Sony has shipped
the last cassette tape Walkmans to vendors (Crunchgear), according to multiple media outlets. It’s surprising that the Walkman was produced for this long: the very first Sony Walkman appeared in 1979 and was an instant hit. In today’s portable electronic devices market, Sony is sadly not a leading company anymore.
In the early 80s, I walked around with (non)-Sony portable cassette players: I think the only time I actually bought a Sony was a few years before I left for Canada, a thing I regretted instantly as I had already been moving to MD players. My very first ‘Walkman’ was an Erres (rather an Erres-branded Phillips thing): I’m not sure how much it cost those days or how I got the money to buy one. I think right after the Erres, I jumped on the Aiwa bandwagon: the very first one I bought was the one shown above. I didn’t know that Aiwa’s largest shareholder was Sony: In the early 2000s, Aiwa slowly slid to bankruptcy and was eventually bought up by Sony.
Anyway, there were good memories of having a walkman: one of them is that even back in the 80s news outlets reported that ‘more and more teenagers were getting deaf because of the use of walkmans’. They say that these days of iPods and MP3 players also. If you play loud music, of course you’re susceptible to getting deaf, but it seems that the media sometimes just sound like moral preachers stuck in repeating the same story every 10 years.