Taking apart the 2010 Fisher Price re-released Music Box Record Player
twitter.com
twitter.com
I remember trying to get the spin faster/slower, stopping the spring, etc.
Since it required no batteries it was always working, even when you found it at the bottom of toy bin after months/years.
This modern version is a complete scam, especially since the outside look seems absolutely identical to the original. I'd be very disappointed if I bought one for a toddler, only to realize when unboxing it's crap.
By the way, we still have the original toy from my childhood. It's been passed around to relatives, but last I heard, it still works after what must be almost 40 years.
This. It preys upon the childhood memories of parents and grandparents. Literally everything that made the original such a fond memory is gone and what you're left with is a cheap trick that had none of the lasting appeal of the original.
You can say whatever you like about vinyl, but it is tangible.
I have an old phonograph cabinet and my toddler is always trying to turn the crank, then wants to be held up to see the record spinning while it plays. He doesn't care that it's an obsolete relic of generations past, he just wants to turn a crank and watch it spin.
Applies to pretty much 90% of everything I use and buy. The world is getting shittier by the day.
Instead of prices going up in this case, quality goes down.
I think this is the reason for the new version. Fisher Price won't earn any money if the toys never breaks and never have to be replaced, to the detriment of everyone (including the environment) except the stakeholders.
The new version is much more suspicable to breakage and hence, a better chance at profits for the company.
I thought it would be interesting to 3D print additional records for the thing. Was super disappointed when I bought one for our daughter last year and found that they had changed it to a digital music player that only uses the records for song selection.
A lot of the modern day versions of the original Fisher-Price toys don't hold up to the originals. For example on the xylophone they replaced the Wood base with plastic and the thing sounds like crap.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphon
They are still cheap plastic, but the quality is good enough for real music.
I mean really.. ave maria is a little magical https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu4FWixsUM8
gosh
I think some children will realize how these things work. They might start to find them dumb if they find out that the strenuous repetitive movement is in fact unnecessary. At least to me it feels like a dishonest contraption and I'd prefer if they simply put a button on it.
Conversely, I’ve seen some kids play with real pumps and they seem to find it incredibly fun when they realize that more and faster movement brings more water.
Hell, I thought it was fun myself just seeing how fast I could make it go.
Seeing someone do this, but unironically and for a real product specifically meant for humans who are actively developing their sense of how the world around the works, feels somewhere between cynical and outright deceptive. It reminds me of the Mechanical Turk (the original one, not the Amazon service): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk - a machine deliberately designed to mislead.
And here's the inverse of that— a camera that blocks you from taking photos too many other people have taken: https://philippschmitt.com/archive/2018/work/camera-restrict...
Electronic toys generally don’t give you much of this.
And I think this really represents a fundamental change in a lot of aspects of life: there’s a specific way to interact with things, prescribed by the maker.
I absolutely loved the quiet weekends as a kid where I could spend hours and hours making ridiculous contraptions by mixing toys and a bit of tape and such.
Maybe you mean digital. As electronic toys can still be modified/screwed with.
…until I looked closer! Fraud! Deception! And saddest of all, I tried the same thing foone did, knowing that the unused binary codes (maybe not 0000 but surely the other five) were surely hiding a few extra songs. But no, complete and total disappointment. Par for the course.
This thing has survived two young daughters now, but it is utterly devoid of soul.
This is basically the same kind of chip that is in electronic greeting cards.
It is a shame, because we live in the age of 3D printers, and making your own tunes is now not that hard for the original music player, but the new player itself is now so limited.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Fisher-Price-Classics-Play-Tape-R...
That’s the thing about their remakes, all across the board—they look similar to the originals, but lost their a lot of the details and functionality that made them charming. As a Buffalonian I still have a soft spot for Fisher-Price, but these are just disappointing.
This toy is a good analog for a real record player and with grooves that move a needle and play sound encoded on the disk. Leading to understanding of sound waves.
