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Sony Discontinues the Walkman
Ponca City writes "Crunchgear reports that after selling 200,020,000 units worldwide since its inception over thirty years ago, Sony has announced that it is pulling the plug on the manufacture and sales of the Walkman, the world's first portable (mass-produced) stereo. Magnetic cassette technology had been around since 1963, when Philips first created it for use by secretaries and journalists, but on July 1, 1979, Sony Corp. introduced the Sony Walkman TPS-L2, a 14 ounce, blue-and-silver, portable cassette player with chunky buttons, headphones, a leather case, and a second earphone jack so that two people could listen in at once. The Walkman was originally introduced in the US as the 'Sound-About' and in the UK as the 'Stowaway,' but coming up with new, uncopyrighted names in every country it was marketed in proved costly so Sony eventually decided on 'Walkman' as a play on the Sony Pressman, a mono cassette recorder the first Walkman prototype was based on. The popularity of Sony's device — and those by brands like Aiwa, Panasonic and Toshiba who followed in Sony's lead — helped the cassette tape outsell vinyl records for the first time in 1983 as Sony continued to roll out variations on its theme with over 300 different Walkman models, adding such innovations as AM/FM receivers, bass boost, and auto-reverse on later models and even producing a solar-powered Walkman, water-resistant Sport Walkman, and Walkmen with two cassette drives." For now, at least, the Walkman brand lives on for some of Sony's media players and phones.
Hard to believe something that was once the #1 format for music (late 80s and early 90s) is now foreign to anyone college aged or younger.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Am I wrong, but is that more units than the total human population? Needless to say... Dead man Walkman.
I think you need to learn how to count again. The last time I checked, 200 million (if counting the cassette-based units; 400m otherwise) was considerably less than 7 billion.
Nowadays this would be called a Walkperson.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/aw-what-the-hell-heres-the-microwalkman-weve-been,17178/
When Sony released the first Walkmans, they featured two headphone jacks and a "talk button." When pressed, this button activated a microphone and lowered the volume to enable those listening to have a conversation without removing their headphones.[2] Sony Chairman Akio Morita added these features to the design for fear the technology would be isolating. Though he "thought it would be considered rude for one person to be listening to his music in isolation" (Morita quoted in Patton[3]), people bought their own units rather than share
(emphasis mine)
Hm, maybe communicating across the wall, via IM, with the family/etc. isn't so bad after all...
(the topic of "soundtrack to life" also worth noting, where the above quote came from)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Well it was about time no? My holloween costume from last year included a yellow walkman, some folks could have thought I was the Encino Man lol...I didn't know they were still in production!
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
I suspect if we look hard enough we could find some music industry comment freaking out about how this new technology was going to end the world...
... without this link: Finally after 20 years of court battles, the electronics giant agrees to pay the inventor of the device that made its success.
Yep. You also can't copyright a name in the UK. The only thing you can do is trademark them.
I remember buying this at Neiman-Marcus in Dallas, Texas when it came out.
Fresh out of college with no experience, and with a starting salary greater than what my uncle earned with 30 years experience as a skilled machinist, I paid $300 if I recall.
Which was a lot of money at the time. I remember hesitating before buying it, but rationalized that after four tough years in college, and given my salary, I had earned it.
It was robustly built and had many parts made from metal, and it lasted for many years. (Unlike the vast majority of consumer products made nowadays.)
I don't recall what I did with it. Upon this nostalgic reflection, I'm glad I bought it.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
Thanks for the insightful comment. Everyone here at /. was at loss without this important clarification. Now can we get back to nostalgic memories of childhood days and leave silly pedantics alone for a few minutes?
Jesus, some people never quit.
BTW, "but not as poorly worded" is also a poorly worded sentence, but I'll leave it as an exercise for you to fix on your own. I don't believe in FTFYs.
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
Yeah it feels kind of a low number, you'd expect at least a significant portion of the world population to have (or had) a walkman by now. But that 200 million number refers to Sony models, and of course there are many products from other manufacturers that (ignoring Sony's brand name) would commonly be called 'walkman'. Even if limited to audio-cassette based ones. I wonder what's total number - anyone got some references?
Or a troll.
Way back in the early 80's, an old, wise Princeton professor complained about this new trend of students constantly wearing Walkmans. His comment was, "They seem to think that life must have a soundtrack album, like a film."
Another comment was about the trend to wear long black coats, or sectional down jackets: "They either try to look like Raskolnikov or hand grenades."
Nowadays, when I'm out and about, most of the younger folks seem to be "tuned in." To the extent that they cannot hear a car honking at them when they ride their bikes through a red light.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
How did you even come close to thinking that 200,020,000 is anywhere close to ~7,000,000,000? There are ~310,000,000 people in the US alone.
My favourite Walkman - and I've still got one - is the one which is exactly the same size as a compact cassette case. It uses just a single AA battery and is an utter masterpiece of miniaturisation. There is a slight trick to how they get all the guts and motors of a cassette player within the size of a standard case, but it's still very clever.
I remember making copies for friends and receiving them as well.
Once it was possible, the music industry was not able to sell any more music. Artists went to get real jobs and that is why all music you hear is only done by amateurs.
