My daughter asked for a record player for Christmas. My wife and I picked a few albums to gift her… knowing that she’ll be captive to them for a short while. Starting her off with Nirvana’s mtv unplugged, Miles Davis kind of blue, and abbey road. She’s got great taste in music, so I’m looking forward to her to slowing down and deliberately experiencing an album, rather than fragmented playlists sprinkled with “Alexa/siri skip” every few minutes.
Yeap, it comes across as anemoia false nostalgia pining for a "utopia" than never existed. I had Weird Al and Metallica on cassette and a cheap-o, bulky Walkman and Koss Porta Pros. It didn't really ever play at a constant speed and ate batteries like they were free. When CDs came out (which was actually around 1981), they were a million times better, but it took forever to get the Discman down to a halfway decent price and not skip like crazy on the slightest bump. A good example of a portable CD player that worked well was the '94 Sony D-828K Car Discman that also wasn't just for cars.
And the 80's and 90's weren't that great. The best thing that happened was George Carlin on pirated analog HBO telling us how Americans were morons and that everything sucked. ;o)
Flash storage bit rots. As do consumer writable optical media. RAID HDD or you ain't got nothing.
I wonder why SanDisk stopped manufacturing the Sansa Clip+. The production cost in 2025 would be extremely low and the demand still relatively high (relatively high as in, really low but high enough to sustain it as a product).
I can't imagine choosing a cassette walkman over an mp3 player just based on how much music fits on the device.