9 ms·

Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models

223 points by speckx 3mo ago

ChrisArchitect 3mo ago
When I hear Walkman I only think of cassette tape, not MD, but whatever... Minidisc understandably gone away (until maybe hipsters revive that too like they have with tapes?) but on the tape front ... Maxell thinks they have something with cassette players.... wonder if/how these are selling: Maxell MXCP-P100 – wireless cassette player https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47497781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47497781
- 1659447091 3mo ago
  > When I hear Walkman I only think of cassette tape Same here. I was just recently wondering if there were any places that sell Walkman's still. I remember walking around Seoul and ended up in a maze of closet sized electronic and nick-nack shops with some really random old parts and gadgets. Made me miss my old boombox. Thought that would be a good place to go back and look for a walkman, but the Maxell MXCP-P100 – wireless cassette player looks perfect
  - NaOH 3mo ago
    I was glad to find this site offering refurbished iPods, and they also have refurb Walkmans. https://retrospekt.com/collections/cassette-players https://retrospekt.com/collections/cassette-players
- officeplant 3mo ago
  >until maybe hipsters revive that too like they have with tapes? That is already happening. I like to frequent Vintage Computer Festival and for the last few years a few of them have had MD-Con as part of a convention within a convention. A whole room dedicated to MiniDisc tech showing off laptops, desktops, camcorders, pro-hifi gear, etc. There is a collector that even brings a large portion of his collection which is all in blue including rare blue color minidiscs themselves from company promo's. One example is a promo MD from Boss Coffee in japan which looked fantastic. There is even a revival in the software used to burn/format minidiscs since most of the original software is ancient now. Its pretty fun to visit them as someone who used a minidisc player through highschool and college until I got the original Microsoft Zune. A lot of the people I met at the last two MD-Con's loved looking through all the models presented at the con to try and find the same device they back in the day. https://www.mdcon.live/ https://www.mdcon.live/
- SpecialistK 3mo ago
  You're many years late to the MiniDisc revival.
- gattilorenz 3mo ago
  Maxell cassette players are not cassette players from back in the day, but cheap stuff like everything else: https://youtu.be/6XyaBls8jyg?is=Lrgqe23yWlelBvl- https://youtu.be/6XyaBls8jyg?is=Lrgqe23yWlelBvl-
sdevonoes 3mo ago
Got it. But then why Nike/Adidas/Quicksilver/etc cannot bring back clothes from the 90s? Buying second hand is not that nice (smells that never go away) and “vintage” places sell min. catalogue buy way overpriced.
- Schiendelman 3mo ago
  Clothes made in the 90s used different materials and stitching than they do today, and likely cost more to produce. They'd probably need old machines they haven't had in decades.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- HardwareLust 3mo ago
  Great question!
- sublinear 3mo ago
  Have you tried dry cleaning?
- ragall 3mo ago
  > But then why Nike/Adidas/Quicksilver/etc cannot bring back clothes from the 90s? They can, but people wouldn't want to pay the price. When adjusting for inflation, clothes today are much cheaper than 30 years ago, and the main producers of high-quality cotton (Kazakhstan and Egypt) are having continuous drought problems so the best raw material is even more expensive. The combination of customer expectation for low prices, and more expensive raw materials, exacerbated by lower production volume, means that very few would be willing to buy. As an example, take a look at the high quality jeans market: there are a few niche companies in Japan, Europe, US and Canada producing jeans at the same level of quality as 50-100 years ago, in some cases the exact same model as, say, a 1950's Levi's. Those jeans start at $200 per pair, but go even up to $400-500 and the manufacturers are barely surviving.
  - 3mo ago
jeromechoo 3mo ago
If mechanical time keeping hadn’t made the leap to luxury, I wonder if it would’ve ended up in the same situation as walkmans.
potbelly83 3mo ago
Sometimes reading these articles I can't help but think we've pushed ourselves into a local but sup-optimal maximum technologically speaking. i.e. If we didn't follow the path of trying to stick everything into an iPhone/Android (along with moving everything into the cloud), we'd have a more interesting technological landscape.
- autoexec 3mo ago
  Everything has been optimized towards giving a small number of companies total control and surveillance over our media. That means forcing people to store their files on someone else's servers. Those companies don't really care about making better technology for others to use. Fewer options for the public, lack of innovation, and the increasing enshittification of everything is a price they are willing to pay for control, lock-in, and rent seeking.
trencedamp 3mo ago
This is a really interesting read. But it doesn't answer one question I have, which is why can't Sony or Apple or anyone else bring back decent MP3 players? None of this technology is lost, and there are plenty of small-time two bit no name players out there still making them, often in a much smaller, much slicker form factor than than the original digital Walkman or iPod. If I want to buy a new MP3 player, I have to buy something from a company I've never heard of with a terrible screen, use an old phone, or buy some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much. Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?
- nubinetwork 3mo ago
  The iPod was a product in an interesting time... if you ignore the screen, a modern mp3 player could be made as small as a SD card... as soon as you add the screen, you need a full operating system to manage files and run the screen. Nobody wants to put the effort into something that's going to be as basic as a mp3 player.
  - fortyseven 3mo ago
    I find this seriously underestimates what jackets 6 will undertake for fun, even unpaid.
