Sony Releases a Walkman For Its 40th Anniversary (cnn.com) 96
The Sony Walkman is back. The electronics maker will release a new version of its revolutionary portable music player, it announced Friday at IFA 2019, a leading annual consumer electronics trade show in Berlin. From a report: First released in 1979, the Sony TPS-L2 Walkman was the first truly portable personal cassette player and changed the way we listen to music. Sony has since released various iterations of its Walkman, but it's gone the extra mile with this special 40th anniversary edition. The Sony NW-A100TPS Walkman has a 40th anniversary logo printed on the back, and it comes with a specially designed case and package that pay homage to the original TPS-L2 Walkman. It also has a unique cassette tape interface for those who want to take a trip down memory lane. It runs Android and offers battery life of up to 26 hours. It is built for the future, with a USB-C port for connections. Its cost and release date haven't officially been announced.
Full Ciricle. (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny how they've come full circle. Started with an open media format, the Philips compact cassette, then moved to propriety minidisc and memory stick, finally ending up back in open formats - android and microsd.
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But if they had made a working copy of the original but with some extra features then Adam Savage wouldn't have had to make a prop [youtube.com].
I was almost interested. (Score:4, Informative)
Then I saw the pictures and price. Looks like a shit Ipod rather than a Walkman, Price $US900+ which is in Apple country.
WTF. They had an opening with the Guardians of the Galaxy pushing their ancient products and they produce this overpriced ugly tripe.
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Just need to add an extra comment for the tl;dr: Don't be fooled by the pictures that show a similarity to the old box, It's just the case they throw in as a nod to the 40th birthday to get a promotional boost. You can run a "screensaver" that makes it look as if it contains a cassette. It's just another Google product, overpriced to hell.
Re:I was almost interested. (Score:4, Insightful)
About 33 years ago my boss gave me a very short course in business. The conversation went something like this.
Boss: "If you were running the company, how would you price our products?"
Me: "Well, I suppose I'd add up how much they cost to make, and transport, and sell, and then add on some margin - maybe 20% or so...?"
Boss: "Reasonable - and dead wrong. Nobody does it that way - and stays in business. What they do is to charge what the market'll bear. If you can't make a big profit selling something, you just don't sell it".
My conclusion today: punters are too stupid, or foolish, or fashion-conscious, or keen to keep up with the Joneses, to value gadgets at what they are really worth. Otherwise those prices wouldn't be possible.
It's obvious all the economists' theories about pricing and value are hopelessly wrong - unless you consider status and self-delusion the most important values in most people's lives.
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Social status in alpha predators is the primary driver that is second only to survival instinct, and even against that it's not always so. It's completely instinct-driven and can be observed in most large mammals that end up as alpha predators in their respective biomes.
Humans are alpha predators that differ from other large mammals primarily in their ability to perform cognitive abstractions of much higher complexity. Actual drivers of behaviour are largely the same.
Re: I was almost interested. (Score:2)
Social status in alpha predators...
Cool; how about in primates?
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Moderation of survival instinct by predation is a significant differentiator.
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How does your Boss know "what the market will bear"? And the vast majority of things sold don't make "a big profit". Your fake anecdote makes your Boss sound like an idiot.
Re: I was almost interested. (Score:3)
How does your Boss know "what the market will bear"?
That's generally based on supply and demand and skewed by marketing.
I know; it must be hard.
Re: I was almost interested. (Score:4, Insightful)
>"That's generally based on supply and demand and skewed by marketing. I know; it must be hard."
Exactly. It is as if we have raised generations of people who don't understand how a free market works and think companies are just greedy and evil. Businesses are trying to survive and grow.
The company will research their proposed pricing, and come out at a point they think the market will bear, usually a pretty high price. This will capture early adopters and help to cover the incredible risk and expense of design and tooling. Then they will watch what happens. Usually prices will then drop according to how much demand is present. As demand sinks, so does the price, which then stimulates new demand. if the product is good enough, other companies will jump on board with their designs and the prices will continue to fall and choice will increase.
If the product fails in the market, the business might suffer horribly, economically. If they aren't reckless, they can tweak the product by making different versions, adding or subtracting features, and try again until they find what consumers want at the price they are willing to pay.
