Before there were iPods and other .mp3 players, if you wanted to take your music with you and listen via headphones, odds are you had a Walkman. Introduced 30 years ago, the portable, personal cassette players were an iconic part of the 80s.
Now, they’re antiques.
Sony announced the news that it’s stopped production of the iconic Walkman. The company produced the last run in April. Once they’re sold out, that’s it for the Walkman (except on E-Bay, of course).
The first generation Walkman was released on July 1, 1979 in Japan. Although it later became a huge success, it only sold 3,000 units in its first month. Sony managed to sell some 200 million iterations of the cassette Walkman during the product line’s 30-year career.
The announcement was delivered just one day ahead of the iPod’s ninth anniversary on October 23. And while iPods and other such players did help lead to the decline, it was the advent of CDs that helped push cassettes toward extinction.
If Sony makes MP3 players under the Walkman brand than the name is going away, just the cassette player
I’m surprised they were still making them.
I still have a vintage 1997 walkman in a drawer of my office. The tape drive is mostly worn out, but the radio still works. Now I have to consider keeping it as a pop culture collectible.
i still have and use daily a sony radio only walkman that i got in the mid 80s. a quarter of a century old! a good investment.
sony was famous for it’s build quality and for years i was happy to buy their products. but then about 10-12 years ago as other companies brought out cd players with mp3 playback their devices seemed to be going backward and would be the only devices in the shop that could not even play cd-rs with music on them. i stopped buying their hardware at that time. they were mp3s i had ripped from my cds or cds that i put my favourite songs onto in cd format. not downloads. restricted to 56k dial up i wasn’t downloading music.
but cassettes in the 80s. my first computer was a zx spectrum that used tapes for games. copying them was great fun when i didn’t have a direct ear phone to mic cable. hanging a mic from a light fitting over a player on a cushioned chair to reduce background vibration. fun times!
haven’t used a cassette since around 98.