Still would have been good for the Substack author to link to the tweet rather than just embedding a nearly-too-small-to-be-readable png of a JPEG and six links to the tweet author's X profile.
tonyhart7 47 minutes ago [-]
Yes, that is the primary reason
people just want it but not enough people to buy the thing
same happen with physical games
cbmuser 3 hours ago [-]
It’s really only economics, there is simply no relevant market for mechanical cassette players that would justify the investment.
I don’t think it’s true that the capabilities to make these devices are lost. There are still companies like ALPS that are capable of making the necessary parts.
But in the end, the market is too small to justify any investments.
bombcar 1 hours ago [-]
There's still TAPE drives out there, but nowhere near as many as there were, and they're expensive.
You could make a Walkman; it'd cost $3-10k each.
johncoltrane 40 minutes ago [-]
There are lots of portable cassette players on the market, starting at 20€ or less.
geon 32 minutes ago [-]
Only low quality. But yes, building better quality shouldn’t cost $ 10k
trencedamp 12 hours ago [-]
This is a really interesting read. But it doesn't answer one question I have, which is why can't Sony or Apple or anyone else bring back decent MP3 players? None of this technology is lost, and there are plenty of small-time two bit no name players out there still making them, often in a much smaller, much slicker form factor than than the original digital Walkman or iPod.
If I want to buy a new MP3 player, I have to buy something from a company I've never heard of with a terrible screen, use an old phone, or buy some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much.
Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?
nl 3 hours ago [-]
> If I want to buy a new MP3 player, I have to buy something from a company I've never heard of with a terrible screen, use an old phone, or buy some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much.
Is this surprising?
They are a commodity (you can literally build a fairly decent for less than $10 in parts) so therefore are low profit. Brands you have heard of generally don't want to play in commodity markets.
The alternative is to move upmarket where prestige or specific features are important:
> some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much.
There you go.
> Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?
They can and do. Look on Amazon.
They call into the two buckets you outline above. Just buy one of the $50 ones from the companies you haven't heard of.
Dylan16807 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
smolder 9 minutes ago [-]
You want an mp3 player with no DRM lockin and proprietary store and so on? Sorry, that's not competitive anymore. That will not happen for the same reason people don't make affordable dumb TVs anymore. The manufacturer needs a way to spy on you or get recurring revenue some other way.
That would be "some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much"
The entry level Walkman is $400 and only has 32gb internal storage. It's all about flac and hires audio but you're paying through the nose for the brand
phire 9 minutes ago [-]
I guess there just is no room in the current market for a mid-ranged product.
It is being squeezed on at least five sides (probably more):
- Cheap low-end no-name players;
- Audiophile products like the Sony walkman stuff;
- People who are happy using their phones;
- (for the exercise "phone too heavy" use case) A smart watch, paired to bluetooth headphones;
- Second hand iPods from the 2000s, often refurbished and/or modded;
Maybe one of the low-end no-name players meets your needs... But how could you find it wading through the crap?
SpecialistK 8 hours ago [-]
They had models like the A55L (https://www.whathifi.com/reviews/sony-nw-a55l) which were more affordable, but the venn diagram of "cheap" and "niche audiophile gear" is two separate circles. Those who want nostalgia get iPods and mod them with SD cards and new batteries. Those who want Android and a headphone jack have older used phones or new budget ones (Moto g Power 2024 is US$129) and the market for cheap "nuggets" is not wide enough nor would there be enough margin to justify continued production.
That product category simply isn't worthwhile for big brands anymore.
bandrami 3 hours ago [-]
IDK I've got some rando Chinese product that looks pretty much exactly like a late-2000s iPod "classic" and has some fairly generic Android interface including a decent music player. I think it cost like $40.
parl_match 2 hours ago [-]
> which is why can't Sony or Apple or anyone else bring back decent MP3 players
the burning answer is really, by the time you've chosen a modern merchant soc, and put a screen on it, you're really more or less at the same BOM cost as a very low end android device (and frankly, the soc bsp you chose is likely to be android/aosp to begin with)
so you're basically competing head to head with every shitphone maker out there, and they have economies of scale. you do not.
> Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware
and so... now you're competing with simple smartphones. you're going to charge more for a fancy case for something that requires to be carried separate from your phone and offers zero additional advantage?
btw, im sure someone like shanling is making exactly what you're thinking of, but they often have limited production runs and still cost within the same range as a basic android phone (usually a bit more)
klausa 27 minutes ago [-]
>the burning answer is really, by the time you've chosen a modern merchant soc, and put a screen on it, you're really more or less at the same BOM cost as a very low end android device (and frankly, the soc bsp you chose is likely to be android/aosp to begin with)
This is, incidentally, also almost universally an answer to "why doesn't nobody make a dumb TV anymore?!"
The off-the-shelf SoC that handle the TV decoding/HDMI bits already has a bunch of general purpose ARM cores; might as well put Android on it instead of writing your own firmware.
turtlebits 10 hours ago [-]
Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?
Because you can do that with any phone and just not use the phone part?
trencedamp 8 hours ago [-]
Because I want something half the size of a phone. I don't need a giant screen, I just want a player that can do music or audiobooks and be light enough to run with.
I find myself researching, trying to find the smallest lightest old phone that either has decent internal memory or a micro SD slot, but it's not easy. Most phones are massive compared to an iPod shuffle
wmf 4 hours ago [-]
There are a ton of these and they're all behind your "company I've never heard of" blind spot.
They have an AI assistant on the webpage and it says that the shortcut to activate it is cmd+Q (on Mac this is a global shortcut to quit an application, akin to alt+F4) which is absolutely psychotic. I wonder if in chinese macOS the shortcut is different or something or the person designing it uses windows and just thought ctrl+q(uestion) makes perfect sense
1 hours ago [-]
jayGlow 7 hours ago [-]
you could use a smart watch, not nearly as much storage but for playing music while running it can work well enough.
arthurfm 2 hours ago [-]
There's a case [1] for the Apple Watch that turns it into an 'iPod'. It's also quite similar to the Pod Case concept [2].
MP3s have been on the way out for a long time, being replaced by music subscriptions. And "MP3 player" is a feature of other devices, not its own device. Both my Apple Watch and Garmin watch can store and play MP3s without a phone; both also support music subscriptions.
The only market is in the "enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much", just like it is currently for vinyls and DVD players.
stevekemp 1 hours ago [-]
I buy films from local charity shops for €1/film, but it seems the local electronics stores are not selling many DVD players any more.
It seems like streaming "won", which is disappointing.
TacticalCoder 10 hours ago [-]
> MP3s have been on the way out for a long time, being replaced by music subscriptions
I both have music subscriptions (Spotify for the wife, Qobuz for me: Qobuz streams lossless but sucks for music discovery) and good old files (mostly FLAC files indeed except some very old, impossible-to-find, live recordings I only have in mp3). One does not prevent the other.
Also some people self-host or partially self-host things: you stream from a server you own: be it family pictures (I'm Mich / immich), movies and/or music (Plex or Jellyfin). And, well, the stream doesn't spring out of thin air: there are good old files on the server.
Lastly: some music streaming services allows you to buy albums and/or individual songs, DRM-free.
jerlam 6 hours ago [-]
I'm not saying that MP3 and CDs and cassette tapes and vinyl don't work. But they are on the decline and no company would be wise to make a mass-market device specifically for them, when the mass market has moved on.
Did you even read the article? They mention Sony sells a new Walkman just like what you mention https://www.sony.co.uk/walkman
nubinetwork 11 hours ago [-]
The iPod was a product in an interesting time... if you ignore the screen, a modern mp3 player could be made as small as a SD card... as soon as you add the screen, you need a full operating system to manage files and run the screen. Nobody wants to put the effort into something that's going to be as basic as a mp3 player.