The market knows what it wants and consumers have the ultimate say in what succeeds or fails. It is something that no government or regulatory body can accurately predict or manage. As long as businesses have the freedom to innovate, consumers have freedom to purchase, and there is adequate competition, it works quite well. It isn't perfect, but it is the best real-world system ever devised.
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The market knows what it wants and consumers have the ultimate say in what succeeds or fails.
I think that's a bit simplistic. Marketing departments exist to create desires, ideally where none existed before.
Re: I was almost interested. (Score:1)
Supply and demand.
Marketing
What do the market know about price and needs? SJWs are the only real measurement. ... Whatever then want you shouldn't produce.
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How does your Boss know "what the market will bear"?
He does some advertising for a non-existing, impossible to build product at ridiculous prices.
If orders come in he goes to the engineers and says "You've got six weeks..."
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In this case Sony would have done market research which would have asked people questions about something with similar features and what they would be willing to pay for it. Plus they would look at similar products in the marketplace. Sony has, or at least used to, have a premium on the price so they would add that on. Add on a bit more for this being a 40th anniversary item. Then take into account the exchange rate. And whatever else they can think of.
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"Sony would have done market research"
The problem with most market research is that you find out that people want mauve unicorns with spots just the perfect shade of flecked gold, when the product that would do the job perfectly was a child's tricycle.
Re: I was almost interested. (Score:2)
My conclusion today: punters are too stupid, or foolish, or fashion-conscious, or keen to keep up with the Joneses, to value gadgets at what they are really worth. Otherwise those prices wouldn't be possible.
You wrack your brains in your attempt to determine how/why Sony will make a profit on this piece of shit. It's simpler than that; they're not going to.
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It's obvious all the economists' theories about pricing and value are hopelessly wrong - unless you consider status and self-delusion the most important values in most people's lives.
That's because you are either:
1. Conflating macro-economics with micro-economics, or
2. Only reading the first chapter of a micro-economics book
You are referring to a concept called utility. It's been well studied.
Economics is a lot more complicated than supply and demand. If it wasn't there wouldn't be a field of economics.
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boss was wrong, most things sold have multiple producers and sellers. in competitive market you're back to the basics of costs and margins
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In a competitive market you have to decide not to make some products. But then, you sometimes also have to decide to make some unprofitable products just to keep your good name. People tend to be faithful to a brand until they have a reason to switch, and that faithfulness is worth money.
Which all boils down to the point being correct. You charge what the market will bear, but what the market will ultimately bear over time is very complicated, with many potentially surprising factors involved.
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Nope, local grocery stores don't decide to not make eggs. People might not be faithful to an egg farm, they just want good eggs at good price.
You might be able to undercut the local market, keeping close eye on costs and having egg sale. Might get a bulk deal on some eggs to have a huge sale to get people in store, but then you're dealing with costs and margins. Or have loss leader with eggs to get people in store to see other things on sale.
Grocery stores make low profit, 3 percent or less, the money
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The supermarket is even more complicated, because most of them are both producers of their own product, and distributors of the products of others, many of which are extremely similar.
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very true, I'm just saying that cost/profit analysis is very important and has to be done in many markets.
Re: I was almost interested. (Score:1)
You can get a device which do somewhat close to the same for 99 dollars.
This one will likely be better though. The small improvements onto the common cost a lot.
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It's obvious all the economists' theories about pricing and value are hopelessly wrong - unless you consider status and self-delusion the most important values in most people's lives.
You and the economists should take more physical anthropology courses. Status and self-delusion are overriding concerns in social primates. Rational individuals are the exception and selected against.
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You work out that pricing as the MINIMUM you can sell it at - then you charge what the market will bear.
Telcos have been doing it for decades - so when competition comes along they know exactly how low they really can go and stay in business (Hint: lower than a new startup, whilst staying profitable. Significantly lower than that if they want to choke the competition in the crib)
Re: I was almost interested. (Score:1)
Good DACs and amps cost a lot of money.
Good SOCs and displays of course cost as much in a player like this as with a phone.
