Giving up my iPod for a Walkman - A 13-year-old test drives the cassette-tape player for a week. The observations he makes are pretty amusing, such as this:
Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn’t is “shuffle”, where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down “rewind” and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured.
I told my dad about my clever idea. His words of warning brought home the difference between the portable music players of today, which don’t have moving parts, and the mechanical playback of old. In his words, “Walkmans eat tapes”.
It’s amazing to think that kids these days never experienced (or owned) a Walkman. I remember the days of cassettes and carefully crafting a mixtape. Not to mention being blown away by the introduction of CDs and eventually the first few mp3 players. I remember being so stoked to have my 64 MB Samsung Yepp player.
The kid does recognize the Walkman’s significance though for its time, saying that he can imagine how excited people were at the idea of having portable music:
Perhaps that kind of anticipation and excitement has been somewhat lost in the flood of new products which now hit our shelves on a regular basis.He’s got a point there. While there’s certainly buzz over each new version of the iPod/iPhone, it’s not the huge technological leap mentally to think that it’s going to significantly shift our way of life. Instead, the first thing we do when we hear about the new gadget is we quickly tear it apart and complain about features it doesn’t have included.