The best you can compare is what VHS did to the film industry. A few obscure independent movie makers is all that you have left.
And all this because of piracy. Right?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Well, if the name is long and creative enough, I'm sure you also can copyright it. For example, you could use a 20 line poem as name of your product. It's probably not a good idea, but it's certainly not forbidden.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Obligatory YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3jkUhG68wY
No, just that I believe most people here understood that the summery was talking about a trademark and not copyright, and the parent just came off as a show off.
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
The real news here is that it took until 2010 for them to discontinue it. Seriously, who in the world was actually buying a cassette player in the last 10 years?
I'm not surprised at the long persistence of tape, in general; but of Sony's persistence in the market.
Even though the cost of a gig of flash and some cheapass SoiC may well have fallen below the cost of a tape transport, that only really helps in an environment where computers with which to load and reload the resultant low-end mp3 player are ubiquitous. Tape, while it imposes higher fixed costs on the player, allows extremely cheaply duplicated cassettes to be sold and swapped(and unlike cheap optical transports, tape is writable).
However, even if there is still a case for tape, it has only applied in some pretty downmarket areas. In the first world, wearing a tape-player in public is practically a diagnostic signal of mental illness, now, that's how downmarket they are. For Sony, a company that prefers higher margin niches, it seems like a very odd place to be. I'll be genuinely suprised when the last cheap-n'-nearly-anonymous Chinese OEM stops making the things; but I would have expected Sony to leave the area some time ago. Perhaps their brand is still worth enough that they figured they could make some money stamping it on devices produced by somebody else, and keeping a few pennies of the premium it commanded over identical goods by lesser names?
The news is that they were still making the things for the last 10 years.
Although technically they're still making Walkmans. Just not cassette based versions.
I'd feel somewhat more differently if Sony were still the company of the 70s and 80s, a Japanese company concerned with quality and style trying to prove its product to the world. Now they just coast, especially in Japan where their brand is still synonymous with quality because of their past successes, building for next quarter as opposed to the next 5 years (with the exception of the PS3, and even that has been mishandled). There was a reason I still have two working Sony Walkman tape players from the 80s and a working Betamax player (and a still-working set of Beta tapes including Raiders of the Lost Ark), a working 20" Sony Trinitron from 1987(ish), and yet I went through 6 PS2s and 2 PS3s. And I certainly didn't lose the ability to record TV shows on that Betamax player through a firmware update.
Funny....
I have an original PS2 (the big bricky one), and it outlasted my PS3. Blu-Ray drive blew up right after a firmware update. The fact that Sony has to issue press releases that firmware updates aren't the cause of drive failures, kinda says sumpin, no?
do() || do_not();
I for one was a big supporter of the Walkman back in my highschool days and went through a couple players just from wear and tear. I skipped over the discman because I like making mix tapes and the discman was bulky and would drain batteries quickly. Once the Net walkman came out, I jumped on that because of it's size and Sony's rep for making quality walkmans. At the time of purchase I had no idea users had to use Sonic Stage to transfer music. Sonic Stage was just about the worst software I have ever used. Users were forced to use this garbage software to copy music to the player and during the process all their music was then converted to ATRAC3. The process was so painful and slow that once you had music on your player, you never wanted to change it just to avoid using Sonic Stage. Needless to say, once that netwalkman died I never replaced it and haven't gone back to Sony since.
Ya know, for the longest time I thought that FTFY meant Fuck That, Fuck You. Maybe it still does.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
You probably still have a chance, since they just announced they are discontinuing it... I doubt this will increase demand. You may have troubles finding a store that still carries them new, however, chances are you could find an old one on eBay if you looked hard.. they were that popular that there are probably many old ones whose owners don't want them anymore, and hope to sell to collectors/hoarders of odds and ends.
You should learn to count in English.
billion = 1e9
You probably still have a chance, since they just announced they are discontinuing it... I doubt this will increase demand.
You may have troubles finding a store that still carries them new, however, chances are you could find an old one on eBay if you looked hard.. they were that popular that there are probably many old ones whose owners don't want them anymore, and hope to sell to collectors/hoarders of odds and ends.
I wonder what's more difficult - finding a new Walkman, or finding music on cassette to listen to on that Walkman?
#DeleteChrome
I went for "Fixed That For You", but your definition also hold water, if needed.
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
Am I wrong, but is that more units than the total human population? Needless to say... Dead man Walkman.
I think you need to learn how to count again. The last time I checked, 200 million (if counting the cassette-based units; 400m otherwise) was considerably less than 7 billion.
Yeah, but check the timestamp on that original post - it was from 1348AD. Those Dark Age web browsers were really slow...
#DeleteChrome
man, learn long and short scales
I just Googled Astraltune and it appears that Sony paid them millions for the "idea" in 2004... stupid.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I wonder what's more difficult - finding a new Walkman, or finding music on cassette to listen to on that Walkman?
You can always put music onto a cassette. Never hear the term "Mix Tape"?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
There are a bunch of audio books you can still get on cassette tape, the library also seems to have a whole lot of this. It will be mostly old content.
