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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.
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.
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.
I don't have a twitter account and do not want to go there. Anything good brought over to another format is value added.
Yes, that is the primary reason
people just want it but not enough people to buy the thing
same happen with physical games
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...
I imagine grok on x will do this too
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
There's an irony here, because Sony do make MP3 Walkmans based on Android: https://electronics.sony.com/audio/c/walkman-digital-recorde...
The basic Sony Walkman is 74.99 $
https://electronics.sony.com/audio/walkman-digital-recorders...
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?
Have you looked at fiio? They’ve been doing it a while and aren’t crazy expensive https://www.fiio.com/player
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.
> 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)
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.)
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.