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Then I saw the pictures and price. Looks like a shit Ipod rather than a Walkman, Price $US900+ which is in Apple country.
It’s beyond Apple country. Apple’s base-model iPod Touch is $199 and has 8 times the storage of this. You could spend another buck and get a cassette player app for it, too.
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Whoops, the $199 version only has *twice* the storage.
Sony has consistently made mistakes in this space (Score:2)
Their first attempts at an MP3 player didn't even play MP3s (had to use their crappy ATRAC format), and/or used proprietary storage (Memory stick instead of CF or SD), and were insanely overpriced.
This is why Apple ended up eating their lunch, even at a premium pricing level.
Now they have a chance to release something cool to celebrate 40 years of Walkman, and they bungle it up again by charging WAY too much.
I have a fondness for Sony because I've had their products all my life, including classic Walkman, b
It's not a trick (Score:2)
It's a Sony.
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It's a Sony.
Be careful there . . . Sony has probably built something into the headphones that rootkits your brain!
And wait:
It also has a unique cassette tape interface for those who want to take a trip down memory lane.
So what does that exactly mean? Can you put a cassette tape in it? Or what does this interface actually do?
Anyway, this gadget will still not be retro enough for hipster and millennial folks. They will want a Sony portable device that can play 12 inch vinyl records.
But given the size and weight of this critter, instead of being called "Walkman", Sony will need to call it "Lugman".
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So what does that exactly mean? Can you put a cassette tape in it?
I think it's just a screensaver showing a cassette with its reels turning during playback. Not an actual tape playback mechanism.
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Which would be senseless, because they didn't even put the screen in the middle, where the tape window would be.
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You can see it better here, it's just a wrap-around cover
https://www.stuff.tv/sites/stu... [stuff.tv]
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Buried in the EULA will be language authorizing a rootkit, malware activity and disabling software media companies don't like. If they're really adventurous they could search for torrent software and log activity to provide to their legal team, or go full apple and 'move your media to the sony cloud' then delete all of your local media. (hope you don't have any media you created with a name similar to a MPAA or RIAA title, or it's
Re: It's not a trick (Score:1)
Multiheaded metall and Dolby S capable NR would go some distance but digital would be better and cheaper so why bother.
Miss out on smell though.
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"unique cassette tape interface"
That means there is an erase head after the play head, so that each tape can only be played once, then you have to go buy another!
Re: It's not a trick (Score:2)
It's a Sony
So for those of us who stay on the cutting edge of audio formats, surely that means no .dsd support.
Re: It's not a trick (Score:1)
Sony supports DSD and this device do too.
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Except with only 16GB storage, you can only store 6.3 hours of stereo DSD . Pretty damn useless for one's ripped SACD collection.
They should at least have featured an SD or microSD card slot. You can get 512GB SD cards fairly affordably these days...
Little to no incentive (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: Little to no incentive (Score:3)
It's marketed at audiophiles, not necessarily the general Joe Soap music listener that still uses the in-ear headphones that came with the phone.
This is designed for a much higher quality of music than your phone can produce. Plus it has a headphone plug that most phones made today don't have.
Granted you then need to get the much higher quality music files... I wonder if Sony have a music store...
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"This is designed for a much higher quality of music than your phone can produce."
Maybe for your shit earbuds. My MDR-V150s play loud and proud on my phone with great quality coming from high-bitrate or losslessly-compressed audio. It helps to have a quality microDAC.
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It's marketed at audiophiles,
HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAA
A Sony product marketed to audiophiles, go on, pull the other one.
Sony hasn't made high-quality audio equipment in any sense since the seventies, or maybe early eighties. Now they make sophomoric mistakes in cost-cutting, like not putting enough solder on the contacts for the cutoff relays, so the impedance is high enough internally to trigger channel shutoff. That's what "killed" the Sony amp I got at the flea market for twenty bucks. I am not an audiophile, so I don't mind Sony. I don't
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All the biggest vaporwave releases are on cassette tapes. You should see what the original Walkmans are going for on eBay these days.
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I think there are applications that people use cell phones for that still work better in a standalone device, usually because of battery concerns. Playing music isn't one of them.