  - trencedamp 3mo ago
    It barely needs a screen. I adored my minidisc players and they were all basically calculator displays
    - ezst 3mo ago
      Would you still adore it as much today, though? I know I don't adore my iPod classic as much now as I did in 2006, and that's inclusive of the nostalgia kick. It's just not very practical and usable in today's world.
      - SpecialistK 3mo ago
waynesonfire 3mo ago
I disagree. Sony can't bring back Walkmans because a Walkman won't generate the returns Sony demands. Furthermore, they refuse to open-source it so it stays hidden in a vault. Plenty of people would lose money, break even, or God willing, make a tiny profit, diving into this problem. Regardless, it would make society a happier place.
- fortyseven 3mo ago
  Capitalism will make you as happy as necessary to ensure that you continue buying. No more no less.
- cwillu 3mo ago
  s/can't/won't/
  - cwillu 3mo ago
    I can take the grocery delivery order that pays $4, but I won't because the returns for my time and gas are unacceptably low.
leet-stick-7299 3mo ago
Those things are highly prized by flippers now.
nmstoker 3mo ago
This is sad but no great surprise. What does surprise me a little is how far ranging the "we can't make those parts anymore" argument goes. I thought back to those seriously slim Sony Walkman and Aiwa players people would bring back to school from the Far East and even the basic things like the sliding buttons were better than products have nowadays: they would inevitably be tiny, sleek, yet beautifully engineered to still be easy to push/slide, they'd be metal, often powder coated to match the body, would involve super low tolerances, and have a satisfying quality reminiscent of closing/opening the door of a Mercedes! It feels like we can't even do them justice now... Or maybe it's just the economics?! Either way, what an era that was!
- a34729t 3mo ago
  hold on now william gibson
- left-struck 3mo ago
  Some things we have today have incredible build quality compared to anything that existed in the 80s and 90s. Compare any flagship phone today and the tight tolerances between the edges of different parts of the assembly compared to any walkman. Now of course there are downsides to the way phones are constructed, many downsides. My point is simply that the quality of construction is very high today for some things. I’ve driven many 90s and 2000s jdm cars and I also own a 2019 Japanese car and the quality of the 2019 car is just incomparable. The 90s cars feel like bits of plastic thrown together haphazardly, not that different from like an industrial Japanese truck’s interior. The cars are legendary sure but the interiors are awful. Now those cars are much older too, but my 2019 car’s interior looks damn near brand new despite having been in the harsh Australian sun for 6 to 7 years, while I remember older cars I owned didn’t fare so well after just 5 years.
- ssl-3 3mo ago
  I remember those days very well indeed. Duping tapes on cheap decks to get one ratty-sounding copy, or spending more money to get a better-sounding original copy at the local record store downtown -- for it to eventually find itself wrapped around the pinch roller. The weird featuresets: Some bougie later ones had auto-reverse, so the days of flipping a tape were over. But some players couldn't even stop on their own at the end of a tape when rewinding or fast-fowarding. (And some only had fast-forward. Want to rewind? Eject tape, flip tape, FF tape, flip again.) The awesome battery life: I could get, like, whole several trips to and from school out of a pair of AA batteries -- if I was lucky! Replacing them in advance to ward off inevitable failure lead to fun games like having an assortment of variously-used batteries to experiment with when the small stack of new ones inevitably ran dry. The awesome fidelity: A bass boost switch sometimes, even though the headphones had no bass anyway. An ineffective 3-band EQ if fancy. The interactive wow and flutter of having one in a pants pocket on the move, keeping time with your pace. The stereo image that was always just a little bit offset and slightly closer to the left or right ear than the middle. The musical selection: It was always such an excellent time selecting a singular tape to listen to for the day, because carrying more than that took up real physical space. Besides all that: Stopping to change tapes on these precious devices would attract attention, and attention was an astounding thing in a world with plumes of tetraethyl lead in the air. After that, there's no longer a walkman nor any tapes, but at least you've got a new black eye to talk about and the music selection problem is completely resolved! Yeah, it was certainly an era. --- If someone from the future had somehow come back and showed the 1990 version of me any of our modern pocket supercomputers along with a $20 pair of wireless earbuds and access to Spotify, I'd have simply revered them as a god.
cbmuser 3mo ago
It’s really only economics, there is simply no relevant market for mechanical cassette players that would justify the investment. I don’t think it’s true that the capabilities to make these devices are lost. There are still companies like ALPS that are capable of making the necessary parts. But in the end, the market is too small to justify any investments.
- bombcar 3mo ago
  There's still TAPE drives out there, but nowhere near as many as there were, and they're expensive. You could make a Walkman; it'd cost $3-10k each.
  - johncoltrane 3mo ago
    There are lots of portable cassette players on the market, starting at 20€ or less.
    - geon 3mo ago
      Only low quality. But yes, building better quality shouldn’t cost $ 10k
      - rbanffy 3mo ago
        They are as good as the price the market wants to pay for them. There is a match at $20, but not much more than that.
  - rbanffy 3mo ago
    Tape now is very niche - it’s for data archival purposes, and often only exists for regulatory reasons. This is why it is ludicrously expensive- it only needs to be cheaper than the next credible commercially available alternative, which only needs to offset the risk of going to jail for malicious malpractice.
