Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models | Hacker News Reader

Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models

obsoletesony.substack.com

223 pointsspeckx244 comments

Article is just a (wordy) recapitulation of this tweet from a former Walkman engineer: 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/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.

Yes, that is the primary reason

people just want it but not enough people to buy the thing

same happen with physical games

> 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.

... and you end up being the donkey they can pin the tail onto, when they feel like bilking you again.

Companies like this are why strong customer protection laws need to exist, and be full of teeth.

the stores also have terrible physical stock. getting a game you want by blindly walking into a store is a gamble now.

Record stores are the same - subscription services for music made them very niche.

Does that mean capitalism is not an efficient system to meet the needs of well-informed consumers? Why am I being lumped in with an 8 year old who asks their parents to buy them an online game? There should be a market for physical media and devices with physical buttons if people exist who want them. These companies won’t work on anything that doesn’t bring them a gazillion dollars, so billion/million dollar ventures never get off the ground.

capitalism is the most efficient system ever

the statistic literally says it all, any person that think otherwise its delusional

Is it, though?

Rule of thumb: when a fanboy asserts that any person holding an alternative view is defective, you should immediately abandon the fanboy's position and adopt the alternative view. It's heuristically more likely to be correct, and it gets you out of an odious fan club.

Case in point: China proceeded through stages of development more efficiently than any western nation. Case in point: South Korea incubated its industry in a command economy.

case in point: bringing 2 best example of why capitalism is the best system

Care to explain?

Throw the USSR in there as well. Central planning allowed them to leap from an agrarian society to launching Sputnik and putting the first human in space, which spooked us into kickstarting the space race. It wasn’t market incentives that did that.

The USSR performed _somewhat_ well, but i wouldn't say it clearly outperformed the west given the whole "collapse" thing. I could argue the point, but only weakly.

It's more illuminating to pick the two exemplars, America and China, because they have many parallels

It outperformed the west in some things, notably not computing (which sealed its fate). I agree though. But I think there’s also something to be said about the way in which the experiment ended. Compared to the bloody, violent disintegration of most historical superpowers, the dissolution of the USSR was a remarkably swift, self-inflicted, and low-violence event.

It's hard to layer meaning over social media comment, but what i wanted to express was the nonsensicality of reducing history to "yay capitalism".

There's a common strand of thought that goes "America is emphatically capitalist, America is successful, ergo success is due to capitalism". But America finished WWII with a proportionally-small loss of life and a massive and intact industrial base while all the existing powers were in a heap of wreckage. It then held the mortgage on reconstruction and dictated the terms of the peace.

With advantages like that, it would be remarkable if they didn't end up on top of the pile. Capitalism was merely the vehicle, and other vehicles would have been equally adequate.

People who need answers to be simple will continue to make bold claims about the relative merits of capitalism. It's just identity signaling. I'd like to cull humans who, in adulthood, decline to develop critical thinking skills. These people vote, and they shouldn't.

Take a breath, you’re having a total knee-jerk reaction. What statistic?

So out of thousands of years of human history, we somehow stumbled onto the absolute final, perfect economic system 250 years ago with zero room for upgrade? Makes total sense /s. I’m sure there were those who said feudalism/mercantilism were the most efficient systems ever and we don’t need capitalism. Even Marx was a fan of capitalism, he viewed it as a revolutionary stepping stone towards a more efficient system and praised it for lifting feudal subjects out of poverty, and the massive productivity gains it produced. That’s not what’s being argued here.

> "The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together."

are you want to move goal post further and further ????

From the article:

> even sales in the tens of thousands might not recover the development and tooling costs

If you're looking for an argument against capitalism, this wasn't it.

people buy physical games when its an option. take god of war ragnarok where more than 60% of copies sold were on disk. its a totally different situation from niche products with no existing supply chain.

sony numbers are distorted because most third party games are digital only, and the average players preference for physical is not so strong that they wouldnt buy the game at all. its also not counting sharing or second hand sales so the number of players on physical is even higher.

I have five PS5 discs from around launch. Gifts. It is such a pain finding them and putting them in only to download a patch anyway. I’d sell them but I don’t want to perpetuate them as a thing so I’ll likely just throw them away.

why tf you have five PS5

    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/2080114490...

People still use google translate? Most browsers now have translate built in, as do llm

I imagine grok on x will do this too

X’s auto translate of tweets has been really awesome actually.

I wonder why its so much better than localised titles and subtitles on youtube.

LLMs can mentally match and replace whole sentences with culturally similar concepts rather than having to go word-by-word. That tend to yield more natural sounding, not necessarily accurate, translations than literal ones. That's great if you don't need accurate details and/or consistent inverse translations.

Classical machine translations can't take "EUTs sets up a bearer with eNB" and produce "The device (like a phone) connects to the cell tower."[1], it's a fragment of confection to an LLM, and that's useful when/where it is.

1: I just literally asked Gemini Flash to do it

Firefox didn't offer to translate this, so initially I wasn't aware that it could. But I could get it to translate via the menu. And Google Translate is still a bit better, so I do regularly fall back to that.

Unless something changed recently (and things change all the time where LLMs are involved), deepl.com does the best translations. I have a sister who translates professionally; she said it's the only one where she can use the result and make some improvements instead of throwing it away and starting over.

Deepl's professional advantage is not in the translation itself (even though it has always been a notch above the rest), but in the UI. You can literally click any word on the translated text and (a) see a list of alternatives, and (b) pick one and then the following text adapts to your choice.