This new toy is a mix of new and old tech. How can a per-literate child be expected to decipher binary encodings and how they map to individual songs? What deeper understanding of how things work are within the grasp of a child that cannot yet use a screwdriver, wire cutters, and a volt meter?
This new toy is boring. Once you learn how to turn it on, it can have no appeal to a child exposed to much better music players all around them: cell phones, iPads, computers, tvs. This is just a piece of plastic and e-waste destined for the landfill, purchased by some sentimental old timer who has fond memories of the original F-P record player.
[0] to cope, I scavenged a few portable TVs from the 90s to toy with the small tubes.
Tangential to this thread, I listened to Carmacks keynote[0] for the Facebook Connect event, and it’s very refreshing to hear him push back, in ways that just make sense , instead of towing some corporate line that’s part fantasy and snake oil. See his comments on “social metaverse” and “3D vs flat screens”.
Aside from the practical reasons, I think unknowable unresolvable problems make me psychologically distressed.
I too, I'm wired to enjoy closed / defined systems. Yet, the few I've read about old EE books, is that the guys managed to analyse and comprehend noisy, irregular systems. Today mainstream computing is still about digital/clean/closed but one day I assume the analog/noisy/chaotic will become a thing in a normal curriculum. It's an easy/shallow prediction but still.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/upperstory/spintronics-...
Now it will be up-to parents to decide whether they want to bring up an iPhone consumer kid or more of a PC creative kid.
I mean, technically it is, but then so is the microwave timer controller.
In terms of user interaction, an iPhone does its best to be an appliance, not a general-purpose computer. So do Android smartphones - lest one thing it's an Apple problem, it's not. It's a modern computing problem.
At least you get to run arbitrary software on them as a standard feature. And on many, the bootloader is unlockable, so you could root the thing and/or tinker with the OS.
The modern computing problem isn't this particular thing, it lies higher. It's presuming that the user is stupid and can't possibly be trusted with figuring stuff out and making their own informed decisions. Won't be surprised if people who design software like this consider every setting a liability.
I agree with that. It's pretty much an unquestioned axiom in the industry. You can see it mentioned in almost every article or book about writing software, doing UI design or UX work. The user is stupid. They're incapable of thinking for themselves, figuring things out, having their own goals. They have to be carefully guided so they follow the exact path the software prescribes for them, and incentivized along the way with "engagement patterns", lest they get bored mid way.
> Won't be surprised if people who design software like this consider every setting a liability.
Which is funny, because the first thing every single piece of software on this planet does, is disclaiming any and all liability for anything.
So the kind of liability they feel, I believe, is just that of getting bad press over some reviewers deciding something is too confusing, leading to reduced sales.
It's even more malicious than that. The corporations and governments are hostile towards users. They lock the computer down so we can't do anything that harms business and government interests. Can't copy or share files. Can't use strong cryptography the government can't crack.
These people believe computers are too subversive to allow the masses unrestricted access to them. They would rather we have nothing but restricted appliances that obey them instead of us. The computer doesn't serve us, it serves them as a tool to control us.
It reminds me a bit of Oliver's, a fast food chain in Australia. They set up shop at roadhouses along major highways, and market themselves as a healthy alternative to McDonalds or KFC. You look at the menu, though, and it consists of organic acai berries, quinoa, antioxidant-rich kale smoothies and the like. They've hyper-optimised their brand's goal/mission to the point where the product is unapproachable and unaffordable for most consumers.
All we want is chicken and rice, but our choice is between a double bacon cheeseburger or an overpriced organic bliss bowl.
If you ever fly to (the US via) SFO, perhaps check out Amy's at terminal 1B:
(Technically I think you cannot/should not drive through the airport location.)
If I was on holidays in the US, I don't think I'd be looking for healthier options as much as I'd want BBQ sauce, ribs and burgers.
The new toy is just fucking up with kids' development. It literally boils down to a 10-button panel for selecting which song to play. All the things that make it look like a turntable are nonfunctional lies. There's no direct relationship between what disk you have in it, and whether it's turning, because the music isn't even encoded on it in the first place. The disk is just representing two possible states, and the turning is for show.
