Gadgets Blog » Sony Walkman

It’s a bit odd to write about today’s gadget, a device that triggered a cultural revolution around the time I was born. Portable music may have been a 20th-century invention, but the advent of the MP3 and the iPod has spectacularly transformed how we think about music here in the 21st century. The idea of carrying a tape, or even a CD, around just to get our music fix seems archaic. I could listen to my iPod for 31 straight days and not hear the same song twice.

In an era before this technology, Sony’s compact device transformed the world, laying to rest the 8-track cassette and rendering the vinyl record a collector’s item. The Walkman was released in 1979, and as the design became more portable and sleek, sales continued to climb. Sony sold a staggering 220 million cassette tapes around the world in the three decades following its release.

But on Friday of last week, the last Walkman on Japanese soil rolled off the production line, bringing an end to its 30-year run. The advent of compact discs stole a considerable portion of the Walkman’s market share, leading to the updated Discman. According to Sony, there remains a strong market for the Walkman in other places in the world, but Japan’s rapid adoption of other technology has, sadly, rendered the tape deck obsolete.