I still use a standalone GPS hiking and cycling; when cell phone battery life gets roughly 3x better than it is now I probably won't anymore. We passed that point for music playing years ago.
The other concern is form factor. Some people just don't want to carry a phone some of the time (e.g. running, in the gym). The market is st
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I think there are applications that people use cell phones for that still work better in a standalone device, usually because of battery concerns. Playing music isn't one of them.
Cell phone batteries will not be getting any better although you can buy units which have very large internal battery capacity.
I still use a standalone GPS hiking and cycling; when cell phone battery life gets roughly 3x better than it is now I probably won't anymore.
I have not found any cell phone which had even acceptable GPS performance due to form factor restrictions on the antenna. Besides that, my standalone GPS uses standard batteries, is waterproof, floats, and can be operated while wearing gloves.
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There is little to no incentive to have a stand alone digital music player anymore, given most cell phones will do that and more.
My iPod can go 36 hours between charges and stores 160GB of music without any apps, video, or other garbage clogging up the drive. You don't get that on a phone that can barely make a cross continent flight without going flat.
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My iPod can go 36 hours between charges and stores 160GB of music without any apps, video, or other garbage clogging up the drive. You don't get that on a phone that can barely make a cross continent flight without going flat.
Only 36 hours? Wow, Apple is getting cheap. My third rate MP3 player which includes an FM radio goes for at least a week.
16GB* storage capacity (Score:3)
*A portion of the memory is used for data management functions. Actual available memory is approx. 6.26GB
Thankfully it has SDCard support, but it doesn't appear to come with one, despite it effectively being retired.
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6.26 GB! the Creative Nomad had 6 GB almost 20 years ago. Sure this is solid state vs a spinning drive, but surely we should demand more at this point. This is really Sony just trying for a quick cash grab. Although I think the price is a little too high for a quick cash grab. It's not like the NES classic thing. At $500 it's going to take a special kind of person to really think this is a good thing to spend your money on.
Re:16GB* storage capacity (Score:4, Funny)
6.26 GB! the Creative Nomad had 6 GB almost 20 years ago.
And still no wireless. Lame.
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It has a microSD slot. They showed a 128 GB card in the ad. I don't think anyone who buys this cares about $20 extra for 20x storage.
You could not add storage to Nomad.
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Sure you could. it used a standard hard drive, so you just had to swap it for a larger one.
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That's enough space to store about two hours of quality audio. Certainly not an audiophile device. Come back when it has 6.26 TB of storage.
Not that impressive (Score:4, Interesting)
From what I'm reading it costs close to $500 US, and only comes with 16 GB of storage, although you can expand it with an SD card. For a device that touts being able to play high res tracks, it sure won't be able to store a lot of them. It only has WiFi, so that means that you'll have to connect it through your cell phone if you want to listen to a streaming service while out and about. It says it has 26 hours of battery life, which they say is more than most phones. However, in my experience, if you turn of the cell radio and background data on your phone, you can get quite a few hours of audio out of your phone. A random old phone I happen to own, the Samsung A5 2017 [gsmarena.com] is rated as having an audio playback time of 52 hours, so I'm not sure where they go the idea that 26 hours is more than most cell phones.
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If you load it up with high-res tracks then you aren't going to then go and start streaming.
If it could at least record... (Score:2)
..., it's value-for-money wouldn't be quite as dubitable. Like the WM-D6C could, by the way, back in the days.
But it doesn't play tapes! (Score:5, Informative)
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FTFA:
It also has a unique cassette tape interface for those who want to take a trip down memory lane.
Quite what that means in practice I don't know.
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my smart phone can have that on the screen. Also, it has speaker/mic jack that can actually interface with anything the old cassette player/recorders could, whether amp system, musical instruments (yes need pre-amp to get to line level, just like back in the day) or whatever
I could even put a "sony walkman" sticker on my smartphone and it would be just as much an original walkman as this thing, with the bonus of being able to make and receive phone calls!
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How can you pay homage to the original and not play tapes?