To listen to new music, you may have to implement the 1990s version of "sync your iPod". Buy CDs, and use a cassette recorder to record the music to blank cassette tapes which are still available
Sounds like a pain... iPod sync is a lot faster and more convenient than copying to cassette.
Although there is a minor advantage, that once copied to tape, you can switch between tapes almost instantly, this is more than made up for by how much music an iPod can hold at a time, however.
The blue model. It had that funky "hot line" button and a mic. I was convinced there was a way to make it record, but I was a child then and didn't realize that no record head, no recording.
Good times.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Interesting... I would have thought that the massive virus/rootkit/audio CD thing would have killed them by now. Or their yanking the plug on advertised features of their products. Or suing their users for using their products in innovative ways.
Whatever. Sony, you can pretty much do what you want. Anyone who is still a customer of yours evidently enjoys the pain.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
In manufacturing, the Walkman was notable for its construction. It was designed for automated vertical assembly. In vertical assembly, all components are inserted by simple robots which move straight down to add a part to the base. The base is designed to support and align the parts so that this simple approach to assembly will work. It's fast, cheap, and fully automated.
Apple tried vertical assembly briefly. The Macintosh IIci was designed for vertical assembly. The power supply went in vertically and clicked into the motherboard. No internal cables. Then they went over to outsourced manual assembly with cheap labor. Swatch watches also used vertical assembly. Simpler cell phones are often assembled in this way.
You can always put music onto a cassette. Never hear the term "Mix Tape"?
No, no, *please* don't do that! As the campaign from the Walkman's glory days informed us....
;'-(
Home Taping is Killing Music... and it's Illegal.
I still feel guilty about how copying some of my parents' LPs had caused the end of the music industry by 1988.
*cough*
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Indeed: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Oh no, so no more of those Plato ads?
I've seen in other stories, though not here, that the Walkman was killed by the superior Ipod.
I hope that myth doesn't proliferate here.
There were hundreds of mp3 players out before the ipod, which was just a better (cleaned-up) and cheaper implementation of digital "medialess" technology.
The walkman was wonderful for its degree of portability at the time it came out.
What could possibly kill the mp3 player, or the music-streaming service? Envision your answer now.
Actually I wouldn't even say switching tapes is an advantage anymore, as many $30-$50 Sandisk players now had Micro-SD slots which let you switch cards of up to 8Gb, so you can not only switch "tapes" you can have 8Gb genre cards and the cards plus player take up less than a pack of cigarettes, while the Walkman was always a fat bastard by comparison.
What killed the Walkman was Sony Entertainment and Sony's love for proprietary formats and DRM. While everyone else jumped on MP3 as soon as they saw it was the de-facto standard everyone was using, Sony desperately hung onto ATRAC like it was actually something people would use. Why would I bother converting to your funky proprietary format, when others would play the file as is? Hell my 2008 Sony car stereo still has support for ATRAC, not that I'd ever use it.
It just goes to show that having a consumer entertainment arm and a consumer electronics division under one roof is a BAD idea.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I had a waterproof walkman, brilliant
then I had a solar one, fantastic
now I have a two MP3 Walkman - the best mp3 players I ever used. and beautiful.
I have an NWZ-A818 and a X Series - lovely. I just enjoy holding them
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Ironic, in English, it's 1e12.
American it may be 1e9
I did, my maths teacher taught me that 1,000,000,000 is one thousand million and that 1,000,000,000,000 is one billion.
No, just retarded.
And from the same link in the comment section of the article:
Astraltune is the original personal portable stereo sold in the US (1975). Morita purchased an Astraltune in Aspen, Co. in 1978. Prior art can void any patent claim.
It's too bad the Sony lawyers settled this case before crowdsourcing the research of prior art.
Not anymore it isn't. I live in the UK, and a billion in the UK is now generally accepted to be 1e9.
Both standards were defined as exactly (or very close to) half the rate of the alternating current (AC) that powered them. In the U.S. 60 Hz AC is the standard, so NTSC could use a very simple circuit to translate that to 30 frames per second. The rate was decreased very slightly to about 59.94 Hz to assist with color encoding, and by that time the electronics were more advanced anyway.
You are the moron: I never claimed that copyrighting and trademarking are the same thing. However, you (assuming you're the same AC) explicitly claimed "You CAN'T copyright a name." I gave an example of a name that you can copyright. You can also trademark it (unless there's a limit to the length of names you can trademark), but that's besides the point.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
My Walkman plays MP3s only. It's got a drag-and-drop interface and loads as a mass USB storage device. The sound quality is quite good.
The only problem I have with it is that you can only create playlists using WMP11, which doesn't run under Wine.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Nice anecdote.
I live in the UK, and generally accept a billion to be 1e12, but assume someone means 1e9 if they're on tv or it's in their interests to exaggerate.
Doing a physics degree, a billion is always 1e12 in the lab.
so.... you're a girl, huh?
The reason I still keep my 10 year old walkman is because aside from my car radio, its the only device I have that has AM radio and works during a power interruption, and I'm too cheap to buy a newer AM radio when I have one that works perfectly. AM radio is perfect for news reports during typhoons