Rohansi 4 hours ago [-]
> as soon as you add the screen, you need a full operating system to manage files and run the screen
More software? Sure. An operating system? No. There were (are?) plenty of cheap MP3 players that had screens but just drive it with some budget microcontroller.
nubinetwork 3 hours ago [-]
And they're all e-waste nuggets sitting in dankpods' storage closet... :)
trencedamp 8 hours ago [-]
It barely needs a screen. I adored my minidisc players and they were all basically calculator displays
ezst 6 hours ago [-]
Would you still adore it as much today, though? I know I don't adore my iPod classic as much now as I did in 2006, and that's inclusive of the nostalgia kick. It's just not very practical and usable in today's world.
thejazzman 2 hours ago [-]
I still adore the hell out of my 512GB (SD) iPod Classic/Minis
You can buy new shells, colors, storage adapters, batteries, etc.
I don't use it daily, but I enjoyed rediscovering and using my MiniDisc stuff that I was inspired to build a pretty popular website around it :)
youngtaff 1 hours ago [-]
I adored my MiniDisc too but the limited storage of a single disk makes it easy to find the music you want
Given how much we can store in solid state not sure I’d want to navigate my library without a screen
fortyseven 11 hours ago [-]
I find this seriously underestimates what jackets 6 will undertake for fun, even unpaid.
rtpg 2 hours ago [-]
My understanding is there are decent MP3 players by places like Fiio at this point? Haven't used any of em in anger though
Though I have a walkman (that kinda sucks cuz it's android.... it's (USB-C AND annoying Android OS) XOR (Proprietary charging cable) from Sony nowadays
> Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?
Sony Walkmans are this, along with a bunch of the random mp3 players you would find on amazon. I don't know why some other people replying to you are acting like this doesn't exist.
nl 1 hours ago [-]
> Sony Walkmans are this
The cheapest one I'm seeing is the Sony NW-A306. That's around $600 - I think it fits into the OP's category of "some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much"
gyulai 3 hours ago [-]
> If I want to buy a new MP3 player, I have to buy something from a company I've never heard of with a terrible screen, use an old phone, or buy some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much.
I recently got the Shanling M0s. It runs its own OS and seems to me completely at parity with what MP3 players used to be back in the day; in fact I think it's the best one I've ever had, and I've been buying those devices since the Diamond Rio. If more people just got one, Shanling would no longer be a company nobody's ever heard of, and the economics would change to further bring down the price too (although I think it's not all that bad right now).
fragmede 1 hours ago [-]
Then we're just haggling over price though. Make more money and be less cheap. Also, I'd like a Ferrari and only pay $20 for it.
11 hours ago [-]
bamboozled 3 hours ago [-]
I think you’ll find that is what modern Walkmans are…
sharts 9 hours ago [-]
The demand isn’t that high for so much effort?
snapetom 1 hours ago [-]
Apple got it right with the original iPod, and your ask, and others, is just to extend it to modern times. A lot of these comments simply aren't helpful, and people chiming in know it. For me, I was looking for
1) Music player that holds a ton of songs.
2) Lossless.
3) No touch screen control.
4) Battery that is long lasting and semi-replaceable.
5) Smaller than modern phones.
6) Great software experience, which for me meant Apple Music compatible.
7) Wired. Not Bluetooth.
A $400 Sony Android-based player doesn't meet 3, 4, nor 5. Most importantly, $400 for a product that doesn't meet some pretty important criteria is ridiculous. A shitty tiny Chinese player isn't going to meet 3, 4, 6 and it'll die on you in a couple of years and you'll be back at square one.
My solution was to buy a 5.5 Gen iPod off eBay ($100), a microSD card carrier (iFlash.xyz - $40), and four microSD cards (Back in my day, $50 each for 256gb). Yes, I had to open the iPod, but yes, it checks all my boxes. And it came in less than the Sony player.
jjav 3 minutes ago [-]
> For me, I was looking for
To add:
- A physical switch to turn off all inputs. The older ipods had a slider switch that disables all buttons and screen inputs, which was awesome.
Mostly I use an mp3 player when working on things (yard, cars, house, etc) and need something very small and very light, so not a phone. My older ipod with the switch broke down so I'm stuck with a newer ipod which lacks that switch and I hate it. Every few minutes it activates some button press from being in my pocket and ruins the listening.