    - slfnflctd 3mo ago
plorg 3mo ago
Article is just a (wordy) recapitulation of this tweet from a former Walkman engineer: https://x.com/akiraa_tanaka/status/2080114490830680500 https://x.com/akiraa_tanaka/status/2080114490830680500 But fair play to OP, you'd have to bounce it through at least Google Translate to make it legible to the predominant English-speaking HM crowd: https://x-com.translate.goog/akiraa_tanaka/status/2080114490830680500?_x_tr_sl=ja&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en https://x-com.translate.goog/akiraa_tanaka/status/2080114490... Still would have been good for the Substack author to link to the tweet rather than just embedding a nearly-too-small-to-be-readable png of a JPEG and six links to the tweet author's X profile.
- tonyhart7 3mo ago
  Yes, that is the primary reason people just want it but not enough people to buy the thing same happen with physical games
  - rbanffy 3mo ago
    > same happen with physical games And now it’s faster to get them online than to go to the store, even if the game doesn’t have to download itself again for updates.
    - rustcleaner 3mo ago
      ... and you end up being the donkey they can pin the tail onto, when they feel like bilking you again.
      - rbanffy 3mo ago
        Companies like this are why strong customer protection laws need to exist, and be full of teeth.
    - smcg 3mo ago
      the stores also have terrible physical stock. getting a game you want by blindly walking into a store is a gamble now.
lardosaurusrex 3mo ago
I am so beyond sick of Sony right now. I didn't think they'd end right up there aongside the rest of humaniry's treasonous ilk such as Tesla/SpaceX/ChatGPT/Microsoft/Samsung/Nvidia/etc but the whole "we're not making discs for playstation because we repurposed the factory for some slop meant for ai data centres" left such a horrifically sour taste in my mouth that I wish them nothing but the absolute worst. Hell it feels weird to hate any company more than telecom ones but somehow they all managed; it's insane. It used to be so easy to make fun of comcast and yet compared to all these horrific companies they look downright angelic in comparison nowadays. Sigh.
- rustcleaner 3mo ago
  Best you can do is get familiar with peer-to-peer acquisition, and teach others. Starve the enshittifiers!
  - lardosaurusrex 3mo ago
    Oh no there's way more than that. :)
dotancohen 3mo ago
It's all the same arguments as the "Why can't we build another Saturn V rocket" and the like. The parts are no longer available, the technical blueprints that remain do not paint a full picture of the manufacturing process, and the engineers and machinists who did know the full picture are mostly retired and decreased.
- verve_rat 3mo ago
  Yup. In other words, we totally could, but there is no reason to put the time, effort and money into doing so.
- ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
  We can't build Saturn V rockets because there are not enough Egyptian slaves to do it today, and also we can't figure out how to prevent damage to the rockets as our donkeys roll them across the ground to the launch pad.
fsuts 3mo ago
Most music is controlled by a few large companies. If you could demonstrate a revenue stream higher than streaming then they may support. Without that, a struggle, as you need to have exclusives and bonus tracks to differentiate. With vinyl there are claims of a superior listening experience, that’s not the case with casettes If any of you are parents of young kids, buy a used book box or Walkman of eBay along with good albums and give them to a child who will love it.
- Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
  The thing with vinyl is that record players never really went away, but more importantly compared to the walkman (and in the spirit of this article / tweet), they are big and relatively simple, with the pickups probably being the most specialized part of them. And since people kept vinyl players around and they need replacement every once in a while, some of the companies making them never really went away. Anyway, yes, give your kids physical media, if anything it'll give them something physical to associate with the memory of e.g. music. For me, streaming has lowered the value of music. Before streaming I'd pirate, because digital music was easier, but even then it had more value to me because I had curated playlists and whatnot. Trying to make up for it by buying vinyls of my favorite albums, even though I don't own a player (yet).
rbanffy 3mo ago
I always found the MD format super cool. It’s a real shame that, even with BD-like densities, it just can’t compete with a cheap USB stick.
- TACD 3mo ago
  MiniDisc would have been an ideal successor to the floppy disk if only Sony had unclenched their fist just a little bit. USB sticks are higher capacity but there's utility in having media you don't have to keep track of; especially in the early 2000s it would have been very handy to give somebody a MiniDisc of data and just say "don't worry too much about getting that back to me, I have a whole box at home". We had rewriteable CDs but they were so awkward, large, and unreliable that it never quite filled that need.
  - Melatonic 3mo ago
    Yeah - like many things Sony they went to proprietary and locked down
    - rbanffy 3mo ago
      True. They screwed themselves thoroughly multiple times.
  - SpecialistK 3mo ago
    It could have beaten the Zip Disk and helped MD be adopted as a music format ("oh I have a few of these already, might as well get [a Walkman / PC drive]")
- thenthenthen 3mo ago
  MD was so cool, but the portable players were so fragile, insert the MD the wrong way and you risk ripping the read head out, at least with the Aiwa one i had (and killed that way..)
  - rbanffy 3mo ago
implements 3mo ago
If you want something Walkman-like and aren’t short of a few bob, there’s always: https://teenage.engineering/products/tp-7 https://teenage.engineering/products/tp-7 - scratches a similar itch, but is also a: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objet_d'art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objet_d'art