They don't. I might have been interested if it could actually play tapes. With some useful features. Say, a built-in FM radio. Ability to record from external sources (line in). Replaceable Li-ion battery. Tape counter that indicates position as time (or tries to) rather than some arbitrary # that differs from player to player. At a low enough cost that anyone could buy it as a gimmick. And maybe release some brand new tapes while they're at it (tapes are still being made but thin on the ground. Never mind
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"They don't. I might have been interested if it could actually play tapes. With some useful features. Say, a built-in FM radio. Ability to record from external sources (line in). Replaceable Li-ion battery. Tape counter that indicates position as time (or tries to) rather than some arbitrary # that differs from player to player. "
Those can be bought for about $45.
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Yeah, or, really, a high quality modern cassette player.
Many people still have some tapes laying around and the new tape players are all novelty junk so your only option is to hunt for new old stock and then try to track down replacement belts which probably disintegrated by now. I don't know who'd care about a fancy stand-alone mp3 player nowadays.
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The problem is tape cassette mechanisms are only made by one company and they pretty much only have one model of mechanism left.
Tanashin is the last company maki
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The problem is tape cassette mechanisms are only made by one company and they pretty much only have one model of mechanism left.
Tanashin is the last company making mechanisms, and the only one they're producing is a basic one (auto-stop unidirectional). Granted, it's a very reliable mechanism and has been made since the 80s, which is why it's still manufactured.
Sure, you could design your own mechanism, but a reliable mechanism that engages properly and positively all the time, despite the tape quality is not easy to make. And one that's cheap and relatively mass producible at that.
Right, but surely if anyone can do it, it'd be Sony? They must have all the old Walkman schematics around somewhere, if not a mothballed production lines. Or make one from scratch, it's not rocket science.
Obviously the economics of this would be highly questionable but it could probably be sold as a limited production run for hipsters and old people like us.
Want to bet? (Score:2)
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from the i'm-too-old-to-care dept (Score:3)
stupid and pointless if it can't make phone calls (Score:2)
a phone does everything it can do and more, so unless the walkman makes phone calls don't see point.
Sony should sell ZERO of these (Score:2)
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At least it has a headphone jack & SD card sup (Score:2)
On the negative side, it's no better than a cheap smartphone with 16 GB storage, and it's more expensive. 382 KHz sampling rate means exactly jack for all human beings due to science (Nyquist).
BTW, it would have been truly ballsy if Sony made an ACTUAL Walkman - a device that can playback tapes. There are still people releasing music on them, and people have old collections of tapes laying around.
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you have a misconception
Oversampling protects against noise and distortion being introduced in processing and anti-aliasing filtering and that's why higher sampling rates are used in high quality music recording. There is more than the limits of human hearing to consider.
Interesting that humans can detect differences in sound when frequencies above low 20s KHz are left out, to about 32KHz by some experiments
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I didn't see any mention of a headphone jack and i didn't see any in the video.
More info on other news sites .... (Score:2)
The linked site didn't give me a really good idea of what the product was supposed to look like, vs the info I found on Forbes, here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/d... [forbes.com]
I really do like the way they made it look like it's playing actual cassettes, on its touch-screen, until you open it to change settings.
But truthfully? I think Sony missed a real opportunity here to merge all of this modern tech with an actual cassette player. There are a LOT of us who still have an old collection of cassettes sitting around,
Better idea (Score:2)
I would be interested in this thing if it was priced at say $100. But they are charging over $500 for this thing, I bought my Moto G phone for $280 and I put a 128GB sd card in it... pretty much accomplishing the same thing at half the price but mine also includes phone functionality. So why would anybody buy this?
If Sony really wants to wants to celebrate the walkman here is what I propose they make... Make a device that looks like a cassette walkman. Doesn't have any kind of screen or anything, it f
Great Post (Score:1)
Improved, but SanDisk Clip is still better. (Score:2)
Vinyl Processor (Score:3)
The article linked to in the summary says that there is a "vinyl processor to give digital tracks the character of vinyl." Why the heck would I want that? If I want extra noise with my music I'll go and get vinyl. Some people like but I don't. When I hear a guitar or piano in real life there isn't an extra sound to it as there is with vinyl.
Comment removed (Score:3)
DRM? (Score:2)
How much DRM does it include? Or is DRM implemented through the high price?