How did they imagine a kid will process such a toy? How much disappointment will a child feel when they realize, after trying to physically play with the turning disks, that it's just a dummy?
They could've made this toy with a single disk with a motor under it, and 10 buttons to pick songs, and it would be better because it wouldn't lie. It would look like a record player, not pretend to be one. Or perhaps I'm just angry because the old model was an actual record player, so we have a clear example of them having a superior design available (and most likely cheaper to produce), and then choosing to make it worse for re-release.
Anyway, there's a software analogy in here, but I'm not in a mood to be able to write a coherent and short summary of it. Suffice it to say: the continuous dumbing down of software all across the board is sometimes called "Fisher-Pricing the UI". Never before have I felt this term is so apt as I feel now.
Absolutely nothing, since they don’t know what to expect. My son has a similar music player from a different brand (more like a diskman) and just accepts that putting in the disk is enough, no need for spinning or anything.
Of course the machine screams “Open!” and “Lets play!” When you open or close the disk cover respectively, so it’s orders of magnitude more satisfying than the fisher price thing (you can try playing with cover open, or rapidly open/close it to see what happens).
Exactly. This is the problem though. Look back at the threads when Sir Clive Sinclair died. The number of people (like me) who have a career due to just having something you can experiment with. Now, it's all "press this allowed button and the allowed action will happen". A company like Fisher Price, with their deserved reputation for producing quality learning toys, should be embarrassed by this.
This is probably not the case. The blob chip is probably in the pennies. And while I didn't look at the pictures extremely deeply I bet they did part and assembly reduction using the following methodology.
A quick look on ebay shows they're typically selling for less than $100.
As for the dial, I remember thinking it felt so music-box-like, but I had no idea it was an actual music box!!
Alas, I never experienced the mechanical version. Such a shame.
I wonder if the original revamp had planned to have it just be a wind up music box and only play one song.
The first version was an electronic imitation (complete with winding) of the original. Once the winding was rendered unnecessary, you get the current version without that imitation and it loses the tactile component.
This music box in the base of the new model is probably simply the cheapest way to get a spring motor for the turntable these days, rather than custom-manufacturing one that matches the original.
I, too, was disgusted that it took batteries but you still had to wind the knob, but I was even more offended by the awful staticky sound from the tiny speaker.
Like foone, I also got a kick out of playing with the switches and seeing what happened when you held the disc stil, but I was never curious enough to open it up. I'm glad I didn't, though -- I think the sight of an actual music box would have broken my heart.
It would be interesting to know the cost in 1980, and compare it (with inflation) to the current cost.
The electric version might actually be cheaper to produce.
[1] https://www.instructables.com/3D-printing-records-for-a-Fish...
[1] https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalogPage/1971-Sea...
Side note: like others here, I loved the hell out of this thing as a kid and I’m pretty sure we got it as a hand-me-down from my older cousin. It still worked like a champ after many years of abuse.
Maybe they found this to be a problem, so they made an updated version that is easier to break.
Until that point I fully expected you to say that they replaced the tape with storage on a cloud account. I bet this will happen one day. So many toys are already trying to suck on kids' data and hook up the parents to cloud services (see e.g. toys that feature "extra experiences" that you access by pointing your smartphone camera at them, and looking through the toy maker's app).
> And then it's 'oops we leaked all your kids audio'
Especially that this has already happened at least once - there was a company storing unencrypted audio from a plush teddy bears in a publicly-accessible MongoDB instance.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/iot-connected-teddy-bea...
The tot phase is pretty fast, so parents don't really seem to get a feel for what is a "good" baby toy in time.
I really wish there would be more general study of this rather than being at the mercy of a sales market that fundamentally doesn't have the baby in mind, mostly just the parents buying the stuff.
But then again, "learning acceleration" in babies is probably bunk anyway.
Simple wooden building blocks or a stack of cups that fit in each other already allow for that for early age, no need for more advanced toys / battery driven things.
