5 ms·
> Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music. On the flip side, Sony lost the consumer devices market for this very reason. Sony's single-mind
by postalcoder 3mo ago
> Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music.
On the flip side, Sony lost the consumer devices market for this very reason. Sony's single-minded pursuit of proprietary formats was a disaster class of corporate mismanagement.
It disgusts me because I used to love their products so much. Sony's competitor to the iPod was a marvel of a device called the NW-HD1. It was beautiful, had a ton of space, and great battery life. But it wasn't an MP3 player. It could only play ATRAC music. That means you had to transcode all of your MP3s to their proprietary format just to listen to them.
I remember trying to debate the virtues of my Sony NW-HD1 versus the iPod, but having to keep my computer on throughout the night just to transcode a couple albums was indefensible.
- speed_spread 3mo agoYet a few years before that Sony had no qualms selling walkmans, blank tape cassettes and dual-tape portable sound systems, often with double speed copy function. We would gather for afternoons and make actual copy parties. Recording quality wasn't great but we didn't care.
- mghackerlady 3mo agonot to mention minidisc, which was pretty much exclusively used as a format to copy your CDs to
- kmeisthax 3mo agoYes, but that was also the era where Sony was fighting Congress to keep DAT legal. Even when they got their way, no label would touch the format and it was a total, abject failure. Sony's response to this was to use their bubble-era money to start buying US record labels, purely so they could force them to support their formats. But they ultimately wound up buying the exact same mentality that they were fighting against, and the labels won that fight internally. Sure, Sony had Minidisc releases of major label music, but the format flopped anyway, because they were entirely unwilling to market it for recording in the US. Outside of the US, Minidisc was the Apple "Rip. Mix. Burn" experience half a decade prior to the iPod; but in the US that experience basically didn't exist unless you knew exactly where to look.
- itsmartapuntocm 3mo agoArguably it hurt them with the PSP as well by trying to get everyone to buy UMDs for their movies and store music on memory sticks.
- ssl-3 3mo agoPerhaps so, but they were clueless: The PSP was so easy to mod and run pirated games and emulators with that I'm not sure if I've ever tried to run a UMD in the one I have.
- marysol5 3mo agoTook a fair while for people to "jailbreak" the PSP. But then when they discovered that there was a factory bypass in the battery, it was game over
- itsmartapuntocm 2mo agoI was in the scene when the pandora's battery was discovered and to say it was huge was a understatement. After years of playing cat and mouse with Sony over exploits, not only was every PSP to date now forever hackable, but it also allowed previously bricked consoles to be brought back to life.
- akersten 3mo ago> the NW-HD1 Ah, something tells me it wasn't the technical capabilities that held this very pronounceable and fashionable product back.