- where-group-by 3mo ago
  Only 1500 euro. I would not be suprise if it was cheaper to find and refurb a vintage Walkman.
- CompoundEyes 3mo ago
  Geiskes makes a series of aftermarket bent Walkman like cassette players aimed at musicians. I remember spending a lot of time as a kid half pressing buttons to hear the song playback in reverse or chipmunked. https://www.perfectcircuit.com/gieskes https://www.perfectcircuit.com/gieskes The TE recorder is beautiful. I hadn’t heard of that term captures it perfectly. The itch is only scratched once it’s owned though right? O_o Their OB-4 has a similar wheel transport that can be scrubbed too and it keeps a rolling buffer of the last so many seconds of sound into the speaker from whatever source is playing.
raffael_de 3mo ago
Not just an issue with Walkmans but also other device types like digital cameras and Mp3 players. Sad because it seems like more and more people discover the appeal of dedicated devices versus carrying a smartphone around all the time.
dbspin 3mo ago
I wonder how far we are from being able to custom spec electronics to locally manufacture low volume dedicated hardware devices at the late 90s Sony level of quality. Is this something that's likely to be possible as 3D printers, cnc machines, AI design tools and microelectronics advance. Or is the combination of materials science and expertise impossible to ever replicate? Basically is a solar punk local fabrication future where you can custom build a CD Walkman, or equivalent technical device - in small run quantities, to high tolerances, making small runs of all the requisite components - even possible. Or do we need to 'wait for' nanobots or replicators for that kind of manufacturing?
- theragra 3mo ago
  I wonder if LLMs will evolve to allow ordering such things by request. Surely this is a a dream of many, manufacturing things same as we are vibe coding apps. This is probably not near, but maybe in 10-20 years?
sajithdilshan 3mo ago
One thing I would love to have is a device like ipod nano (or even a smaller device) with like 1TB storage so I can have all my music offline and have with me all the time. I hate the subscription fee services and just want to buy and own my own collection.
vr46 3mo ago
Obsolete Sony is a lovely-looking website ram-packed with errors and false claims, which means it’s actively worth ignoring. I chat with Akiraa Tanaka on Twitter a lot. He’s great. Sony was informally regarded as Japan’s electronic R&D department, regularly coming up with new and cool shit for everyone else to get behind, and while their strategy was annoying a lot of the time (control everything: proprietary connectors and standards) I think that much of their success was enabled by their willingness to cut off and bin whole swathes of their catalogue. Ok, a lot of it was binned later than it should have been (Cassette Walkmans were crap by the late 1990s, post 2000 Discmans/CD Walkmans too) the fact that they did it was a good signal.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
wink 3mo ago
I'm generally not zealous in either way of the good old time or everything old is bad... But seriously, have your vinyl and be happy, I am buying CDs for home use (even in a car it got annoying fast). But why would I ever go back to something huge, clunky, fragile like MCs (or MDs to a degree)? I'm not saying stop using a dedicated music player (although I've been team mobile phone for music (with mp3s) forever). But the only reason I see for exchangable media would be trading playlists with friends (I hardly did that with MCs or CDs, but ok) - but why not cheap small SD cards. Why do people want their Walkman back? I just don't get it.
rimworld 3mo ago
just buy a astell kern ak jr awesome unit im on my 2nd battery
hn-ai-podcasts 3mo ago
Because they dropped physical medias?
nottorp 3mo ago
... because the physical support would give people ownership over the music and we can't have that.
hmstx 3mo ago
This is reminiscent of the reasons why Technics (Panasonic) could and would not just do a reissue of the Technics 1200 turntable. In the mid 2010s after some lobbying, they eventually invested into new tooling to build a successor. The new models have a handful of components in common, yes, a possibly even better re-engineered direct drive motor (and I don't remember about the tonearm) - but of course the prices put them in the "too much" range, even the more streamlined versions aimed at the DJ booth. And they have worse feedback than the classics. /me pets his M3D/MK5s
JauntTrooper 3mo ago
One day they'll write a similar article about the iPhone. It's amazing how ephemeral these incredibly complex manufacturing networks are.
hn_submit 3mo ago
There's no need for CD, cassette or MiniDisc. These days you can store ALL your music in CD-quality audio on a single solid-state memory card. People clamoring for cassette and CD are a tiny minority. Most listen on their PC or smartphone.
- vr46 3mo ago
  [flagged]
noxer 3mo ago
Ofc Sony would need to start from scratch but they could absolutely do it. Assuming they want to keep the outside dimension and material exactly like an old one, they would have to design it kinda in reverse. But the idea that the manufacturing tech has been lost is ridiculous. Sony still make tons of stuff that is electrical and mechanical. Most prominently cameras and lenses. They have tiny motors in them and tolerances are much tightener in these than in a Walkman type device. The real reason why they "can't" do it is cost. They can sell a camera for $3000 USD (or much more even) and a high end lens too. But no one wants a $1000+ USD Walkman.
paulus_magnus2 3mo ago
Wouldn't it be enough to have a "walkman" styled mp3 app? Or even a smatwach-app or even just walkman-buds? The physical casette /CD is obsolete, most people don't even have music stored on their internal storage and just stream things. And if you don't have the cassette /CD inside you don't need the form factor. You could probably stream via a smartwatch or in the future directly to the buds.
vkaku 3mo ago
If the market otherwise can make other cassette players work, This looks like a Sony problem than a general problem.