In technical terms it lets you stop the transformer at any token, sample alternatives from the probability distribution at that point, pick your desired next token and resume the generation.

This UI lets an expert guide and control the output of the tool, instead of having to fight it. I wish there was a frontend for large GPTs that worked like this instead of the ubiquitous-yet-useless chatbot.

I'm not sure if that is what she meant. In any case, it does sound very useful for code. The input becomes messy to represent as text, but prompts don't usually make it into version control, so not much is lost.

I'd bet this is what she meant because I've done professional translation in the past.

The input and output of a GPT it not a sequence of messages in turns: fundamentally the input is the entire context (both from the user and the model), and the output is a probability distribution for 1 single next token.

The chat is only one of many interaction patterns possible with that primitive: one where the "most likely" output token is concatenated to the previous input and this is repeated until a limit is reached or the model produces a special "end of sequence" token.

Representing a more complete interaction pattern as a chat is impossible because the chat abstraction is lossy and could never represent it. Sometimes the abstraction leaks, as with the concept of "temperature", that's not a parameter of the model but of the chat.

IOW, it was also technically hard for Sony to launch the original Walkman, but they overcame the difficulties, because they expected a huge market success (which followed).

Now the product would be niche, and what had been originally built for its production became unavailable. The effort to stand up it all over again would not pay off.

The first Walkman from the late 70s was just an existing Sony portable cassette recorder (the TCM-100B), but with the mono head replaced with a stereo head and the recording functionality removed. Once that first unit proved there was a market, they were able to continually re-invest the money into miniaturization and new features so by the mid-90s Walkmans (Walkmen?) were high-quality cassette players that were barely larger than the size of a tape. All the tape enthusiasts would want a recreation of a high-end 90s Walkman, but the tooling and supply chain required to build one no longer exists and can't be recreated without the revenue stemming from portable cassette players being the predominant way to listen to music on the go for 15+ years.

It was also nearly magical how long my final Walkman could run with a single AA cell.

The jump from TPS-L2/WM-1 to WM-2 was ENORMOUS. Like, WM-2 was TINY - 75% the size of TPS-L2/WM-1. They were almost done before they got started! I know I got one Xmas 1981 and it was stolen in 1984 but now I have 3x.

I don't have a twitter account and do not want to go there. Anything good brought over to another format is value added.

I don’t see why anyone should be obligated to direct traffic to Twitter. Let the author post on his own blog or digital garden. I don’t want to go on Twitter. Echoing the same as others, it’s good to bring any content from Twitter into the open web.

To be fair, the site guidelines encourage submitting the original source, not rehashing it on a blog and posting that.

> Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.

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.

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.

There are lots of portable cassette players on the market, starting at 20€ or less.

Only low quality. But yes, building better quality shouldn’t cost $ 10k

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.

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.

The LTO-10 can hold 30 TB of highly compressed data on one cassette, and will last at least 30 years without degradation (probably longer under optimal conditions). This is still useful for many things. It does take almost a full day to fill up a tape, though, so if you're trying to back up a lot of stuff fast you're probably just going back to SSDs.

The M-disc is a better option for most use cases-- but if you have a ton of data that needs archiving, the tape involves less human labor and less physical space, which is I guess how the high prices are justified for those 'niche' applications.

I imagine the typical tape user doesn’t get individual drives and instead gets fancy tiered storage servers that include ludicrously fat network pipes, RAM, flash, HDDs and tape libraries, where tapes are fed and removed to an off site location every day, hopefully to never be seen again (because, if you need those tapes, it’s because something really bad happened to your data - the servers is plan A, the library is plan B, and getting it from offsite storage is plan C).

But the article explains WHY the investments are necessary in the first place.

CRTs are a stronger example. The R&D Sony has lost to the sands of time means we would need decades of sustained effort to reach the same quality of shadow mask that we used to have. It wouldn't be picking up where we left off, it would be picking up at the idea of where we left off with none of the supply chain that enabled it.

Modern economy cannot exists without economy of scale. It's unfortunate is that if you want something else than millions of other people the price likely will be prohibitive - small scale production is not viable economically, especially for high tech components and devices.

> I don’t think it’s true that the capabilities to make these devices are lost.

I think they are. Not all knowledge is captured in documentation and blueprints. A lot of knowledge existed only in brains of now retired people. And even blueprints are lost when companies go out of businesses.

> I think they are. Not all knowledge is captured in documentation and blueprints. A lot of knowledge existed only in brains of now retired people. And even blueprints are lost when companies go out of businesses.

We are talking implementations details to build the slimmest walkmans made in history.

That doesn't mean we couldn't make a much better sounding tape player protoype and still a slimmer one than the We are Rewind player and what is available today on Amazon, then iterating on making it smaller and smaller over the models. The main issue is still money and market, you can't spend that time on iterating and improving the design if the market is small and you are losing money.

This is - in passing - why billionaire prepper fantasies of surviving an apocalypse on a private island are insane. Sooner or later spares and consumables will start running out, and without global supply chains nothing is repairable.

You might get ten years if you stock up on ten of everything you can think of, plus a few things you can't, but after that things will start breaking down, and you're going to start running out of replacement parts.

And you'll be out of consumables long before then.

I had this discussion with my friend before and it really doesn't take long until you really are screwed in an apocalypse scenario.

