Sony Ceasing Production On Portable Cassette Recorder Next Year

Yeah, good bye & so long.

They were so darned expensive when they were first introduced, then they wanted an arm and a leg for CD players,............

Whatever is new is expensive, I guess.

Well one era ends where much more began.  This will forever be in the history books as the first portable music player.  The devices we have all began here, it's amazing it's lasted even this long.  

I remember that I had an FM stereo radio with earphones that I used to use while I jogged.

It was a Sony and used one AAA battery and lasted for 5 days of jogging 6 miles a day.

We had some great music stations in southern California back then, my favorites were KMET and KLOS.

I'm definitely wondering what took so long.

Literally the only person I'd seen use a Cassette player in the past 5 years is my dad because he had classic songs on cassette he couldn't find anywhere else (at the time) and by the time they were available on CD he didn't want to reinvest in the same music he already owned on another format.

He eventually did reinvest in CD's since they were so inexpensive and he was able to listen to them at places other than his car and hopefully I'll get him completely transitioned to digital by ripping his CD's to MP3 for use on his phone soon.

I still can't believe portable cassette recorders were being made at all in the last generation.

I'm pretty sure most of the "rest of the universe" has already said goodbye to the Cassette too.

I'm really curious as to what the sales reports for portable cassette players were for Sony were in General, who would buy this and where would those people be?!

Back in the day,........(long, long ago)........I had a ~Dual~ Cassette TEAC recording deck that set me back over $600.00.

I also had a TEAC Reel to Reel and a Marantz stack to power my tunes. Four Kenwood 160W speakers and four Bose 901's made the walls shake.

All of it would heat a room up fast,.............(and piss-off the next door neighbors too)

I am sure most of these units weren't being shipped to the United States but areas of the world that still uses cassettes and possibly less developed. There are still a lot of people in the print media industry that use these and their micro-cassette counterparts (that Sony most likely will continue to produce since they aren't mentioned in this ad) to interview people, record speeches, etc. I know there are digital voice recorders out there but these use easily replaceable batteries, the cassettes are much cheaper than memory cards especially if you want to keep each seperate interview or whatever on its own disk AND if you want to archive the disks rather than back up on a computer, and that's the biggest part of it all you don't need a computer at all.

Us average people wanting to record a lecture in class or something along those lines would be served well with a digital voice recorder or the one found on our smartphones but people like writers or psychologists recording sessions with patients and careers along those lines definitely still see benefits in cassettes over modern digital options.

I'll NEVER forget my first Sony Walkman bought in 1994 for $130 as my Christmas present I was 12 and I used it for 3 years before I got an updated model and gave it to my sister and it was still working until 2006 when water damage finally got to it in the garage. My first Sony CD Walkman was in 1998, 2nd in 2000, iPod in 2003, shuffle in 2006, iPhones since 2008. What's next what's next what's next !?!?!?!