223 points by speckx 3mo ago

When I hear Walkman I only think of cassette tape, not MD, but whatever... Minidisc understandably gone away (until maybe hipsters revive that too like they have with tapes?) but on the tape front ... Maxell thinks they have something with cassette players.... wonder if/how these are selling: Maxell MXCP-P100 – wireless cassette player https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47497781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47497781

1659447091 3mo ago
> When I hear Walkman I only think of cassette tape Same here. I was just recently wondering if there were any places that sell Walkman's still. I remember walking around Seoul and ended up in a maze of closet sized electronic and nick-nack shops with some really random old parts and gadgets. Made me miss my old boombox. Thought that would be a good place to go back and look for a walkman, but the Maxell MXCP-P100 – wireless cassette player looks perfect
- NaOH 3mo ago
  I was glad to find this site offering refurbished iPods, and they also have refurb Walkmans. https://retrospekt.com/collections/cassette-players https://retrospekt.com/collections/cassette-players
officeplant 3mo ago
>until maybe hipsters revive that too like they have with tapes? That is already happening. I like to frequent Vintage Computer Festival and for the last few years a few of them have had MD-Con as part of a convention within a convention. A whole room dedicated to MiniDisc tech showing off laptops, desktops, camcorders, pro-hifi gear, etc. There is a collector that even brings a large portion of his collection which is all in blue including rare blue color minidiscs themselves from company promo's. One example is a promo MD from Boss Coffee in japan which looked fantastic. There is even a revival in the software used to burn/format minidiscs since most of the original software is ancient now. Its pretty fun to visit them as someone who used a minidisc player through highschool and college until I got the original Microsoft Zune. A lot of the people I met at the last two MD-Con's loved looking through all the models presented at the con to try and find the same device they back in the day. https://www.mdcon.live/ https://www.mdcon.live/
SpecialistK 3mo ago
You're many years late to the MiniDisc revival.
gattilorenz 3mo ago
Maxell cassette players are not cassette players from back in the day, but cheap stuff like everything else: https://youtu.be/6XyaBls8jyg?is=Lrgqe23yWlelBvl- https://youtu.be/6XyaBls8jyg?is=Lrgqe23yWlelBvl-

sdevonoes 3mo ago

Got it. But then why Nike/Adidas/Quicksilver/etc cannot bring back clothes from the 90s? Buying second hand is not that nice (smells that never go away) and “vintage” places sell min. catalogue buy way overpriced.

Schiendelman 3mo ago
Clothes made in the 90s used different materials and stitching than they do today, and likely cost more to produce. They'd probably need old machines they haven't had in decades.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
HardwareLust 3mo ago
Great question!
sublinear 3mo ago
Have you tried dry cleaning?
ragall 3mo ago
> But then why Nike/Adidas/Quicksilver/etc cannot bring back clothes from the 90s? They can, but people wouldn't want to pay the price. When adjusting for inflation, clothes today are much cheaper than 30 years ago, and the main producers of high-quality cotton (Kazakhstan and Egypt) are having continuous drought problems so the best raw material is even more expensive. The combination of customer expectation for low prices, and more expensive raw materials, exacerbated by lower production volume, means that very few would be willing to buy. As an example, take a look at the high quality jeans market: there are a few niche companies in Japan, Europe, US and Canada producing jeans at the same level of quality as 50-100 years ago, in some cases the exact same model as, say, a 1950's Levi's. Those jeans start at $200 per pair, but go even up to $400-500 and the manufacturers are barely surviving.
- 3mo ago

jeromechoo 3mo ago

If mechanical time keeping hadn’t made the leap to luxury, I wonder if it would’ve ended up in the same situation as walkmans.

potbelly83 3mo ago

Sometimes reading these articles I can't help but think we've pushed ourselves into a local but sup-optimal maximum technologically speaking. i.e. If we didn't follow the path of trying to stick everything into an iPhone/Android (along with moving everything into the cloud), we'd have a more interesting technological landscape.

autoexec 3mo ago
Everything has been optimized towards giving a small number of companies total control and surveillance over our media. That means forcing people to store their files on someone else's servers. Those companies don't really care about making better technology for others to use. Fewer options for the public, lack of innovation, and the increasing enshittification of everything is a price they are willing to pay for control, lock-in, and rent seeking.

trencedamp 3mo ago

This is a really interesting read. But it doesn't answer one question I have, which is why can't Sony or Apple or anyone else bring back decent MP3 players? None of this technology is lost, and there are plenty of small-time two bit no name players out there still making them, often in a much smaller, much slicker form factor than than the original digital Walkman or iPod. If I want to buy a new MP3 player, I have to buy something from a company I've never heard of with a terrible screen, use an old phone, or buy some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much. Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?