We could barely agree on the probable scenarios - "dollar collapse" is bad enough without even getting into "aerosol transmissible Ebola" or the like.

I agree, modern Sony cameras and lenses have much more sophisticated tech in them than any Walkman ever had. Much smaller and more efficient too. The tech is not lost, it's just obsolete. The tiny motors used in a Walkman haven't been used in a Sony camera or lens for probably 10 years. They are loud, weak, heavy, inefficient, unreliable etc. we simply have much much better tech today.

It is not a capitalist conspiracy that there is no portable vinyl turn table that you carry around in a back pack so you can do rucking workouts and listen to vinyl at the same time either.

It is just a stupid idea.

I can picture myself listening to LL Cool J on a walkman in the 80s. I am not old enough for 8 tracks but I would put cassettes as the worst music media of my lifetime.

Maybe if you are into Japanese noise music there would be some kind of aesthetics of a cassette that would be interesting but it is mostly a stupid idea too in 2026.

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?

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.

I find this seriously underestimates what jackets 6 will undertake for fun, even unpaid.

It barely needs a screen. I adored my minidisc players and they were all basically calculator displays

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.

I don't use it daily, but I enjoyed rediscovering and using my MiniDisc stuff that I was inspired to build a pretty popular website around it :)

I would really love to try MD: besides the "tactileness" of it, the storage limits imposes to actively curate playlists and make compromises on how much/what music you can carry with you given the circumstances. An iPod classic already has so much storage available that this thought is secondary and you don't have to engage with your music to the same extent.

Absolutely, and that's something I've tried to highlight in the FAQs on the site - limitation breeds creativity. It makes you appreciate the media just a little bit more.

One of the best places to have MD is in a car. You can quickly identify (by unique color or label) each disc, which is either a full album presented as the artist intended or a playlist you curated. There's no "shuffle all 5000 songs" or "here's a playlist Spotify calls 80s kitchen songs but is half 90s pop you've heard before"

The other place I've thought I'd like to go back to MD is just sitting in bed and listening to some music.

I don't want to fiddle with my phone and get blasted by light from the screen.

I don't want to swipe through an infinite list of all music known to man.

I don't want to wait for an app to update, page to load, song to buffer or pop-up upselling me to need to be dismissed.

I want to listen to music I own, on a device I own, which instantly responds when I press play. That's it.

All 100% true. Just watch out for dead batteries (especially rechargables, because there are no Low Self Discharge Ni-MH gumsticks)

What's the website ?

The MiniDisc Wiki at minidisc.wiki [didn't mention it before because self-promo]

Amazing resource, indeed, Good job there!

I still adore the hell out of my 512GB (SD) iPod Classic/Minis

You can buy new shells, colors, storage adapters, batteries, etc.

https://github.com/jmonster/podhnologic

The tactile experience is a nice throwback in a touchscreen mostly/no physical buttons present, but the display is garbage by modern standards, finding specific tracks sucks, and doing any amount of playlist management is an exercise in frustration. And that is with replacing the firmware with rockbox, which significantly improves on those areas :-)

https://www.rockbox.org/

Hard to be objective through the nostalgia tbh. I would expect more today I guess

I adored my MiniDisc too but the limited storage of a single disk makes it easy to find the music you want

Given how much we can store in solid state not sure I’d want to navigate my library without a screen

> as soon as you add the screen, you need a full operating system to manage files and run the screen

More software? Sure. An operating system? No. There were (are?) plenty of cheap MP3 players that had screens but just drive it with some budget microcontroller.

And they're all e-waste nuggets sitting in dankpods' storage closet... :)

So like the original iPod Shuffle? Just buttons, a clip and a headphone jack, no screen.

(I do think they need a minimum size to be usable but companies can be creative with the form factor)

There's an irony here, because Sony do make MP3 Walkmans based on Android: https://electronics.sony.com/audio/c/walkman-digital-recorde...

That would be "some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much"

The entry level Walkman is $400 and only has 32gb internal storage. It's all about flac and hires audio but you're paying through the nose for the brand

They had models like the A55L (https://www.whathifi.com/reviews/sony-nw-a55l) which were more affordable, but the venn diagram of "cheap" and "niche audiophile gear" is two separate circles. Those who want nostalgia get iPods and mod them with SD cards and new batteries. Those who want Android and a headphone jack have older used phones or new budget ones (Moto g Power 2024 is US$129) and the market for cheap "nuggets" is not wide enough nor would there be enough margin to justify continued production.

That product category simply isn't worthwhile for big brands anymore.

I guess there just is no room in the current market for a mid-ranged product.

The segment is being squeezed on at least five sides (probably more):

- Cheap low-end no-name players;

- Audiophile products like the Sony walkman stuff;

- People who are happy using their phones;

- (for the exercise "phone too heavy" use case) A smart watch, paired to bluetooth headphones;

- Second hand iPods from the 2000s, often refurbished and/or modded;

Maybe one of the low-end no-name players meets your needs... But how could you find it wading through the crap?

I had an ipod, but the battery is dead, and it still had a rotating hd, so I thought: I liked Sony Discman, back in the day, this new player must be good. I was wrong. It sucks in many different ways. I've described some of the problems before and copied them here:

My iPod Classic was in a terminal phase, and since I like to carry my music around instead of streaming arbitrary stuff, I bought a Sony Walkman mp3 (+ other formats) player. It's bad. It takes a long time to boot, the battery life is mediocre, the UI is mainly lists of things, searching always misses tracks or albums, the volume defaults to a pretty low level, and when you increase it, it interrupts you asking if you're sure.

