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Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

incidentally i visited akihabara just in 2001, however i am curious how it looks today.

in beijing the electronics market which used to have a similar size and feel, shrunk a lot in the past 5-8 years (before covid) due to online ordering becoming more popular. many shops closed their walk-in stores and went online only. already in 2019 what remained was a fraction of what used to be there a few years earlier.

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Akihabara has pivoted from electronics into anime. Most all of the hardcore electronics stores (eg Radio City) are long gone, in their place you have massive emporia catering to otakus, ranging from maid cafes to doujinshi.

The (newish) Yodobashi store at Akiba is still one of my go-tos if I need to pick up gadgetry on trips to Japan, but in these days of easy online ordering of anything I need at rock-bottom prices from China, that's not very often.

I was a few times in Akihabara in the late 90s and absolutely loved it. Those narrow alleys packed with electronics shops selling every niche product you could think of, backed by some huge electronic stores. Also, game arcades were still a big thing and the whole manga and anime insanity had not take off. Around 2012 I visited it again with my family and was a bit disappointed. It was much less techy and many cool electronics shops had turned into mange/anime shops. Well, I guess times will never stop changing.

it looks like the decline of electronics shops in akihabara started even earlier than in china. not surprising though. in china on the other hand those stores were not replaced. the malls just emptied out and closed.

Not sure if younger people know how big Japanese electronics were in the 80s and 90s with brands like Aiwa, Nakamichi (look up "Nakamichi Dragon", or even better, try to buy one on Ebay) and Sony (which was like Apple in the 80s). Although Japan still has some great electronics brands, they have been in decline since the late 90s, when China started taking huge chunks of their market share.

Or National which is almost all gone today. Or rather rebranded to Panasonic. Before the early 2000s the company was selling most of their products under National brand in Japan. They've introduced Panasonic to sell speakers abroad because, as it turned out, the National name was not available. The reception was so good over the years that the National brand has been discontinued and all the products are called Panasonic now.

I've learned only today, while double checking the facts, that there is `panasonic` TLD.

https://holdings.panasonic/global/corporate/brand/history.ht...

Interesting, I though National and Panasonic were just brand names of Matsushita, but the corporation was renamed to Panasonic in 2008. See, that's how old I am :)

36yo here. OFC Sony was a synonym of quality. But nowadays you can get decent devices from Shenzhen.

And an $100 pinebook can do everything Sony could do in the 80's and 90's.

good point. that's another factor that i didn't consider. and online sales are having a double effect here. not only is there no need for walk-in stores but there isn't even a need for resellers to import anything but popular products. the rest can be ordered directly from china.

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