nubinetwork 3mo ago
The iPod was a product in an interesting time... if you ignore the screen, a modern mp3 player could be made as small as a SD card... as soon as you add the screen, you need a full operating system to manage files and run the screen. Nobody wants to put the effort into something that's going to be as basic as a mp3 player.
- fortyseven 3mo ago
  I find this seriously underestimates what jackets 6 will undertake for fun, even unpaid.
- trencedamp 3mo ago
  It barely needs a screen. I adored my minidisc players and they were all basically calculator displays
  - ezst 3mo ago
    Would you still adore it as much today, though? I know I don't adore my iPod classic as much now as I did in 2006, and that's inclusive of the nostalgia kick. It's just not very practical and usable in today's world.
    - SpecialistK 3mo ago

waynesonfire 3mo ago

I disagree. Sony can't bring back Walkmans because a Walkman won't generate the returns Sony demands. Furthermore, they refuse to open-source it so it stays hidden in a vault. Plenty of people would lose money, break even, or God willing, make a tiny profit, diving into this problem. Regardless, it would make society a happier place.

fortyseven 3mo ago
Capitalism will make you as happy as necessary to ensure that you continue buying. No more no less.
cwillu 3mo ago
s/can't/won't/
- cwillu 3mo ago
  I can take the grocery delivery order that pays $4, but I won't because the returns for my time and gas are unacceptably low.

leet-stick-7299 3mo ago

Those things are highly prized by flippers now.

nmstoker 3mo ago

This is sad but no great surprise. What does surprise me a little is how far ranging the "we can't make those parts anymore" argument goes. I thought back to those seriously slim Sony Walkman and Aiwa players people would bring back to school from the Far East and even the basic things like the sliding buttons were better than products have nowadays: they would inevitably be tiny, sleek, yet beautifully engineered to still be easy to push/slide, they'd be metal, often powder coated to match the body, would involve super low tolerances, and have a satisfying quality reminiscent of closing/opening the door of a Mercedes! It feels like we can't even do them justice now... Or maybe it's just the economics?! Either way, what an era that was!

a34729t 3mo ago
hold on now william gibson
left-struck 3mo ago
Some things we have today have incredible build quality compared to anything that existed in the 80s and 90s. Compare any flagship phone today and the tight tolerances between the edges of different parts of the assembly compared to any walkman. Now of course there are downsides to the way phones are constructed, many downsides. My point is simply that the quality of construction is very high today for some things. I’ve driven many 90s and 2000s jdm cars and I also own a 2019 Japanese car and the quality of the 2019 car is just incomparable. The 90s cars feel like bits of plastic thrown together haphazardly, not that different from like an industrial Japanese truck’s interior. The cars are legendary sure but the interiors are awful. Now those cars are much older too, but my 2019 car’s interior looks damn near brand new despite having been in the harsh Australian sun for 6 to 7 years, while I remember older cars I owned didn’t fare so well after just 5 years.
ssl-3 3mo ago
I remember those days very well indeed. Duping tapes on cheap decks to get one ratty-sounding copy, or spending more money to get a better-sounding original copy at the local record store downtown -- for it to eventually find itself wrapped around the pinch roller. The weird featuresets: Some bougie later ones had auto-reverse, so the days of flipping a tape were over. But some players couldn't even stop on their own at the end of a tape when rewinding or fast-fowarding. (And some only had fast-forward. Want to rewind? Eject tape, flip tape, FF tape, flip again.) The awesome battery life: I could get, like, whole several trips to and from school out of a pair of AA batteries -- if I was lucky! Replacing them in advance to ward off inevitable failure lead to fun games like having an assortment of variously-used batteries to experiment with when the small stack of new ones inevitably ran dry. The awesome fidelity: A bass boost switch sometimes, even though the headphones had no bass anyway. An ineffective 3-band EQ if fancy. The interactive wow and flutter of having one in a pants pocket on the move, keeping time with your pace. The stereo image that was always just a little bit offset and slightly closer to the left or right ear than the middle. The musical selection: It was always such an excellent time selecting a singular tape to listen to for the day, because carrying more than that took up real physical space. Besides all that: Stopping to change tapes on these precious devices would attract attention, and attention was an astounding thing in a world with plumes of tetraethyl lead in the air. After that, there's no longer a walkman nor any tapes, but at least you've got a new black eye to talk about and the music selection problem is completely resolved! Yeah, it was certainly an era. --- If someone from the future had somehow come back and showed the 1990 version of me any of our modern pocket supercomputers along with a $20 pair of wireless earbuds and access to Spotify, I'd have simply revered them as a god.

cbmuser 3mo ago

It’s really only economics, there is simply no relevant market for mechanical cassette players that would justify the investment. I don’t think it’s true that the capabilities to make these devices are lost. There are still companies like ALPS that are capable of making the necessary parts. But in the end, the market is too small to justify any investments.

bombcar 3mo ago
There's still TAPE drives out there, but nowhere near as many as there were, and they're expensive. You could make a Walkman; it'd cost $3-10k each.
- johncoltrane 3mo ago
  There are lots of portable cassette players on the market, starting at 20€ or less.
  - geon 3mo ago
    Only low quality. But yes, building better quality shouldn’t cost $ 10k
    - rbanffy 3mo ago
      They are as good as the price the market wants to pay for them. There is a match at $20, but not much more than that.
- rbanffy 3mo ago
  Tape now is very niche - it’s for data archival purposes, and often only exists for regulatory reasons. This is why it is ludicrously expensive- it only needs to be cheaper than the next credible commercially available alternative, which only needs to offset the risk of going to jail for malicious malpractice.
  - slfnflctd 3mo ago

plorg 3mo ago

Article is just a (wordy) recapitulation of this tweet from a former Walkman engineer: https://x.com/akiraa_tanaka/status/2080114490830680500 https://x.com/akiraa_tanaka/status/2080114490830680500 But fair play to OP, you'd have to bounce it through at least Google Translate to make it legible to the predominant English-speaking HM crowd: https://x-com.translate.goog/akiraa_tanaka/status/2080114490830680500?_x_tr_sl=ja&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en https://x-com.translate.goog/akiraa_tanaka/status/2080114490... Still would have been good for the Substack author to link to the tweet rather than just embedding a nearly-too-small-to-be-readable png of a JPEG and six links to the tweet author's X profile.