And when I started copying my itunes collection to the "walkman" (it is branded Walkman, but not worthy of the name), it would constantly stop copying. The included software was useless, and wouldn't copy a single track, giving up after 5 to 10 minutes of scanning. I had to write a Python script to overcome problems with long directory and file names and copy them to the proper directory.

Worst of all: there's a very loud click when you stop a track (using wired headphones). It's as if they never even used it.

There are so many 3rd party parts available for iPods.

Pry it open, replace the battery, swap the HDD for something like the iFlash.

Are they useable on Windows for loading music?

You can use iTunes on Windows to load music on the stock firmware. If you load Rockbox onto it, it works like a standard MP3 player where all the organization is done at the filesystem level. Note that I don't really see a point in buying an iPod to load Rockbox onto because you can get lots of other standard MP3 players that aren't well over a decade old, such as the Hifi Walker H2. That also gets you other modern features like bluetooth audio, expandable storage, and USB-C charging. It really only makes sense to get an iPod if you use iTunes to manage your music.

If you're running the stock firmware, one other thing to keep in mind regarding storage mods is that the main limiting factor for how much music you can keep on an iPod is the number of songs, not the amount of storage you can cram into it. One optimization Apple used on the iPods was to keep the entire music database in RAM. This made the player a lot more responsive and more battery efficient, since you could browse through your library without needing to spin up or seek the hard drive. However, it also means that having too many songs will make the iPod unstable because it'll keep running out of RAM and crashing. The limit is around 20,000 songs on the 5th gen and 45,000 songs on the 6th/7th gens. This means that it's not really worth putting a crazy amount of storage in your iPod unless your library is all lossless.

> You can use iTunes on Windows to load music

Yuck

Refurbished iPod is the way try go, I have a 2006 model with new battery and 128GB flash memory, it’s great for leaving plugged in in the car

Probably have the same model - what battery did you use ?

I just thought that maybe this is something for a personal Pi 0 project. DAC + microSD card + off the shelf display + 3D printed case + battery.

Or even the Pi Pico.

You really don't need that much processing power to decode mp3s and FLACs.

I was looking at the Pico first when writing that, but you would need a SD card header. Small issue - I use one for my Dreamcast controller Maple>USB bus.

You already need to add a decent quality DAC/Amp, might as well add a SD card slot at the same time.

On top of the lower power consumption, another advantage of the pico is that you can actually buy the raw RP2040 or RP2350 chips (for roughly $1) and make your own custom PCB.

I was investigating this further and found Tangara (https://cooltech.zone/tangara/)

You may need to build it yourself, but it looks like everything a HN-using MP3-buyer would want.

Power consumption seems a bit high. Other than that, looks awesome.

I checked, the 2nd gen iPod mini can get 18 hours of listening on a 400mAh battery, with a spinning HDD. This is getting 20+ hours listening with a 2200mAh battery and solid state storage.

Not that 20+ hours of listening is bad, I just expect a player with a battery that large to do quite a bit more.

In 2005 the iPod with 30 GB of storage was $299 ($511 in today's dollars) so the entry level Walkman is actually fairly comparable to Apple's pricing from back then. You can use some of the $100 you're saving to buy a 256 GB MicroSD card to load more music onto.

You have to apply equal opportunity inflation. The worth of 30gb portable memory in 2005 is not the same as the worth of 30gb in 2026. During that time, when I was in school, I remember my dad getting antsy about lending me his 64mb flash drive for school presentation because he paid $60 for it.

The 2005 iPod was state of the art and you couldn't buy a memory card for it. 300 for something with 30gb storage today is a joke

MP3s have been on the way out for a long time, being replaced by music subscriptions. And "MP3 player" is a feature of other devices, not its own device. Both my Apple Watch and Garmin watch can store and play MP3s without a phone; both also support music subscriptions.

The only market is in the "enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much", just like it is currently for vinyls and DVD players.

> MP3s have been on the way out for a long time, being replaced by music subscriptions

I both have music subscriptions (Spotify for the wife, Qobuz for me: Qobuz streams lossless but sucks for music discovery) and good old files (mostly FLAC files indeed except some very old, impossible-to-find, live recordings I only have in mp3). One does not prevent the other.

Also some people self-host or partially self-host things: you stream from a server you own: be it family pictures (I'm Mich / immich), movies and/or music (Plex or Jellyfin). And, well, the stream doesn't spring out of thin air: there are good old files on the server.

Lastly: some music streaming services allows you to buy albums and/or individual songs, DRM-free.

I'm not saying that MP3 and CDs and cassette tapes and vinyl don't work. But they are on the decline and no company would be wise to make a mass-market device specifically for them, when the mass market has moved on.

These days Spotify can stream FLACs as well, it's a setting.

I buy films from local charity shops for €1/film, but it seems the local electronics stores are not selling many DVD players any more.

It seems like streaming "won", which is disappointing.

Disappointing, but that's the harsh reality of how the market works. Convenience wins. Which is why physical media sales first suffered (allegedly) from piracy; I don't think it was primarily to avoid paying for stuff, but because having years of music in a winamp playlist was much less hassle than managing a CD collection.

Piracy was ultimately defeated or at least greatly diminished thanks to streaming services. It's making a comeback now due to increased prices and fragmentation though (and to a degree, the politics of prominent figures at these streaming companies - artists pulled their music from Spotify out of protest).