Thanks for showing us this perspective :)
He'd love a toy like that (the original that is).
On a related note: it's nice that some old records with children's content are actually really good, and often much nicer — slower, more focussed, and with better articulation — than modern content for his demographic. Although I admit that the much-loved audio play about a field mouse visiting her mousy friend who lives in the city to learn all about the sounds in a family's house is a bit… anachronistic. The shower, electrical razor, and hoover are fine, but the typewriter and landline telephone may be a tad confusing, and the baker who hawks his bread at the door hasn't shown up in reality yet (but fast-food delivery is a close-ish thing). His parents both use mechanical keyboards though, so the sound isn't too far-fetched.
People will buy this toy mostly for the nostalgic feeling. I just don't get why Fisherprice didn't just remake the battery-less original though; it would have hit just the right note nowadays. The remake just damages their brand.
On the other hand some modern electronic toys are brilliant. The Leapfrog one with the 8x8 LED array and the light pen is absolutely brilliant in how much play value it gets out of that simple hardware and already feels like a classic.
I would invite you to submit any examples of how you think modern toys are made of "mostly" standard tooling... that's not how this works. China has more mold designers, mold makers, and mold shops in many towns than other countries have within their borders.
I do agree with you that the old clockwork motor would be too expensive to manufacture now, but I think you should keep thinking about the rest of your thesis.
It seems pretty cynical to market this in order to appeal to people like me with memories like this, with a huge dimension of the enrichment value stripped away.
If this trend continues even wooden blocks will some day come with batteries :p
We got some of those cube ones with the letters and numbers at one point, and they were noticeably smaller and worse-finished than the ones I had as a kid in the 80s, which I'm sure were just the only blocks of that type that some cheap local store had and were probably the same quality as all such blocks on the market at the time, not something special. The newer ones looked very similar in a photo, but were missing lots of textures (kinda, you know, a big deal to babies and early toddlers) and details that mine had, and the paint chipped more easily (probably a thinner coat, I guess, plus probably just lower-quality paint).
We bought our first kid a rolling walker/phone thing with some other features—yeah, electronic crap, but at least this one had a volume setting, unlike many modern ones that are just fixed to "deafen your child" with no other options unless you break out a soldering iron. By ~4 years later, between seeing other people's version of the same thing—same brand and all—they bought a couple years after ours, and seeing newer version at the store when toy shopping, we'd noticed that the "same" product, which looked nearly identical, had had a couple revisions, each one making parts that used to move or be interactive fixed & dormant, and otherwise lowering the quality.
I assume all of us here on HN are the type-of-person who as a child would have been fascinated about how mechanical and electromechanical toys and gizmos worked - and probably disassembled the thing to our parents' chagrin and figured out how it works (and hopefully put it back together correctly!) and ended the day with a sense of satisfaction from learning something new.
...and then I'm remind myself that we are not like everyone else: I'm still able to vividly remember the things I did with my mechanical/electro toys to see and try to understand how they worked, but that most of the other kids my age didn't: their objective was simply to use the toy as entertainment or make-believe-play or the like - not as an object of curiosity - and they weren't particularly interested in any explanation I'd have for them (it didn't help that I wouldn't have asked them if they wanted to hear my explanation in the first place though... heh)
So for us, this digital-fake of a classic toy is an insult to our imagined younger-selves of the 21st century, but when I think about this ultra-modern toy from the perspective of someone just after something of solely nostalgia value - and a modern-day kid uninterested now (and shall most-likely forever-be uninterested) in how things work then indeed none of what we're griping about here matters - in fact it's the opposite: this 2010 remake is demonstrably tougher and more resilient to damage and wear than the mechanical original despite being superficially the same - given we're in the minority overall (...I think?) then this new design is objectively better as far as moral-utilitarianism is concerned.
...and it's not like Fischer-Price is selling this remake as a toy of interest to kids with a curiosity for things mechanical. They're not being totally dishonest.