tonyhart7 3mo ago
Yes, that is the primary reason people just want it but not enough people to buy the thing same happen with physical games
- rbanffy 3mo ago
  > same happen with physical games And now it’s faster to get them online than to go to the store, even if the game doesn’t have to download itself again for updates.
  - rustcleaner 3mo ago
    ... and you end up being the donkey they can pin the tail onto, when they feel like bilking you again.
    - rbanffy 3mo ago
      Companies like this are why strong customer protection laws need to exist, and be full of teeth.
  - smcg 3mo ago
    the stores also have terrible physical stock. getting a game you want by blindly walking into a store is a gamble now.

lardosaurusrex 3mo ago

I am so beyond sick of Sony right now. I didn't think they'd end right up there aongside the rest of humaniry's treasonous ilk such as Tesla/SpaceX/ChatGPT/Microsoft/Samsung/Nvidia/etc but the whole "we're not making discs for playstation because we repurposed the factory for some slop meant for ai data centres" left such a horrifically sour taste in my mouth that I wish them nothing but the absolute worst. Hell it feels weird to hate any company more than telecom ones but somehow they all managed; it's insane. It used to be so easy to make fun of comcast and yet compared to all these horrific companies they look downright angelic in comparison nowadays. Sigh.

rustcleaner 3mo ago
Best you can do is get familiar with peer-to-peer acquisition, and teach others. Starve the enshittifiers!
- lardosaurusrex 3mo ago
  Oh no there's way more than that. :)

dotancohen 3mo ago

It's all the same arguments as the "Why can't we build another Saturn V rocket" and the like. The parts are no longer available, the technical blueprints that remain do not paint a full picture of the manufacturing process, and the engineers and machinists who did know the full picture are mostly retired and decreased.

verve_rat 3mo ago
Yup. In other words, we totally could, but there is no reason to put the time, effort and money into doing so.
ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
We can't build Saturn V rockets because there are not enough Egyptian slaves to do it today, and also we can't figure out how to prevent damage to the rockets as our donkeys roll them across the ground to the launch pad.

fsuts 3mo ago

Most music is controlled by a few large companies. If you could demonstrate a revenue stream higher than streaming then they may support. Without that, a struggle, as you need to have exclusives and bonus tracks to differentiate. With vinyl there are claims of a superior listening experience, that’s not the case with casettes If any of you are parents of young kids, buy a used book box or Walkman of eBay along with good albums and give them to a child who will love it.

Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
The thing with vinyl is that record players never really went away, but more importantly compared to the walkman (and in the spirit of this article / tweet), they are big and relatively simple, with the pickups probably being the most specialized part of them. And since people kept vinyl players around and they need replacement every once in a while, some of the companies making them never really went away. Anyway, yes, give your kids physical media, if anything it'll give them something physical to associate with the memory of e.g. music. For me, streaming has lowered the value of music. Before streaming I'd pirate, because digital music was easier, but even then it had more value to me because I had curated playlists and whatnot. Trying to make up for it by buying vinyls of my favorite albums, even though I don't own a player (yet).

rbanffy 3mo ago

I always found the MD format super cool. It’s a real shame that, even with BD-like densities, it just can’t compete with a cheap USB stick.

TACD 3mo ago
MiniDisc would have been an ideal successor to the floppy disk if only Sony had unclenched their fist just a little bit. USB sticks are higher capacity but there's utility in having media you don't have to keep track of; especially in the early 2000s it would have been very handy to give somebody a MiniDisc of data and just say "don't worry too much about getting that back to me, I have a whole box at home". We had rewriteable CDs but they were so awkward, large, and unreliable that it never quite filled that need.
- Melatonic 3mo ago
  Yeah - like many things Sony they went to proprietary and locked down
  - rbanffy 3mo ago
    True. They screwed themselves thoroughly multiple times.
- SpecialistK 3mo ago
  It could have beaten the Zip Disk and helped MD be adopted as a music format ("oh I have a few of these already, might as well get [a Walkman / PC drive]")
thenthenthen 3mo ago
MD was so cool, but the portable players were so fragile, insert the MD the wrong way and you risk ripping the read head out, at least with the Aiwa one i had (and killed that way..)
- rbanffy 3mo ago

implements 3mo ago

If you want something Walkman-like and aren’t short of a few bob, there’s always: https://teenage.engineering/products/tp-7 https://teenage.engineering/products/tp-7 - scratches a similar itch, but is also a: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objet_d'art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objet_d'art

where-group-by 3mo ago
Only 1500 euro. I would not be suprise if it was cheaper to find and refurb a vintage Walkman.
CompoundEyes 3mo ago
Geiskes makes a series of aftermarket bent Walkman like cassette players aimed at musicians. I remember spending a lot of time as a kid half pressing buttons to hear the song playback in reverse or chipmunked. https://www.perfectcircuit.com/gieskes https://www.perfectcircuit.com/gieskes The TE recorder is beautiful. I hadn’t heard of that term captures it perfectly. The itch is only scratched once it’s owned though right? O_o Their OB-4 has a similar wheel transport that can be scrubbed too and it keeps a rolling buffer of the last so many seconds of sound into the speaker from whatever source is playing.