Considering both Xbox and PlayStation consoles support DVDs I think there will be quite a long tail for playing DVDs.

Have you looked at fiio? They’ve been doing it a while and aren’t crazy expensive https://www.fiio.com/player

https://a.co/d/055SGJE1

These actually look decent, thanks for the link. I wonder why I could never find them in my endless googling

There's other competitors as well. Just search for "DAP" (digital audio player)

Or buy any old but decent condition LG V series phone (like a V20, v50 etc etc)

Fiio, Hiby, basically any chifi music player is a soc+android.

> ... why can't Sony or Apple or anyone else bring back decent MP3 players?

I know the late 90s called and want their MP3 straight out of Napster and their 10 GB HDD back but you can safely up the ante to lossless FLAC files.

MP3 is, literally, 30+ years old and I traded my 10 GB HDD for a 1 TB NVMe SSD that could read an uncompressed dump of my entire 10 GB HDD in about two seconds.

FLAC files are only about 2x the size of 320 kbps mp3.

Really, it's 2026. We can do it (I do it).

Hey I'm happy if it plays flac, but all I want is decent storage and it to not cost a fortune

Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?

Because you can do that with any phone and just not use the phone part?

Because I want something half the size of a phone. I don't need a giant screen, I just want a player that can do music or audiobooks and be light enough to run with.

I find myself researching, trying to find the smallest lightest old phone that either has decent internal memory or a micro SD slot, but it's not easy. Most phones are massive compared to an iPod shuffle

you could use a smart watch, not nearly as much storage but for playing music while running it can work well enough.

There's a case [1] for the Apple Watch that turns it into an 'iPod'. It's also quite similar to the Pod Case concept [2].

[1] https://thetinypod.com

[2] https://www.behance.net/gallery/72386255/Pod-Case-for-Apple-...

Oh that is kinda cool. Now I really want one

There are a ton of these and they're all behind your "company I've never heard of" blind spot.

Here's a one in close to the form factor of the last iPod Shuffle: https://www.fiio.com/m5

They have an AI assistant on the webpage and it says that the shortcut to activate it is cmd+Q (on Mac this is a global shortcut to quit an application, akin to alt+F4) which is absolutely psychotic. I wonder if in chinese macOS the shortcut is different or something or the person designing it uses windows and just thought ctrl+q(uestion) makes perfect sense

Maybe a pair of these: https://uk.shokz.com/products/openswim-pro

They have 32GB of storage, no screen, light enough to run and swim with.

The old HTC One M8 used to fill this niche but they might be too old to use on the daily any more. I’ve been thinking of digging mine out, the headphone output was great

Now there's a name I've not heard in a long time!

Yes the old box of obsolete smartphones and PDAs and datalogic falcon x3 pocket pcs waiting for me to do projects with them are why I can never justify buying even a20 dollar mp3 player.

the unihertz jelly is pretty small and not very expensive

You seem to be moving goal posts a little.

Get an iPhone 12 Mini or 13 Mini for around $200 used.

I don't understand the question, Sony still sells a product line of both premium and cheaper mp3 player devices?

Although FiiO is probably the company to look at for these kind of products.

Show me the cheaper one please. The lowest price Walkman I can see is 400 bucks for 32gb

That is the cheaper one.

That is the decent player you're looking for. (It has an SD card slot.)

iPods weren't cheap either.

Fourth gen ipod was $399 new.

(the one with the touch wheel and colour display, usually what people think of when they think “classic ipod”.)

It released in 2005, so adjusted for inflation thats $668.91

Yowza!

Fiio has been making these for many years at every price point and size. Quality seems very high

They're very well known and have several competitors

My "MP3 player" is a phone with Musicolet. If you really distrust phones, you can buy a cheap phone and use it only for that and nothing else. There are probably other offline MP3 players but this one seems pretty good. (It is hard to find a phone with an SD card slot and a headphone jack but that's a separate issue.)

The problem with cheap phones is how big they all are

The demand isn’t that high for so much effort?

> 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.

Is this surprising?

They are a commodity (you can literally build a fairly decent for less than $10 in parts) so therefore are low profit. Brands you have heard of generally don't want to play in commodity markets.

The alternative is to move upmarket where prestige or specific features are important:

> some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much.

There you go.

> Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?

They can and do. Look on Amazon.

They call into the two buckets you outline above. Just buy one of the $50 ones from the companies you haven't heard of.

I've bought several of these and they don't last. You're right that they are commodity items. The components and quality are shit, there's no support, and six months later the company has vanished.

I guess I just want somewhere between $30 and $500, somewhere between absolutely piece of shit and extreme prestige. But I'm dreaming if I think anyone is going to serve that market

it's a little weird but most of the sub $50 ESP-32 boards on waveshare include an MP3 player as one of many demo bits of code (primarily because it shows off code for "read from microSD card" and "drive the DAC".) It's not quite what you're asking for, just a benchmark that it's kind of "too easy to build" which might get in the way of actual products.

Doesn't Fiio and the like make a bunch of fairly affordable stuff ? Definitely well under 500$

Apparently they do, but I'd never heard of them before this thread

Sounds like you're unironically describing a Tangara [0]. They most certainly hit their goal, though I can't verify if they get restocked or how often.

