Giving up my iPod for a Walkman | Hacker News Reader

Giving up my iPod for a Walkman

news.bbc.co.uk

34 pointsfiaz28 comments

I actually used a Walkman couple months back. I was traveling by bus during a baseball game and wanted to listen to the play by play, which was on an AM station. Good thing I had my circa 1990 Walkman with AM tuner collecting dust in the back of a closet. Worked like a charm.

Yeah, the fact that most mobile devices these days lack radio functionality is something that's always baffled me, especially now that some phones are being equipped with TV tuners.

I think the thing is that a lot of the media has turned to on-demand through DVRs, hulu.com, podcasts, etc. Also, there's probably a part where FM tuners don't sound new enough for it to be worth being included. Kind of like having an iPhone with new telegraph functionality!

I was very upset when my iriver h140 stopped working it wasn't much more bulky than an ipod and had radio, ogg and flac compatibility and I could use it to record tapes and records with its optical line in something no other player on the market at this time had done and to this time I don't know if anything has changed.

The experience of listening to FM radio on a portable radio with a small aerial, is not good.

I tried once, with my then phone's FM radio, to listen to my usual BBC station on my 25 minute commute train journey. I gave up (too many tunnels, bridges, cuttings, with poor or no signal), and went back to my MP3s. I certainly wouldn't want to try TV!

Lots of MP3 players lately have FM tuners included. It's pretty head-scratching that Apple omitted radio from the iPod line.

I'm relieved that the majority of technological advancement happened before I was born

Maybe, but there is a lot of technology advancement still happening.

the majority of technological advancement

Aren't technological advancement, by nature, always advancing/evolving? Something isn't right about that phrase. At one point in time, railway was a technology. Rail still is am evolving technology. I don't think we will stop developing, even if for now, its increasingly software rather than hardware.

Yeah. That's like the number fifteen million saying, man am I glad most of the numbers came before me. It doesn't make sense.

Unless you interpret this as a warning on the short time humanity has left or something, which is not what I think was meant.

In 25 years this kid is going to be giving his kid his iPhone and he's going to write the exact same thing about being bulky and crappy battery life (and no mind control).

Sony still sells cassette Walkmen:

http://www.sony.co.uk/product/paw-cassette-walkman

I don't use a portable music player very often — I prefer to think during the periods I am at large in the world and not 'doing' anything — but when I do, I use my late-90s-'vintage' Walkman.

I don't want to listen to tracks in a random order. The order of the movements of a symphony is part of the music; the order of the pieces on an album is part of the album. I can't listen to thousands of pieces of music during one excursion. I find the crap-quality-ness of cassette pleasant and that of MP3 et al. unpleasant.

Of course, the iPod does have its benefits, for example, helping to secure the medium-term health of Apple, and thus of the Mac and OS X.

plus, no drm or big brother.

it's super easy to burn tapes/cd's and give them to people. i don't have an ipod, but i hear that everytime it gets plugged into a computer it synchs with itunes, so you can't just give a friend some songs. is that true? i remember parties where the music sources were people bringing different tapes and cd's--in this age would everyone have to bring an ipod, or can you still transfer music across machines (to say nothing of different types of machines)?

I'm not 100% sure if this is still true, but that used to be an option you could set on your iPod through iTunes. The default was to automatically sync (and delete music that was no longer in your library), but you can change it to only add or remove music when you explicitly move it to or from your iPod.

As for my personal opinion on the topic, I'm known by my friends as being someone who uses older stuff by choice. My phone is ancient, but it's because I'd rather have something that's proven to long-lasting, unbreakable and robust, rather than something that has the latest features.

Not sure about iPod but many players like the cowon iaudio or sandisk sansa series act just like USB drives. So you just drag and drop songs to or from any computer so its easy to share songs with friends.

Are we really this desperate for news fodder? With all that's going on in technology is this the best use of the BBC's time and resources? Because the kid seems pretty intelligent and while reading I kept thinking "If you're going to have this kid write an article aren't there topics that would be more interesting for him to write about? Like how he thinks the future of technology will turn out or what's the most significant technology he uses on a daily basis?"

Instead we get insights like this (which the BBC actually chooses to highlight)

Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn't is "shuffle", where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down "rewind" and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured.

Wow. If I'm ever stuck on a desert island with only a walkman and am jonesing for shuffled music I'll now know what to do.

I doubt the BBC poured all its resources into producing this article. You're being a bit dramatic. Plus, I think it's just as important to remember and reflect upon technologies of past ages as it is to speculate about future technologies. Kids today should be aware of these things as it should give them much more respect for what we have, seeing how far we've come. I found the article interesting.

The resources I was referring to was the kid's time and the point I was making is that this article provided no insight that an adult who thought on the issue for half a minute couldn't have come up.

If you're going to have this seemingly intelligent kid spend time writing a piece why not try to get some insight out of him that is useful and that the rest of us don't already know.

Heck, if you asked the kid a series of questions and had one of them be "What do you think of this Walkman?" that would be ok. But the whole reason the piece is so frustrating is because it's a waste. Have the kid hold a walkman for 5 minutes and he'll tell you everything you heard in this article.

I also thought it was quiet interesting, considering some of the rubbish my licence fee goes on, I'm pretty sure this one is insignificant on the expenses front.

It took me by surprise that there are a generation of kids out there who have probably never seen a tape, these are things that were cutting edge during my time growing up, even the move to CD. I remember taking my cassette players apart and fiddling with them to see how they worked. Unfortuantely you cant really do that with the modern stuff, which is a shame.

I'm turning into my father!

On the other hand, the author is 13. It's a novelty piece, not an attempt at serious news.

I wonder. None of the 13-year-olds that I know or knew would be anywhere in the same zip code (or postal code) as the word "plethora".

Nor would any of them dump their iPhones for Walkmen, I wager. I wrote about like that kid does when I was 13 years old.

To be fair, those 13-year-olds also don't have a BBC editor and their parents at their disposal. Well, maybe their parents :)

A 13 year old who works for CrunchGear too:

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/06/29/one-of-our-interns-make...

Give 13 years old a chance and you'll be amazed at what they can do. It's one thing I'm really not happy about western society: forces teens to be kids until about 20.

AFAIK, physical mental development ends around 9. After that it's only education which decides if you're mature enough at 12 or at 30.

Except that between 12 and 17 you've got so many hormones racing through your body that you rarely make any sensible decisions...

Well techcrunch said this "Wee Scott Campbell of Aberdeen, Scotland is 13 years old and sent us an email last week asking if he could write for us."

So I would assume he wrote the piece and sent it to the BBC, they probably didn't do much except take a picture and publish it.

What I think is interesting is that this kid is able to think up a story good enough for TechCrunch and BBC. If he could do that again it would be really interesting.

I'm about to be a dad, and I've been pondering this topic for a while now. Is my kid missing out on the rapid evolution I experienced? Or was that just the tip of the iceberg?

How am I ever going to explain the awesomeness that was getting my first dual tape deck?

I had to explain the awesomeness of auto reverse the other day. Made me a little sad.

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