raffael_de 3mo ago

Not just an issue with Walkmans but also other device types like digital cameras and Mp3 players. Sad because it seems like more and more people discover the appeal of dedicated devices versus carrying a smartphone around all the time.

dbspin 3mo ago

I wonder how far we are from being able to custom spec electronics to locally manufacture low volume dedicated hardware devices at the late 90s Sony level of quality. Is this something that's likely to be possible as 3D printers, cnc machines, AI design tools and microelectronics advance. Or is the combination of materials science and expertise impossible to ever replicate? Basically is a solar punk local fabrication future where you can custom build a CD Walkman, or equivalent technical device - in small run quantities, to high tolerances, making small runs of all the requisite components - even possible. Or do we need to 'wait for' nanobots or replicators for that kind of manufacturing?

theragra 3mo ago
I wonder if LLMs will evolve to allow ordering such things by request. Surely this is a a dream of many, manufacturing things same as we are vibe coding apps. This is probably not near, but maybe in 10-20 years?

sajithdilshan 3mo ago

One thing I would love to have is a device like ipod nano (or even a smaller device) with like 1TB storage so I can have all my music offline and have with me all the time. I hate the subscription fee services and just want to buy and own my own collection.

vr46 3mo ago

Obsolete Sony is a lovely-looking website ram-packed with errors and false claims, which means it’s actively worth ignoring. I chat with Akiraa Tanaka on Twitter a lot. He’s great. Sony was informally regarded as Japan’s electronic R&D department, regularly coming up with new and cool shit for everyone else to get behind, and while their strategy was annoying a lot of the time (control everything: proprietary connectors and standards) I think that much of their success was enabled by their willingness to cut off and bin whole swathes of their catalogue. Ok, a lot of it was binned later than it should have been (Cassette Walkmans were crap by the late 1990s, post 2000 Discmans/CD Walkmans too) the fact that they did it was a good signal.

deleted 3mo ago
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wink 3mo ago

I'm generally not zealous in either way of the good old time or everything old is bad... But seriously, have your vinyl and be happy, I am buying CDs for home use (even in a car it got annoying fast). But why would I ever go back to something huge, clunky, fragile like MCs (or MDs to a degree)? I'm not saying stop using a dedicated music player (although I've been team mobile phone for music (with mp3s) forever). But the only reason I see for exchangable media would be trading playlists with friends (I hardly did that with MCs or CDs, but ok) - but why not cheap small SD cards. Why do people want their Walkman back? I just don't get it.

rimworld 3mo ago

just buy a astell kern ak jr awesome unit im on my 2nd battery

hn-ai-podcasts 3mo ago

Because they dropped physical medias?

nottorp 3mo ago

... because the physical support would give people ownership over the music and we can't have that.

hmstx 3mo ago

This is reminiscent of the reasons why Technics (Panasonic) could and would not just do a reissue of the Technics 1200 turntable. In the mid 2010s after some lobbying, they eventually invested into new tooling to build a successor. The new models have a handful of components in common, yes, a possibly even better re-engineered direct drive motor (and I don't remember about the tonearm) - but of course the prices put them in the "too much" range, even the more streamlined versions aimed at the DJ booth. And they have worse feedback than the classics. /me pets his M3D/MK5s

JauntTrooper 3mo ago

One day they'll write a similar article about the iPhone. It's amazing how ephemeral these incredibly complex manufacturing networks are.

hn_submit 3mo ago

There's no need for CD, cassette or MiniDisc. These days you can store ALL your music in CD-quality audio on a single solid-state memory card. People clamoring for cassette and CD are a tiny minority. Most listen on their PC or smartphone.

vr46 3mo ago
[flagged]

noxer 3mo ago

Ofc Sony would need to start from scratch but they could absolutely do it. Assuming they want to keep the outside dimension and material exactly like an old one, they would have to design it kinda in reverse. But the idea that the manufacturing tech has been lost is ridiculous. Sony still make tons of stuff that is electrical and mechanical. Most prominently cameras and lenses. They have tiny motors in them and tolerances are much tightener in these than in a Walkman type device. The real reason why they "can't" do it is cost. They can sell a camera for $3000 USD (or much more even) and a high end lens too. But no one wants a $1000+ USD Walkman.

paulus_magnus2 3mo ago

Wouldn't it be enough to have a "walkman" styled mp3 app? Or even a smatwach-app or even just walkman-buds? The physical casette /CD is obsolete, most people don't even have music stored on their internal storage and just stream things. And if you don't have the cassette /CD inside you don't need the form factor. You could probably stream via a smartwatch or in the future directly to the buds.

vkaku 3mo ago

If the market otherwise can make other cassette players work, This looks like a Sony problem than a general problem.