Mine's lasted, and it works pretty well, though the touchwheel isn't quite on-par with an iPod. I like the modern connector and openness (both hardware and software) though

[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/cool-tech-zone/tangara

These companies did everything they could to get people off the "I own files I paid once" model and onto the perpetual "I pay for streaming" model. Of course they dont want to go back to that. It goes against the profit incentive which dictates all business decisions. That's how capitalism works on its most fundamental level.

I recently got the Shanling M0s. It runs its own OS and seems to me completely at parity with what MP3 players used to be back in the day; in fact I think it's the best one I've ever had, and I've been buying those devices since the Diamond Rio. If more people just got one, Shanling would no longer be a company nobody's ever heard of, and the economics would change to further bring down the price too (although I think it's not all that bad right now).

The battery life’s reportedly kind of garbage, though, isn’t it? As it seems to be on all these devices. I understand this is partly due to overpowered output amplifiers (to support obscure headphones) and software decoding (to support obscure formats), but still, <15hr of playback is pitiful.

Mine was great for a year until it stopped working out of nowhere, not turning on. The company told me they wouldn't help me in any way. And there seems to be no good alternatives.

IDK I've got some rando Chinese product that looks pretty much exactly like a late-2000s iPod "classic" and has some fairly generic Android interface including a decent music player. I think it cost like $40.

I've bought a few for the kids but they generally have weird issues like sorting music in bizarre unpredictable ways (can't seem to get it to play an audiobook in order). There's no customer support, and they also break fairly easily

Yeah, it's definitely more of a consumable item than an asset, as the logistics guys would say.

they do. tons of them. https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-mp3-player.html

I've bought too many of these. They never look like the picture, the screens are awful, they all use the same shit soc, they don't last and they have issues with tags and sorting.

I just want a company I've heard of to make something that doesn't absolutely suck but also doesn't cost more than a phone

You get what you pay for.

Ultimately what you are wondering is why electronics companies aren't relentlessly updating and optimizing products like they did during 1980s-2010s at every price point between $4.99 to $499.99M, that just wasn't normal, and that wasn't sustainable after all.

I think there's a chance that the world would go through these discussions again for software, and we realize why only US could produce great software, but we'll see...

I think you’ll find that is what modern Walkmans are…

My understanding is there are decent MP3 players by places like Fiio at this point? Haven't used any of em in anger though

Though I have a walkman (that kinda sucks cuz it's android.... it's (USB-C AND annoying Android OS) XOR (Proprietary charging cable) from Sony nowadays

> Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?

Sony Walkmans are this, along with a bunch of the random mp3 players you would find on amazon. I don't know why some other people replying to you are acting like this doesn't exist.

> Sony Walkmans are this

The cheapest one I'm seeing is the Sony NW-A306. That's around $600 - I think it fits into the OP's category of "some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much"

dunno where you're looking, they're 400 USD

But also just type "android mp3 player" into Amazon dot com. You'll find plenty of stuff under $100[0]

[0] https://www.amazon.com/4-02-Player-Bluetooth-WiFi-Speakers/d...

> which is why can't Sony or Apple or anyone else bring back decent MP3 players

the burning answer is really, by the time you've chosen a modern merchant soc, and put a screen on it, you're really more or less at the same BOM cost as a very low end android device (and frankly, the soc bsp you chose is likely to be android/aosp to begin with)

so you're basically competing head to head with every shitphone maker out there, and they have economies of scale. you do not.

> Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware

and so... now you're competing with simple smartphones. you're going to charge more for a fancy case for something that requires to be carried separate from your phone and offers zero additional advantage?

there's a huge market for external mobile DSPs for this reason. this is an example of an entry level one https://www.microcenter.com/product/705193/moondrop-freedsp-...

btw, im sure someone like shanling is making exactly what you're thinking of, but they often have limited production runs and still cost within the same range as a basic android phone (usually a bit more)

>the burning answer is really, by the time you've chosen a modern merchant soc, and put a screen on it, you're really more or less at the same BOM cost as a very low end android device (and frankly, the soc bsp you chose is likely to be android/aosp to begin with)

This is, incidentally, also almost universally an answer to "why doesn't nobody make a dumb TV anymore?!"

The off-the-shelf SoC that handle the TV decoding/HDMI bits already has a bunch of general purpose ARM cores; might as well put Android on it instead of writing your own firmware.

the race for margins has gotten so intense that actually, actively not scraping viewer data and using it for ad marketing means that even a non-spying smart tv is less economically feasible

Did you even read the article? They mention Sony sells a new Walkman just like what you mention https://www.sony.co.uk/walkman

Maybe it's just me (am I holding it wrong?), but the link you provided lands at only two products:

  DMP-Z1 Digital Music Player Signature Series (price unavailable)
  WM1ZM2 Walkman® Signature Series (£3,299.00, financing available)

there is also what looks like a headset integrated player in the sports section but it is true that it seems they have totally abandonned their regular non luxury walkman line that was still available a couple of years ago.

Apple got it right with the original iPod, and your ask, and others, is just to extend it to modern times. A lot of these comments simply aren't helpful, and people chiming in know it. For me, I was looking for

1) Music player that holds a ton of songs.

2) Lossless.

3) No touch screen control.

4) Battery that is long lasting and semi-replaceable.

5) Smaller than modern phones.

6) Great software experience, which for me meant Apple Music compatible.

7) Wired. Not Bluetooth.

A $400 Sony Android-based player doesn't meet 3, 4, nor 5. Most importantly, $400 for a product that doesn't meet some pretty important criteria is ridiculous. A shitty tiny Chinese player isn't going to meet 3, 4, 6 and it'll die on you in a couple of years and you'll be back at square one.