Jiro 9 hours ago [-]
My "MP3 player" is a phone with Musicolet. If you really distrust phones, you can buy a cheap phone and use it only for that and nothing else. There are probably other offline MP3 players but this one seems pretty good. (It is hard to find a phone with an SD card slot and a headphone jack but that's a separate issue.)
trencedamp 8 hours ago [-]
The problem with cheap phones is how big they all are
izacus 9 hours ago [-]
I don't understand the question, Sony still sells a product line of both premium and cheaper mp3 player devices?
Although FiiO is probably the company to look at for these kind of products.
trencedamp 8 hours ago [-]
Show me the cheaper one please. The lowest price Walkman I can see is 400 bucks for 32gb
izacus 2 hours ago [-]
That is the decent player you're looking for. (It has an SD card slot.)
iPods weren't cheap either.
steve1977 3 hours ago [-]
That is the cheaper one.
zoeysmithe 3 hours ago [-]
These companies did everything they could to get people off the "I own files I paid once" model and onto the perpetual "I pay for streaming" model. Of course they dont want to go back to that. It goes against the profit incentive which dictates all business decisions. That's how capitalism works on its most fundamental level.
TacticalCoder 10 hours ago [-]
> ... why can't Sony or Apple or anyone else bring back decent MP3 players?
I know the late 90s called and want their MP3 straight out of Napster and their 10 GB HDD back but you can safely up the ante to lossless FLAC files.
MP3 is, literally, 30+ years old and I traded my 10 GB HDD for a 1 TB NVMe SSD that could read an uncompressed dump of my entire 10 GB HDD in about two seconds.
FLAC files are only about 2x the size of 320 kbps mp3.
Really, it's 2026. We can do it (I do it).
trencedamp 8 hours ago [-]
Hey I'm happy if it plays flac, but all I want is decent storage and it to not cost a fortune
stefantalpalaru 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
potbelly83 12 hours ago [-]
Sometimes reading these articles I can't help but think we've pushed ourselves into a local but sup-optimal maximum technologically speaking. i.e. If we didn't follow the path of trying to stick everything into an iPhone/Android (along with moving everything into the cloud), we'd have a more interesting technological landscape.
autoexec 12 hours ago [-]
Everything has been optimized towards giving a small number of companies total control and surveillance over our media. That means forcing people to store their files on someone else's servers. Those companies don't really care about making better technology for others to use. Fewer options for the public, lack of innovation, and the increasing enshittification of everything is a price they are willing to pay for control, lock-in, and rent seeking.
dotancohen 2 hours ago [-]
It's all the same arguments as the "Why can't we build another Saturn V rocket" and the like. The parts are no longer available, the technical blueprints that remain do not paint a full picture of the manufacturing process, and the engineers and machinists who did know the full picture are mostly retired and decreased.
verve_rat 1 hours ago [-]
Yup. In other words, we totally could, but there is no reason to put the time, effort and money into doing so.
ButlerianJihad 49 minutes ago [-]
We can't build Saturn V rockets because there are not enough Egyptian slaves to do it today, and also we can't figure out how to prevent damage to the rockets as our donkeys roll them across the ground to the launch pad.
nmstoker 9 hours ago [-]
This is sad but no great surprise. What does surprise me a little is how far ranging the "we can't make those parts anymore" argument goes. I thought back to those seriously slim Sony Walkman and Aiwa players people would bring back to school from the Far East and even the basic things like the sliding buttons were better than products have nowadays: they would inevitably be tiny, sleek, yet beautifully engineered to still be easy to push/slide, they'd be metal, often powder coated to match the body, would involve super low tolerances, and have a satisfying quality reminiscent of closing/opening the door of a Mercedes! It feels like we can't even do them justice now... Or maybe it's just the economics?!
Either way, what an era that was!
a34729t 3 hours ago [-]
hold on now william gibson
sdevonoes 13 hours ago [-]
Got it. But then why Nike/Adidas/Quicksilver/etc cannot bring back clothes from the 90s?
