Retrospectively, I'm very impressed by the mechanical quality. I remember the compartment latch failing on some (non-Sony devices), but never the actual core drive, an this is with thousands of hours of usage.
The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago
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Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago
#32Retrospectively, I'm very impressed by the mechanical quality. I remember the compartment latch failing on some (non-Sony devices), but never the actual core drive, an this is with thousands of hours of usage.
The engineering inside a cassette player (both audio cassettes and video) always intrigued me. There's so much design and manufacturing involved for something that eventually scaled to meet a $50 price point. When I was younger I couldn't fathom how companies could afford to do it.
Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago
#33Man the early Walkman was a magical device. I got a latter one and mine was barely larger than an audio cassette case.
The only access to music I had was from a friend whose older brother copied a seemingly random collection for us to have. Vangelis, The Violent Femmes, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Warren Zevon. I think I listened to the same eight cassettes for most of the following year.
Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago
#34The Walkman is a classic case of how an entrenched competitor with deep pockets couldn't really stand in the way of an innovative product. I point this out because, whenever you come across an idea for a startup, you'd inadvertently find one or more businesses already built around the idea, sometimes with ginormous funding or income. Remember how iPod beat Walkman, Firefox gazumped IE, Zoom sped past WebX, stripe poc…
> Remember how iPod beat Walkman
No. No I don’t. Who the fuck was still using a Walkman in 2001?
Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago
#35The UX of cassettes was very useful for sharing and swapping music or speech, and for resuming where one left off. Because of the linear tape, the cassette's "playback cursor" was stateful and independent from whether the medium was read-only or not. Playback resumed at (nearly) the same spot as it was last stopped, even if moved to a different player. Successor formats didn't have this property. Interestingly, Sony…
I love how you conceptualise things based upon what seems to be your familiarity with DB cursors, stateful interfaces and other CS concepts. You're absolutely right, of course - it's just an interesting choice of conceptual frameworks to position your analogy within. I'm sure a non-programmer could also identify this property of cassettes as a medium, but they wouldn't be anywhere near as precise, nor use anything like that terminology...
I'm reminded of a character called Randy in a book called Cryptonomicon:
> To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy's fundamental metaphor for just about everything)
I had a smile of recognition reading that, just like I had a smile of recognition reading yours. Stateful indeed. You might even term it a continuation.
Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago
#36The UX of cassettes was very useful for sharing and swapping music or speech, and for resuming where one left off. Because of the linear tape, the cassette's "playback cursor" was stateful and independent from whether the medium was read-only or not. Playback resumed at (nearly) the same spot as it was last stopped, even if moved to a different player. Successor formats didn't have this property. Interestingly, Sony…
I enjoyed reading your comment, and couldn't help but thinking how I miss this time. The joy of bringing something physical to somebody - a cassette, a vinyl - for their listening pleasure. The feedback loop from the act of giving and receiving. This whole idea of physical sharing made the music more personal and magical.
Nowadays I have shared playlist for family and friends, and it lacks magic.
Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You knew the gear wasn't imagined and designed by a bunch of bean counters. Hmmm.... Only later when they were marketing TV's? Hated Sony for selling essentially the same TV with the same guts but leaving out one chip (for example) so that "Picture in Picture" required you spend an extra $500 on the high end model. I always suspected it went something like this: • Engineers describe the feature set they can deliver…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
What does this have to do with anything?
Product differentiation is not price discrimination.
If they were selling the same exact product with same features at different prices, then maybe. But this is not the case.
This is just you being unhappy with the market clearing price for those features.
Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago
#38Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
Thanks, yeah, that's been our Brave New World. :(
The bean counters don’t set the price.. the market does. The bean counters are there to predict how the market will respond and plan accordingly.
If they weren’t selling an adequate number of FX TVs at the higher price... they would lower it. I guess they didn’t have to.
This has nothing to do with price discrimination either, which is when the same good or service is offered at different prices in different markets.
Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
What does this have to do with anything? Product differentiation is not price discrimination. If they were selling the same exact product with same features at different prices, then maybe. But this is not the case. This is just you being unhappy with the market clearing price for those features.
It is a form of price discrimination called tiered pricing:
https://www.priceintelligently.com/tiered-pricing
For a mass market good it’s not tactful to openly ask each customer how much they’re willing to pay and sell at that maximum price, so another way to get closer to achieving that is to differentiate products with features that have very low marginal costs.
Psychologically, it’s also part of “anchoring” where you establish the lowest value of the product with the lowest price version, so the middle and high prices don’t seem so bad.
And of course, who wants to buy the cheapest version of something? People generally feel better buying a better product, so the cheapest one might only exist to do that. Also a good strategy for wine in restaurants, sell the wine with the lowest supply cost at the middle price, because people will opt for the middle priced item over the lowest price.