My solution was to buy a 5.5 Gen iPod off eBay ($100), a microSD card carrier (iFlash.xyz - $40), and four microSD cards (Back in my day, $50 each for 256gb). Yes, I had to open the iPod, but yes, it checks all my boxes. And it came in less than the Sony player.

> For me, I was looking for

To add:

- A physical switch to turn off all inputs. The older ipods had a slider switch that disables all buttons and screen inputs, which was awesome.

Mostly I use an mp3 player when working on things (yard, cars, house, etc) and need something very small and very light, so not a phone. My older ipod with the switch broke down so I'm stuck with a newer ipod which lacks that switch and I hate it. Every few minutes it activates some button press from being in my pocket and ruins the listening.

I swear, this site jumps on the tactile control bandwagon when it comes to something like cars, but for this thread, it's all "meh, everything's touchscreen these days. Get used to it."

MP3-module from Aliexpress and some ESP-board with tiny display and micropython. Ten Euro.

You can make random search N in the MP3-module, because OFF/ON restarts and then you short NEXT-button wires N times.

You forgot to add /s. In no universe would this suggestion be at all practical, and meets practically none of the criteria I'm looking for.

Everything else is doable, expect maybe "lossless". But then, alas, WAV is as lossless as can be and memory is cheap.

Why not a Fiio ? Or any of the other nicer brand DAP

I just stated it above. Because I don't want a touchscreen, I want to eventually replace the battery when it starts going bad, I want a good software experience along with it.

Fiio can't even keep their site in order. They have broken links everywhere. Nothing about it makes me think it isn't just another shitty Chinese-made disposable.

They're good at hardware - that being said no idea how easy it is to replace their batteries. The only devices I've used from them don't have touchscreens.

Maybe your better off with something like a refurbed iPod

At this point, I can only assume you're trolling.

I'm not - there's a whole industry around replacing the batteries with modern versions and swapping the spinning disk to giant SSD. And there's different firmware / software if you don't like the apple interface. They tend to have a decent DAC integrated. If you want swappable batteries I imagine that might get you the best longevity in terms of available replacement batteries

No, I mean you're trolling in that you basically read nothing about my original comment.

1) You give a response that doesn't meet half of my requirements. 2) You then give a suggestion that's is fundamentally what I said I did in my original response. Congrats, you demonstrated my gripe about the comments on here too in my original response.

You want an mp3 player with no DRM lockin and proprietary store and so on? Sorry, that's not competitive anymore. That will not happen for the same reason people don't make affordable dumb TVs anymore. The manufacturer needs a way to spy on you or get recurring revenue some other way.

Maybe a nice 50%-200% tax on recurrent revenue streams could force things back to sell-once + no spying...

The basic Sony Walkman is 74.99 $

https://electronics.sony.com/audio/walkman-digital-recorders...

It looks like they recently discontinued that model, I don't see it new anywhere.

the only thing they sell for anything close to that price is a pair of earphones for $99.

https://electronics.sony.com/audio/walkman-digital-recorders...

The cheapest walkman model is $399.99

> Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?

Why can't people simply take inexpensive smartphone hardware, install modern media player software on it, and then just use it to listen to music?

Is it fundamentally impossible to properly enjoy music while ignoring the extra parts that sit disused inside?

I mean: At least here in the States, a person can walk into a Walmart or Best Buy with a fifty dollar bill, and walk out with a brand new Motorola MP3-playing device with wifi, an IPS screen, a headphone jack, and an SD card slot -- and they can then simply use it.

Sony and Fiio both make high end "mp3 players" aka Digital Audio Player. These are expensive devices and have more in common with mobile phones, but you can buy them

Now we're just haggling over price. Make more money and be less cheap.

I'd like a Ferrari for $20,000 but we both know that's not gonna happen.

These days, you can just buy a name, but it's expensive.

Factory A is going to make a device for $50, sell 1,000 for them for $150 and make $100,000 ($150*1000-$50*1000).

Factory B can make the same device for $50, buy a name that you've heard of for $100,000, buy some reviews in magazines you're heard of for another $100,000, and sell 1,000 of them for $350 a piece and then they'll make $100,000. ($350*1000-$200,000-$50*1000)

I think everybody talking about how you can get an android device that does this missing the point. Android is not very good. These devices are just repurposed cell phone components, basically.

The original iPod was an offline device with high quality interfaces and it "just worked." The fact that such a thing can't be found for music - let alone video - speaks volumes.

I think you're asserting away a lot of the meat of your argument.

"Android is not very good" is completely subjective. It does provide access to streaming services and lots of media player options.

The iPod was definitely known for a high quality DAC+amp, but do we know what's inside each older or budget Android device? A lot of components have improved over 20 years, and others haven't. I would also disagree that it "just worked." The cable was proprietary (after Gen 2), iTunes was often buggy and locked down, it didn't support standard FLAC files, you couldn't extract audio officially.

And considering that there are numerous audiophile-focused MP3 players on the market from Sony and FiiO, plus cheap nuggets from no name brands which likely play music just fine... what's being spoken volumes?

You mean why doesn't Apple sell music devices that can't run an App store? I think they make a lot of money from the app store, so they'd probably lose a lot of money by doing that.

(I don't know about Apple's current iPod lineup but I'm assuming they all have the app store on them. I do miss my old iPod classic though.)

