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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.)
> ... 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.
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.
Everything has been optimized towards giving a small number of companies total control and surveillance over our media. That means forcing people to store their files on someone else's servers. Those companies don't really care about making better technology for others to use. Fewer options for the public, lack of innovation, and the increasing enshittification of everything is a price they are willing to pay for control, lock-in, and rent seeking.
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!
Clothes made in the 90s used different materials and stitching than they do today, and likely cost more to produce. They'd probably need old machines they haven't had in decades.
> But then why Nike/Adidas/Quicksilver/etc cannot bring back clothes from the 90s?
They can, but people wouldn't want to pay the price. When adjusting for inflation, clothes today are much cheaper than 30 years ago, and the main producers of high-quality cotton (Kazakhstan and Egypt) are having continuous drought problems so the best raw material is even more expensive.
The combination of customer expectation for low prices, and more expensive raw materials, exacerbated by lower production volume, means that very few would be willing to buy. As an example, take a look at the high quality jeans market: there are a few niche companies in Japan, Europe, US and Canada producing jeans at the same level of quality as 50-100 years ago, in some cases the exact same model as, say, a 1950's Levi's. Those jeans start at $200 per pair, but go even up to $400-500 and the manufacturers are barely surviving.
I feel for them because I wouldn't mind paying 2/3 times the price for something of measurably higher quality and durability, but it takes effort and dedication to accomplish that as a customer. Effectively the market is saturated with premium-branded items that are marginally better or sometimes worse (a lot of what you see as "technical clothing" comes across that way at least), you feel gaslit by marketing, fake reviews and astroturfing campaigns, and there are only so many deceptions, defeats and financial losses you can sustain before going back to the devil you know: the default everyone else is buying.
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:
>until maybe hipsters revive that too like they have with tapes?
That is already happening. I like to frequent Vintage Computer Festival and for the last few years a few of them have had MD-Con as part of a convention within a convention. A whole room dedicated to MiniDisc tech showing off laptops, desktops, camcorders, pro-hifi gear, etc. There is a collector that even brings a large portion of his collection which is all in blue including rare blue color minidiscs themselves from company promo's. One example is a promo MD from Boss Coffee in japan which looked fantastic.
There is even a revival in the software used to burn/format minidiscs since most of the original software is ancient now.
Its pretty fun to visit them as someone who used a minidisc player through highschool and college until I got the original Microsoft Zune. A lot of the people I met at the last two MD-Con's loved looking through all the models presented at the con to try and find the same device they back in the day.
> When I hear Walkman I only think of cassette tape
Same here.
I was just recently wondering if there were any places that sell Walkman's still. I remember walking around Seoul and ended up in a maze of closet sized electronic and nick-nack shops with some really random old parts and gadgets. Made me miss my old boombox. Thought that would be a good place to go back and look for a walkman, but the Maxell MXCP-P100 – wireless cassette player looks perfect
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.
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.
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.
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.
they do. tons of them. https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-mp3-player.html
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 think you’ll find that is what modern Walkmans are…
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.
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
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
you could use a smart watch, not nearly as much storage but for playing music while running it can work well enough.
> 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.
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).
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.
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
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.
> 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... :)
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 find this seriously underestimates what jackets 6 will undertake for fun, even unpaid.
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.
The demand isn’t that high for so much effort?
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
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.
> ... 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
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.
Everything has been optimized towards giving a small number of companies total control and surveillance over our media. That means forcing people to store their files on someone else's servers. Those companies don't really care about making better technology for others to use. Fewer options for the public, lack of innovation, and the increasing enshittification of everything is a price they are willing to pay for control, lock-in, and rent seeking.
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!
hold on now william gibson
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.
Billabong and quicksilver are selling 90s board short models now. They are fairly popular so …
Clothes made in the 90s used different materials and stitching than they do today, and likely cost more to produce. They'd probably need old machines they haven't had in decades.
> But then why Nike/Adidas/Quicksilver/etc cannot bring back clothes from the 90s?
They can, but people wouldn't want to pay the price. When adjusting for inflation, clothes today are much cheaper than 30 years ago, and the main producers of high-quality cotton (Kazakhstan and Egypt) are having continuous drought problems so the best raw material is even more expensive.
The combination of customer expectation for low prices, and more expensive raw materials, exacerbated by lower production volume, means that very few would be willing to buy. As an example, take a look at the high quality jeans market: there are a few niche companies in Japan, Europe, US and Canada producing jeans at the same level of quality as 50-100 years ago, in some cases the exact same model as, say, a 1950's Levi's. Those jeans start at $200 per pair, but go even up to $400-500 and the manufacturers are barely surviving.
> and the manufacturers are barely surviving
I feel for them because I wouldn't mind paying 2/3 times the price for something of measurably higher quality and durability, but it takes effort and dedication to accomplish that as a customer. Effectively the market is saturated with premium-branded items that are marginally better or sometimes worse (a lot of what you see as "technical clothing" comes across that way at least), you feel gaslit by marketing, fake reviews and astroturfing campaigns, and there are only so many deceptions, defeats and financial losses you can sustain before going back to the devil you know: the default everyone else is buying.
Have you tried dry cleaning?
Great question!
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.
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47497781
>until maybe hipsters revive that too like they have with tapes?
That is already happening. I like to frequent Vintage Computer Festival and for the last few years a few of them have had MD-Con as part of a convention within a convention. A whole room dedicated to MiniDisc tech showing off laptops, desktops, camcorders, pro-hifi gear, etc. There is a collector that even brings a large portion of his collection which is all in blue including rare blue color minidiscs themselves from company promo's. One example is a promo MD from Boss Coffee in japan which looked fantastic.
There is even a revival in the software used to burn/format minidiscs since most of the original software is ancient now.
Its pretty fun to visit them as someone who used a minidisc player through highschool and college until I got the original Microsoft Zune. A lot of the people I met at the last two MD-Con's loved looking through all the models presented at the con to try and find the same device they back in the day.
https://www.mdcon.live/
> When I hear Walkman I only think of cassette tape
Same here.
I was just recently wondering if there were any places that sell Walkman's still. I remember walking around Seoul and ended up in a maze of closet sized electronic and nick-nack shops with some really random old parts and gadgets. Made me miss my old boombox. Thought that would be a good place to go back and look for a walkman, but the Maxell MXCP-P100 – wireless cassette player looks perfect
I was glad to find this site offering refurbished iPods, and they also have refurb Walkmans.
https://retrospekt.com/collections/cassette-players
Maxell cassette players are not cassette players from back in the day, but cheap stuff like everything else: https://youtu.be/6XyaBls8jyg?is=Lrgqe23yWlelBvl-
You're many years late to the MiniDisc revival.
Those things are highly prized by flippers now.
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.
s/can't/won't/
I can take the grocery delivery order that pays $4, but I won't because the returns for my time and gas are unacceptably low.
Capitalism will make you as happy as necessary to ensure that you continue buying. No more no less.