Teen reviewer unimpressed by Walkman

[Goliath]

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the invention of the Sony Walkman, the BBC invited 13-year-old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a Walkman for a week.

Campbell's verdict?

"My dad had told me it was big, but I hadn't realised he meant that big. It was the size of a small book... It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape... I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down 'rewind' and releasing it randomly... Did my dad...really ever think this was a credible piece of technology?"

Source: here.

Deprivation truly is completely relative.

And it's no wonder some of my students fail history.

"OMG--you mean Captain Scott died on his way back from the South Pole? Why didn't he, like, call for help on his cell phone? Wasn't his OnStar working? Couldn't they locate him on GPS? Etc."

 

[sidious618]

If you had to swap your car for a horse I imagine you'd be just as confused.

 

[Roger Wilco]

But he's right, isn't he? Compared to today's technology, a walkman looks a horse-drawn carriage compared to the space shuttle.

 

[Plecostomus]

I was watching Short Circuit recently and found myself thinking "this whole situation could have been avoided with cellphones."

...funny thing is I LIVED through that "era" and I know what it's like to not be on call 24-7.

Amusing movie though... even without cellphones.

 

[Goliath]

If you had to swap your car for a horse I imagine you'd be just as confused.

No, I wouldn't, actually. I grew up around horses. My dad owns a string of Arabians.

And that's a false analogy, in any case. Swapping a car for a horse would be like swapping an iPod for a violin--not a Walkman.

 

[Goliath]

I was watching Short Circuit recently and found myself thinking "this whole situation could have been avoided with cellphones."

William Gibson made the same point in his Introduction to a recent edition of Neuromancer.

The modern reader will probably wonder, he says, why cell phones are not allowed in Night City.

 

[RoJoHen]

I always think its funny watching TV shows from the early 90s where teenagers all had pagers.

 

[Roger Wilco]

And that's a false analogy, in any case. Swapping a car for a horse would be like swapping an iPod for a violin--not a Walkman.

Are you kidding? Storing 1000+ songs on an mp3 player, every single one of which can be accessed individually (not to mention downloading and things like that) is lightyears away from cassette tapes.

 

[Goliath]

But he's right, isn't he? Compared to today's technology, a walkman looks a horse-drawn carriage compared to the space shuttle.

You mean--an iPod looks like a dead-end piece of technology from the 70s, that cost far more and delivered far less than was promised, and killed a bunch of its users?

You're being a little hard on iPods, don't you think? They're not that bad.

 

[Holdfast]

I was watching Short Circuit recently and found myself thinking "this whole situation could have been avoided with cellphones."

...funny thing is I LIVED through that "era" and I know what it's like to not be on call 24-7.

Yeah, I had a similar reaction watching some film or other from the 80s the other day. Man, we adapt quickly!

 

[Zulu Romeo]

If you had to swap your car for a horse I imagine you'd be just as confused.

For starters, I'd be wondering why the ignition was so close to the exhaust. [You're doing it wrong! - everyone]

 

[Goliath]

And that's a false analogy, in any case. Swapping a car for a horse would be like swapping an iPod for a violin--not a Walkman.

Are you kidding? Storing 1000+ songs on an mp3 player, every single one of which can be accessed individually (not to mention downloading and things like that) is lightyears away from cassette tapes.

Oh, what rubbish.

I owned Walkmans, and I own an iPod. The differences between the two are small and incremental. They're certainly nowhere near comparable to the differences between a car and a horse.

So you can store songs on your iPod. So what? Are you seriously trying to pretend that this is some kind of huge advance over previous technologies?

You can still only listen to one song at a time. And you still only listen to your iPod a certain number of hours a day. That hasn't changed, and will never change.

I listen to my iPod when I'm on the bus, and when I'm walking to and from the bus stop. In that amount of time, I couldn't finish listening to a single cassette.

What's more, all the songs on a cassette can be accessed individually as well. You just have to have a little...hmm... what was that word?

