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Comment by trencedamp | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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...

> 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.

> ... 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

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)

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...

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

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.

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)

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 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?

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.

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

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

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...

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.

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