Buying second hand is not that nice (smells that never go away) and “vintage” places sell min. catalogue buy way overpriced.
rustcleaner 7 minutes ago [-]
If we ban the FED from conjuring new Dollars for buying debt and securities, and the only way fresh printed Dollars enter circulation is if apportioned to every citizen equally (debt-free), then we could have all these nice things again. Companies and rich people would need to cater to the populace in order to rake in the inflationbux and pay their taxes. Right now only governments, big businesses, and big asset owners get first spend on inflationbux, and it has resulted in we the people having only 1/3rd the purchasing power for the Dollar earned in wages as we had in 1960!
My TradingView (Yearly) model for the phenomenon: 23.05*10^12/M2SL*A4102C1Q027SBEA/(USPOP*CIVPART/100*(1-UNRATE/100))
A4102C1Q027SBEA is total US wages/salaries,
A4102C1Q027SBEA/(USPOP*CIVPART/100*(1-UNRATE/100)) attempts to get a rough average of individual wage/salary,
23.05*10^12/M2SL normalizes the time series to today's Dollar value (in M2 terms).
Schiendelman 13 hours ago [-]
Clothes made in the 90s used different materials and stitching than they do today, and likely cost more to produce. They'd probably need old machines they haven't had in decades.
13 hours ago [-]
bamboozled 3 hours ago [-]
Billabong and quicksilver are selling 90s board short models now. They are fairly popular so …
ragall 11 hours ago [-]
> But then why Nike/Adidas/Quicksilver/etc cannot bring back clothes from the 90s?
They can, but people wouldn't want to pay the price. When adjusting for inflation, clothes today are much cheaper than 30 years ago, and the main producers of high-quality cotton (Kazakhstan and Egypt) are having continuous drought problems so the best raw material is even more expensive.
The combination of customer expectation for low prices, and more expensive raw materials, exacerbated by lower production volume, means that very few would be willing to buy. As an example, take a look at the high quality jeans market: there are a few niche companies in Japan, Europe, US and Canada producing jeans at the same level of quality as 50-100 years ago, in some cases the exact same model as, say, a 1950's Levi's. Those jeans start at $200 per pair, but go even up to $400-500 and the manufacturers are barely surviving.
ezst 6 hours ago [-]
> and the manufacturers are barely surviving
I feel for them because I wouldn't mind paying 2/3 times the price for something of measurably higher quality and durability, but it takes effort and dedication to accomplish that as a customer. Effectively the market is saturated with premium-branded items that are marginally better or sometimes worse (a lot of what you see as "technical clothing" comes across that way at least), you feel gaslit by marketing, fake reviews and astroturfing campaigns, and there are only so many deceptions, defeats and financial losses you can sustain before going back to the devil you know: the default everyone else is buying.
sublinear 12 hours ago [-]
Have you tried dry cleaning?
HardwareLust 13 hours ago [-]
Great question!
jeromechoo 13 hours ago [-]
If mechanical time keeping hadn’t made the leap to luxury, I wonder if it would’ve ended up in the same situation as walkmans.
ChrisArchitect 14 hours ago [-]
When I hear Walkman I only think of cassette tape, not MD, but whatever...
Minidisc understandably gone away (until maybe hipsters revive that too like they have with tapes?) but on the tape front ... Maxell thinks they have something with cassette players.... wonder if/how these are selling:
>until maybe hipsters revive that too like they have with tapes?
That is already happening. I like to frequent Vintage Computer Festival and for the last few years a few of them have had MD-Con as part of a convention within a convention. A whole room dedicated to MiniDisc tech showing off laptops, desktops, camcorders, pro-hifi gear, etc. There is a collector that even brings a large portion of his collection which is all in blue including rare blue color minidiscs themselves from company promo's. One example is a promo MD from Boss Coffee in japan which looked fantastic.
There is even a revival in the software used to burn/format minidiscs since most of the original software is ancient now.
Its pretty fun to visit them as someone who used a minidisc player through highschool and college until I got the original Microsoft Zune. A lot of the people I met at the last two MD-Con's loved looking through all the models presented at the con to try and find the same device they back in the day.
