Comments
Hacker News
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.
by sdevonoes
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.
by potbelly83
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
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!
by nmstoker
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.
by vr46
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?
by trencedamp
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.
by cbmuser
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.
by plorg
Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- 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.
by sdevonoes - 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.by potbelly83
- 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
- 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!by nmstoker
- 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.
by vr46 - 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?
by trencedamp - 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.
by cbmuser - 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.
by plorg