The objects of curiosity don't need to be a toy, or even meant for children. Anything that can be disassembled will be disassembled by a curious child.
Too bad it's no longer possible for end users to disassemble mobile phones.
I agree with you, "we" are probably not like most people. But taking the opportunity to experiment away is such a huge loss. Giving a kid the opportunity to learn on their own is so important. It's not just the one toy, you need to give them loads of different opportunities like these. They'll pick up on some.
Maybe i never would have experimented with this particular toy as a kid. For me, it was getting a screwdriver and taking old electronics apart (and the challenge of putting them back together and still having them work!) that sparked my curiosity. Plenty of things did not, however... But the point is, i was given opportunities.
Yeah. But no, that's a stereotype.
I hated my mecano things, it was too hard to play with. I enjoyed storytelling with my LEGOs much more, my creations were just bare bones scaffoldings for the flesh my imagination would put around it.
I still work in IT and tear stuff apart every day.
With that being said it still saddens me they are digitalising full mechanical toys. It's surely rose-tinted glasses but it looked so much cooler.
I think it's part of most things that aren't computers getting worse over the last few decades. Shit would be double the price if they still "made it like they used to". Even fast-food pizza—Pizza Hut's in fact way worse than it was even in the mid 90s (they've had at least two major reformulations of the sauce, for one thing, getting worse each time), but if you find a different pizza place that makes pizza around 90s PH quality it'll be 50+% more expensive.
But yeah, inflation's only low-single-digits percent a year. LOL sure.
I feel that this must be a strategy used on toys that were previously popular. They're not going to return to being the popular must-have item that people will pay a premium for, but there is residual value in the marketing campaign from the 80s. So the toy companies push the build quality as low as they can and milk the last good will from the brand by making it a cheap impulse purchase.
To your larger point, there are still high quality toys around. You just avoid the big Toys R Us style stores and go to an independent or smaller toy story. Plan Toys and Green Toys stick out to me as two brands which felt consistently high quality and were widely available.
Compounded inflation/interest is pretty powerful.
2% compounded over 25 years (to mark your "mid-90s" reference) would be a 64% increase, which lines up with your 50+% pretty directly.
Agreed that Pizza Hut sucks now. I sometimes wonder which has changed -- the me, or the thing. Good to know that at least with Pizza Hut, it's not all in my head.
My personal pet peeve is the plastic playing pieces of board games. Formerly well-weighted and painted, now thin cheap and with a bad sticker. How much can plastic playing pieces actually cost?
I wonder if Monopoly still ships with cast metal pieces...
My turntable is from 2014, I am well aware of the principles on which it operates. That's why I bought it.
Has anyone proven / disproven Benn Jordan's video about why vinyl is basically poisonous?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ2czFuIYmQ
I haven't watched it for a while but the summary is:
- Vinyl records outgas harmful things that you can detect with air quality meters. (VOCs I think)
- You can't dispose of them because they can't be recycled and aren't supposed to go in landfills. So buying new records from new bands violates the "reduce, reuse, recycle" principle
"It's just that it's _so_ lame and uncool to shit on vinyl..."
"This is just my objective opinion based on a whole lotta research... If you're an avid collector whose peepee hurts after watching this video, understand that my peepee hurts a whole lot more."
https://floortechie.com/is-vinyl-flooring-toxic/
Just search “vinyl off gassing”.
Here’s an EPA pdf purely about vinyl chloride: https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/sites/production/files...
I'd put this down to "someone thinks something is cool and fun! we have to show them how wrong they are!"
And even of its true, reducing VOCs still sounds like a positive goal
http://www.safemarkets.org/toxic-chemicals-in-products/pvc/v...
That sounds a bit exaggerated. There is evidence that occupational exposure to PVC compounds causes liver damage or cancer, and that’s mostly regarding workers in production lines. You’d have to be closely sniffing your record collection for hours on end to get the same effect.
If this was true you’d have entire generations from the 19x0s suffering from liver failure, as vinyl was the only media available, with billions of records sold.