> When I hear Walkman I only think of cassette tape
Same here.
I was just recently wondering if there were any places that sell Walkman's still. I remember walking around Seoul and ended up in a maze of closet sized electronic and nick-nack shops with some really random old parts and gadgets. Made me miss my old boombox. Thought that would be a good place to go back and look for a walkman, but the Maxell MXCP-P100 – wireless cassette player looks perfect
NaOH 13 hours ago [-]
I was glad to find this site offering refurbished iPods, and they also have refurb Walkmans.
I disagree. Sony can't bring back Walkmans because a Walkman won't generate the returns Sony demands. Furthermore, they refuse to open-source it so it stays hidden in a vault.
Plenty of people would lose money, break even, or God willing, make a tiny profit, diving into this problem. Regardless, it would make society a happier place.
cwillu 10 hours ago [-]
s/can't/won't/
cwillu 10 hours ago [-]
I can take the grocery delivery order that pays $4, but I won't because the returns for my time and gas are unacceptably low.
fortyseven 11 hours ago [-]
Capitalism will make you as happy as necessary to ensure that you continue buying. No more no less.
lardosaurusrex 2 hours ago [-]
I am so beyond sick of Sony right now.
I didn't think they'd end right up there aongside the rest of humaniry's treasonous ilk such as Tesla/SpaceX/ChatGPT/Microsoft/Samsung/Nvidia/etc but the whole "we're not making discs for playstation because we repurposed the factory for some slop meant for ai data centres" left such a horrifically sour taste in my mouth that I wish them nothing but the absolute worst.
Hell it feels weird to hate any company more than telecom ones but somehow they all managed; it's insane. It used to be so easy to make fun of comcast and yet compared to all these horrific companies they look downright angelic in comparison nowadays.
But fair play to OP, you'd have to bounce it through at least Google Translate to make it legible to the predominant English-speaking HM crowd: https://x-com.translate.goog/akiraa_tanaka/status/2080114490...
Still would have been good for the Substack author to link to the tweet rather than just embedding a nearly-too-small-to-be-readable png of a JPEG and six links to the tweet author's X profile.
people just want it but not enough people to buy the thing
same happen with physical games
I don’t think it’s true that the capabilities to make these devices are lost. There are still companies like ALPS that are capable of making the necessary parts.
But in the end, the market is too small to justify any investments.
You could make a Walkman; it'd cost $3-10k each.
If I want to buy a new MP3 player, I have to buy something from a company I've never heard of with a terrible screen, use an old phone, or buy some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much.
Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?
Is this surprising?
They are a commodity (you can literally build a fairly decent for less than $10 in parts) so therefore are low profit. Brands you have heard of generally don't want to play in commodity markets.
The alternative is to move upmarket where prestige or specific features are important:
> some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much.
There you go.
> Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?
They can and do. Look on Amazon.
They call into the two buckets you outline above. Just buy one of the $50 ones from the companies you haven't heard of.
The entry level Walkman is $400 and only has 32gb internal storage. It's all about flac and hires audio but you're paying through the nose for the brand
It is being squeezed on at least five sides (probably more):
- Cheap low-end no-name players;
- Audiophile products like the Sony walkman stuff;
- People who are happy using their phones;
- (for the exercise "phone too heavy" use case) A smart watch, paired to bluetooth headphones;
- Second hand iPods from the 2000s, often refurbished and/or modded;
Maybe one of the low-end no-name players meets your needs... But how could you find it wading through the crap?
That product category simply isn't worthwhile for big brands anymore.
the burning answer is really, by the time you've chosen a modern merchant soc, and put a screen on it, you're really more or less at the same BOM cost as a very low end android device (and frankly, the soc bsp you chose is likely to be android/aosp to begin with)
so you're basically competing head to head with every shitphone maker out there, and they have economies of scale. you do not.
> Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware
and so... now you're competing with simple smartphones. you're going to charge more for a fancy case for something that requires to be carried separate from your phone and offers zero additional advantage?
there's a huge market for external mobile DSPs for this reason. this is an example of an entry level one https://www.microcenter.com/product/705193/moondrop-freedsp-...
btw, im sure someone like shanling is making exactly what you're thinking of, but they often have limited production runs and still cost within the same range as a basic android phone (usually a bit more)
This is, incidentally, also almost universally an answer to "why doesn't nobody make a dumb TV anymore?!"
