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Comment by cbmuser | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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