too much if that's not what you're convincing people to buy. Try to think of someone who didn't buy a walkman because it lacked a recording feature. What's their story? Can that easily be represented in the marketing material?
- criddell 4mo agoThis thread reminded me of Blaise Pascal's quip "I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time." It's often easier to just throw in everything that's easy to do with little thought about cohesiveness or user experience. Leaving the record feature out of the walkman was likely a more difficult idea to push than including it and I think they were right.
- jonplackett 4mo agoExactly this. You wouldn’t make a dictaphone and then be like, shall we just tout good speakers in it just in case someone wants to also listen to their music on it. So why the other way around.
- Angostura 4mo agoYou include it but with no mention of it. Allow recoding to be activated with an obscure undocumented button push. Leave a subtle hong somewhere that someone clever can find out. Wait for news of the functionality to go viral and additional products to walk off the shelf bought by people who feel clever.
- ben_w 4mo agoMore likely to go viral in that case, a headline saying "Walkmans sometimes record over your tapes!" When I was about 10, someone lent the school a tape of Holst's The Planets for a school play, one of the other students pressed the record button, and shortly thereafter the teacher played to the class a recording of me shouting "no stop" as I rushed for the stop button having seen what they'd done just a moment too late. Now imagine that happening by undocumented feature, where nobody knows it would happen before it does.
- alnwlsn 4mo agoI thought that's what the little breakaway tabs on the bottom of the cassette are for Though I'll admit, when I used to use cassettes, I never write protected them
- dpark 4mo agoThis story probably involves a cassette that someone copied at home and then didn’t break off that little tab.
- ben_w 4mo agoI hope so, though my memory was it was in an official-looking cassette box. Music back then wasn't cheap.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- burningChrome 4mo ago
- nottorp 4mo ago... and later, the fancier and more expensive walkmans started to actually have a recording function among the differentiators :)
- jeromenerf 4mo agoCase in point: minidisc :) Recording was the killer feature for me. I recorded thousands of hours of band rehearsals with their stereo omni mics and the media quality.
- tobyhinloopen 4mo agoGotta love the LP4 mode. So much music on a single disk! Remember the cool rectangular batteries? Why aren't these gumstick batteries more used in modern devices!?
- burningChrome 4mo agoThe crazy thing is these came out in 92' and they didn't stop production until 2013 so you can still find these players. I just found out Sony stopped production of the minidiscs just last year which is crazy. A 20 year run for the player and 30+ years for the minidiscs. If you can find a player, you can still get the discs on Amazon which is awesome considering how disposable tech has become.
- kranke155 4mo agoThe minidisc was probably beautifully designed. I still have a player and some sample discs because I found them so beautiful. No wonder Ive and Jobs used to go “what would Sony do?” As a design round at early Apple 2.0
- xg15 4mo ago[dead]
- V__ 4mo agoRory Sutherland used the Walkman story in his book, and some YouTube Shorts.