The off-the-shelf SoC that handle the TV decoding/HDMI bits already has a bunch of general purpose ARM cores; might as well put Android on it instead of writing your own firmware.
Because you can do that with any phone and just not use the phone part?
I find myself researching, trying to find the smallest lightest old phone that either has decent internal memory or a micro SD slot, but it's not easy. Most phones are massive compared to an iPod shuffle
[1] https://thetinypod.com
[2] https://www.behance.net/gallery/72386255/Pod-Case-for-Apple-...
https://a.co/d/055SGJE1
The only market is in the "enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much", just like it is currently for vinyls and DVD players.
It seems like streaming "won", which is disappointing.
I both have music subscriptions (Spotify for the wife, Qobuz for me: Qobuz streams lossless but sucks for music discovery) and good old files (mostly FLAC files indeed except some very old, impossible-to-find, live recordings I only have in mp3). One does not prevent the other.
Also some people self-host or partially self-host things: you stream from a server you own: be it family pictures (I'm Mich / immich), movies and/or music (Plex or Jellyfin). And, well, the stream doesn't spring out of thin air: there are good old files on the server.
Lastly: some music streaming services allows you to buy albums and/or individual songs, DRM-free.
More software? Sure. An operating system? No. There were (are?) plenty of cheap MP3 players that had screens but just drive it with some budget microcontroller.
You can buy new shells, colors, storage adapters, batteries, etc.
https://github.com/jmonster/podhnologic
Given how much we can store in solid state not sure I’d want to navigate my library without a screen
Though I have a walkman (that kinda sucks cuz it's android.... it's (USB-C AND annoying Android OS) XOR (Proprietary charging cable) from Sony nowadays
> Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?
Sony Walkmans are this, along with a bunch of the random mp3 players you would find on amazon. I don't know why some other people replying to you are acting like this doesn't exist.
The cheapest one I'm seeing is the Sony NW-A306. That's around $600 - I think it fits into the OP's category of "some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much"
I recently got the Shanling M0s. It runs its own OS and seems to me completely at parity with what MP3 players used to be back in the day; in fact I think it's the best one I've ever had, and I've been buying those devices since the Diamond Rio. If more people just got one, Shanling would no longer be a company nobody's ever heard of, and the economics would change to further bring down the price too (although I think it's not all that bad right now).
1) Music player that holds a ton of songs.
2) Lossless.
3) No touch screen control.
4) Battery that is long lasting and semi-replaceable.
5) Smaller than modern phones.
6) Great software experience, which for me meant Apple Music compatible.
7) Wired. Not Bluetooth.
A $400 Sony Android-based player doesn't meet 3, 4, nor 5. Most importantly, $400 for a product that doesn't meet some pretty important criteria is ridiculous. A shitty tiny Chinese player isn't going to meet 3, 4, 6 and it'll die on you in a couple of years and you'll be back at square one.
My solution was to buy a 5.5 Gen iPod off eBay ($100), a microSD card carrier (iFlash.xyz - $40), and four microSD cards (Back in my day, $50 each for 256gb). Yes, I had to open the iPod, but yes, it checks all my boxes. And it came in less than the Sony player.
To add:
- A physical switch to turn off all inputs. The older ipods had a slider switch that disables all buttons and screen inputs, which was awesome.
Mostly I use an mp3 player when working on things (yard, cars, house, etc) and need something very small and very light, so not a phone. My older ipod with the switch broke down so I'm stuck with a newer ipod which lacks that switch and I hate it. Every few minutes it activates some button press from being in my pocket and ruins the listening.
Although FiiO is probably the company to look at for these kind of products.
iPods weren't cheap either.
I know the late 90s called and want their MP3 straight out of Napster and their 10 GB HDD back but you can safely up the ante to lossless FLAC files.