> Livers from rats provided with diet containing 2% DEHP show an increased number of peroxisomes after a few days
> In spite of the lack of direct evidences […] the indications so far obtained are sufficiently unequivocal not to be neglected
> We have reasons to believe that accumulating toxicity is valid for humans
> which means that evaluation of chronic human toxicity cannot be performed until around 2000 to 2020!
From that to “vinyl records will damage your liver” seems like a huge jump.
As I recall, when Benn did the test, putting the record back in its sleeve caused the air quality to go back to normal.
So whatever VOCs he is emitting, I don't think his meter picked them up.
> I'd put this down to "someone thinks something is cool and fun! we have to show them how wrong they are!"
Re-check the part about "how much my peepee hurts". I really want to like vinyls, but I'm never going to buy one if they're basically Forever Chemicals that got grandfathered in by being part of pop culture decades ago. And Benn says in the video that he could stand to make a lot of money if he sold out and had vinyls of his work manufactured.
I had the old one as a kid and kept it long enough to take it apart and learn so much...
This one has lessons too, but not the same ones. Maybe just as useful, in a dark way.
I highly recommending following Foone on twitter and using the thread unroll app. There's several more years of stuff like this on twitter.
Turing's living the dream... (the family name has to be a coincidence, right?)
* Foone likes to do tweet storms and not blogs and some people on HN have a "Why isn't this a blog?" sentiment which is bothersome to foone.
* HN scraping bots on twitter mention foone which is bothersome to foone.
* HN community frequently assumes he/him for foone. Foone goes by they/them. This does not seem to bother foone on its own, but HN commenters correcting HN commenters about how foone goes by they/them sometimes leads to grammatical argument about using they as a singular pronoun which is bothersome to foone.
* Generally, discourse beyond "whoops sorry!" about he/him/they/them is bothersome to foone.
* Elements of HN discourse represent larger problems of male-dominant sexism that are trenchant in technology, which are bothersome to foone.
[1] https://twitter.com/foone/status/1440375176604966924?lang=en
* No mention of the Twitter thread being better as a blog post, and someone has already posted a Thread Reader App link with the thread unrolled.
* A single instance of someone getting corrected for misgendering, but with no follow-ups or toxic discussion around it.
So maybe things are getting better?
But really, though, I just kinda find foone's annoyance about being posted on HN to be annoying in and of itself. The bot @-mentions I agree are annoying (and I don't know of a good solution; playing ban whack-a-mole every time a new one pops up is lame to have to do), but the other bits have a simple solution: don't read the HN comments. I know sometimes it's hard to resist the temptation, but I personally appreciate these foone threads getting posted here (as I don't really use Twitter much, so I wouldn't otherwise see them). And it's just a little weird to criticize people for linking to something you posted on the web, since linking is what the web is for.
> The modern "classic" one requires you to crank it up, because it won't start playing until you've cranked it up.
Maybe I'm just cranky today. But this quote perfectly encapsulates so much of what's wrong with a lot of modern technology.
>A skeuomorph (also spelled skiamorph, /ˈskjuːəˌmɔːrf, ˈskjuːoʊ-/)[1][2] is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues (attributes) from structures that were necessary in the original. Examples include pottery embellished with imitation rivets reminiscent of similar pots made of metal and a software calendar that imitates the appearance of binding on a paper desk calendar.
The new one is just a fake, a lie. The only thing it teaches kids is that technology is incomprehensible magic that they shouldn't try to understand, a form of learned helplessness where people only rights/abilities with respect to technology is to buy it from big corporations. This is contemptible and disgusting.
Because that's where the audience they write for is.
Because they prefer Twitter threads to blog posts.
Because they get more readers that way.
(And probably anyone here can come up with some more reasons that might be true if they put their minds to it.)
But mostly, the format someone chooses to make this available in is the least interesting thing about it.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Foone/status/1454530751475552256
Foone is a sociopath who doesn't feel certain words should be used to refer to Foone because they don't like them. In fact no one should talk about Foone ever.