Oh, yeah: patience. You have to be willing to delay gratification for those few seconds it takes you to cue up a song.

What's more, it still takes time to cue up new songs on an iPod, while you click through the menu. So not even that has changed, all that much.

In fact, one could argue that it takes more time to edit your playlist on an iPod than it did with a Walkman.

Loading music onto an iPod is a time-consuming process that requires a PC, music software, and a connector cable.

To load music onto a Walkman, you open it, remove the cassette, insert a different cassette, and close it. Walkman 1, iPod 0.

Finally, we had our own version of downloading back in the olden days, too: it was called "going to the record store." They even had a great random-access feature called "browsing," and search engines called "clerks." This was back when people still had things called "jobs."

In the real world, iPods offer just three tangible advantages over Walkmans and Discmans:

1. They are smaller and easier to carry than Walkmans and (especially) Discmans. I used to have a special man-purse for my Discman. I can carry my iPod in my shirt pocket.

2. They do offer better sound than Walkmans (though not Discmans).

3. And they don't require AA batteries.

But even together, those three hardly represent an advance of "light years."

The Walkman was a paradigm shift. The iPod is an incremental advance. That's just all there is to it.

 

[SPOCKED]

The only justice that will ever come of this is when this 13 year old is himself a father someday and his son laughs at the clunky inadequacy of the stoopid '09 ipod. Sorry, but that's the circle of life

 

[Goliath]

^That's true, I suppose.

Stupid life cycle.

 

[Geckothan]

iPods are probably some of the worst MP3 players around, and lossy audio compression makes my ears bleed. Compact cassettes are equally awful. Give me red book discs any day.

 

[DiSiLLUSiON]

I think it's so strange that there are comments on that news article like "I just switched from Walkman to iPod". They make it seem as if the iPod is the first mp3 player. But I beg to differ; the first mp3 player was the MPMAN, back in '97. And I've had a Rio PMP300 in '98 and a PMP500 in '99 when the first one broke down, and because it could hold more then ~8 songs. Anyway, mp3 players have been around for ages; how can anyone not know that?

Even after 11 years, I still have my first one, even though it doesn't work anymore:

That's where apple would eventually get the idea of a wheel on the iPod from. I imagine.

 

[Lindley]

The "well known brand" usually isn't the first example; merely the best-marketed.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Camelopard, I'll have to disagree there. At the very least, the idea that it's only a small increase might as well be used for the horse-car analogy. After all, both a horse and a car can be used to get a person from one point to another without having to walk. The difference is the car does it faster.

An iPod has greater storage capacity and is more mobile (both in the sense that it is smaller and because you don't have to carry around more than one cassette if you want to change to another band). It also allows you to access a song from the beginning on the first try with a click of a button (after you find the song). Rewinding and fast-forwarding is something I used to do with a walkman, but it isn't close to as convenient (I'd argue that portable CD players are slightly more convenient in this regard, but it's balanced out by the bulk and the fact that they had a tendency to skip).

 

[Jadzia]

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the invention of the Sony Walkman, the BBC invited 13-year-old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a Walkman for a week.

Deprivation truly is completely relative.

And it's no wonder some of my students fail history.

"OMG--you mean Captain Scott died on his way back from the South Pole? Why didn't he, like, call for help on his cell phone? Wasn't his OnStar working? Couldn't they locate him on GPS? Etc."

I read somewhere a couple of weeks ago that audio tape sales have increased significantly over the past couple of years.

Either the police are doing a lot more recorded interviews, or many people are enjoying a retro revival.

I think what I frown at most here is the contrast of opinion between two similar pieces of technology. As I said in an earlier thread, it is a substantial part of youth culture nowadays to compare and judge things, and to crave the one with the most 'pwnnage'.

 

[sidious618]

Camelopard, I'll have to disagree there. At the very least, the idea that it's only a small increase might as well be used for the horse-car analogy. After all, both a horse and a car can be used to get a person from one point to another without having to walk. The difference is the car does it faster.

This.