They stopped making iPods in 2022 :( the last one they did make was the iPod Touch (7th gen), which was basically an iPhone in a slightly different shell without a cellular radio.

I have an Astel & Kern SE-100. Amazing build and sound.

The GP specifically said they weren't looking for some overpriced 'enthusiast' nonsense. Did you really spent $1700 for that thing? Did you get the gold plated, oxygen free cables and noise canceling dot stickers at the same time or did you save up for them.

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.

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!

hold on now william gibson

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.

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.

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

> 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

I was glad to find this site offering refurbished iPods, and they also have refurb Walkmans.

https://retrospekt.com/collections/cassette-players

>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/

You're many years late to the MiniDisc revival.

Maxell cassette players are not cassette players from back in the day, but cheap stuff like everything else: https://youtu.be/6XyaBls8jyg?is=Lrgqe23yWlelBvl-

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.

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.

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.

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.

Great question!

Have you tried dry cleaning?

> 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.

> and the manufacturers are barely surviving

I feel for them because I wouldn't mind paying 2/3 times the price for something of measurably higher quality and durability, but it takes effort and dedication to accomplish that as a customer. Effectively the market is saturated with premium-branded items that are marginally better or sometimes worse (a lot of what you see as "technical clothing" comes across that way at least), you feel gaslit by marketing, fake reviews and astroturfing campaigns, and there are only so many deceptions, defeats and financial losses you can sustain before going back to the devil you know: the default everyone else is buying.

> but it takes effort and dedication to accomplish that as a customer

Yes, that's true and IMO the main reason why even people with the money end up buying the same bad products: they often don't have the time to learn and form a taste.

Which companies are those? My last batch of Levi's moved them into "never again" status - noticeably cheaper fabric than the previous batch, flawed stitching, cheaper logos and tags. I paid more per pair than five years ago (unacceptable for a commodity) and got a worse product (doubly unacceptable for anything). I need tough black jeans I can trust to last a decade; I don't mind spending £250 on them but I do mind getting soft cheap cotton which will go to holes just from daily wear.

* Iron Heart (UK): https://ironheart.co.uk

* Naked and Famous (Canada): https://nakedandfamousdenim.com. They also have a cheaper brand that uses the same Japanese denim but the garments are made in China (https://theunbrandedbrand.com), which is still better than Levi's.

* 3Sixteen (US): https://www.3sixteen.com

* The Flat Head (Japan): https://privateandco.ca/collections/the-flat-head

* SugarCane (Japan): https://sugarcanejeans.com/

* TCB (Japan): https://tcbjeans.myshopify.com/

Most of the Japanese brands are hard to get outside Japan, and flying to Tokyo is often the best way to get one, otherwise you're stuck with buying online but you have to know well what you're doing because Japanese denim is almost always unwashed, meaning it will shrink after use so you really have to know how much higher a size to order so that it will fit you well after 6 months.

Right while electronics prices have been kept flat via automation, simplification, maturing of technologies, reduction in moving parts, scale, etc..

Clothing prices have been kept flat more by making the products worse. Cheaper synthetic blends, lower stitch count, thinner fabrics, .. and of course by making them in cheaper places with cheaper labor and fewer laws..

Billabong and quicksilver are selling 90s board short models now. They are fairly popular so …

If we ban the FED from conjuring new Dollars for buying debt and securities, and the only way fresh printed Dollars enter circulation is if apportioned to every citizen equally (debt-free), then we could have all these nice things again. Companies and rich people would need to cater to the populace in order to rake in the inflationbux and pay their taxes. Right now only governments, big businesses, and big asset owners get first spend on inflationbux, and it has resulted in we the people having only 1/3rd the purchasing power for the Dollar earned in wages as we had in 1960!

My TradingView (Yearly) model for the phenomenon: 23.05*10^12/M2SL*A4102C1Q027SBEA/(USPOP*CIVPART/100*(1-UNRATE/100))

A4102C1Q027SBEA is total US wages/salaries,

A4102C1Q027SBEA/(USPOP*CIVPART/100*(1-UNRATE/100)) attempts to get a rough average of individual wage/salary,

23.05*10^12/M2SL normalizes the time series to today's Dollar value (in M2 terms).

A vinegar soak gets rid of almost all smells, and a sodium bicarb soak gets rid of the rest. Air freshener spray is incrementally effective for items you don't want to soak.

If you want something Walkman-like and aren’t short of a few bob, there’s always:

https://teenage.engineering/products/tp-7

- scratches a similar itch, but is also a:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objet_d'art

Only 1500 euro.

I would not be suprise if it was cheaper to find and refurb a vintage Walkman.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah - like many things Sony they went to proprietary and locked down

True. They screwed themselves thoroughly multiple times.

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]")

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..)

That is mostly because the players needed to be compact. If you were designing a floppy replacement, it could be built like a tank (and with space to spare).

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.

Yup. In other words, we totally could, but there is no reason to put the time, effort and money into doing so.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

One day they'll write a similar article about the iPhone.

It's amazing how ephemeral these incredibly complex manufacturing networks are.

Those things are highly prized by flippers now.

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.

Because they dropped physical medias?

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

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

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.

Best you can do is get familiar with peer-to-peer acquisition, and teach others. Starve the enshittifiers!

Oh no there's way more than that.

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.

Capitalism will make you as happy as necessary to ensure that you continue buying. No more no less.

s/can't/won't/

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.

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