MP3 is, literally, 30+ years old and I traded my 10 GB HDD for a 1 TB NVMe SSD that could read an uncompressed dump of my entire 10 GB HDD in about two seconds.
FLAC files are only about 2x the size of 320 kbps mp3.
Really, it's 2026. We can do it (I do it).
Buying second hand is not that nice (smells that never go away) and “vintage” places sell min. catalogue buy way overpriced.
My TradingView (Yearly) model for the phenomenon: 23.05*10^12/M2SL*A4102C1Q027SBEA/(USPOP*CIVPART/100*(1-UNRATE/100))
A4102C1Q027SBEA is total US wages/salaries,
A4102C1Q027SBEA/(USPOP*CIVPART/100*(1-UNRATE/100)) attempts to get a rough average of individual wage/salary,
23.05*10^12/M2SL normalizes the time series to today's Dollar value (in M2 terms).
They can, but people wouldn't want to pay the price. When adjusting for inflation, clothes today are much cheaper than 30 years ago, and the main producers of high-quality cotton (Kazakhstan and Egypt) are having continuous drought problems so the best raw material is even more expensive.
The combination of customer expectation for low prices, and more expensive raw materials, exacerbated by lower production volume, means that very few would be willing to buy. As an example, take a look at the high quality jeans market: there are a few niche companies in Japan, Europe, US and Canada producing jeans at the same level of quality as 50-100 years ago, in some cases the exact same model as, say, a 1950's Levi's. Those jeans start at $200 per pair, but go even up to $400-500 and the manufacturers are barely surviving.
I feel for them because I wouldn't mind paying 2/3 times the price for something of measurably higher quality and durability, but it takes effort and dedication to accomplish that as a customer. Effectively the market is saturated with premium-branded items that are marginally better or sometimes worse (a lot of what you see as "technical clothing" comes across that way at least), you feel gaslit by marketing, fake reviews and astroturfing campaigns, and there are only so many deceptions, defeats and financial losses you can sustain before going back to the devil you know: the default everyone else is buying.
Minidisc understandably gone away (until maybe hipsters revive that too like they have with tapes?) but on the tape front ... Maxell thinks they have something with cassette players.... wonder if/how these are selling:
Maxell MXCP-P100 – wireless cassette player
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47497781
That is already happening. I like to frequent Vintage Computer Festival and for the last few years a few of them have had MD-Con as part of a convention within a convention. A whole room dedicated to MiniDisc tech showing off laptops, desktops, camcorders, pro-hifi gear, etc. There is a collector that even brings a large portion of his collection which is all in blue including rare blue color minidiscs themselves from company promo's. One example is a promo MD from Boss Coffee in japan which looked fantastic.
There is even a revival in the software used to burn/format minidiscs since most of the original software is ancient now.
Its pretty fun to visit them as someone who used a minidisc player through highschool and college until I got the original Microsoft Zune. A lot of the people I met at the last two MD-Con's loved looking through all the models presented at the con to try and find the same device they back in the day.
https://www.mdcon.live/
Same here.
I was just recently wondering if there were any places that sell Walkman's still. I remember walking around Seoul and ended up in a maze of closet sized electronic and nick-nack shops with some really random old parts and gadgets. Made me miss my old boombox. Thought that would be a good place to go back and look for a walkman, but the Maxell MXCP-P100 – wireless cassette player looks perfect
https://retrospekt.com/collections/cassette-players
Plenty of people would lose money, break even, or God willing, make a tiny profit, diving into this problem. Regardless, it would make society a happier place.
I didn't think they'd end right up there aongside the rest of humaniry's treasonous ilk such as Tesla/SpaceX/ChatGPT/Microsoft/Samsung/Nvidia/etc but the whole "we're not making discs for playstation because we repurposed the factory for some slop meant for ai data centres" left such a horrifically sour taste in my mouth that I wish them nothing but the absolute worst.
Hell it feels weird to hate any company more than telecom ones but somehow they all managed; it's insane. It used to be so easy to make fun of comcast and yet compared to all these horrific companies they look downright angelic in comparison nowadays.
Sigh.