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You miss the emotions the walkman brought, especially that nowadays you don’t even own data that’s on this small all-in-one device, let alone the music you listen to…
So of course you don’t get as much joy out of it when it basically is a door to the hell where souls go to agonize wishing they’d die already
sigh but yeah, I get your point
you don’t even own data that’s on this small all-in-one device
If I don’t own it, why does everyone keep insisting I stole it?
If buying is not owning then copying is not stealing.
I’m glad I only have one device now. Fuck having 12 things.
I miss physical buttons for when I’m listening to music.
Having to unlock my phone to skip a track or advance a podcast is really annoying.
I used to be able to click a button in my pocket. I could even slide a bit to skip forward and back 30 seconds.
I also like to listen to music in bed in the dark. The bright screen, the messing around with the unlock, really breaks the flow.
Yes I have earphones that are touch sensitive, but poking it messes with any good isolated fit I’ve achieved, the touch doesn’t always register and after a while, one ear starts to hurt. Especially when you need to tap three times to restart a track.
I’ve now got this stupid setup with a BT dongle in a usb a-c converter; which plugs into my phone and controls a tiny physical keyboard.
There are lots of mp3 players, but they don’t support streaming platforms. The ones that do, also went mainly touch screen only and cost a fortune. There is one physical Spotify player with buttons but it’s just a dumb cube with very basic functionality.
Most decent headphones still seem to have physical buttons. The big ones. With earbuds you’re kinda out of luck
Counterpoint: I’m old and don’t miss any of that. Fewer devices is very, very nice. And fewer physical pieces of media is even nicer for the environment.
I actually don’t miss having to be kind and rewind, or spending 15 minutes with a pencil spooling my music back into a listenable format after being a bit careless with my tapes, only to have Glenn Frey sound like he’s eating marbles next time.
Less waste and less hassle. Nostalgia is overrated.
It’s more nuanced. We like having all that stuff on one device. It’s the other stuff the device does that annoys us.
That’s not an issue with the medium, though.
And I really appreciate being able to watch hours of content with no adverts now. Back in the day, nearly everything had unskippable ads. There was no adblock; you had to watch everything on someone else’s schedule, and the only way to not watch ads was to pee or make a sandwich.
I haven’t seen an ad in years and, my god, it’s awesome.
I guess i just miss having a walkman mode, where all it did was play music. If I could turn on a walkman mode on my phone, I sometimes would definitely do that.
Turn on do-not-disturb and you don’t get notifications or calls. It’s not a true walkman mode but it turns off some distractions.
A good suggestion. The harder problem is actually me. Oh, imma skip this song I don’t like it. Maybe they have a new album out, I’ll just quickly check. Hmm, what’s the weather tomorrow. Etc.
Hmm, not sure about that. Waiting for my TV to boot or update or connecting to Wi-Fi or my m music streaming app to ‘think’ for two minutes until it works at all is tedious. Don’t get me wrong - it’s still net positive. But I would instantly choose any option that offers less features if it would give me back this cosy feeling, that I’m the customer and not the product. Don’t want to go into details here but it feels at certain edges that some of these integrated functionalities have simply not been tested for an actual user, but simply to offer … more.
Writing that, it also could just be age bias. :-p
I semi-agree. A phone is better in any practical way.
But there is something magical about interacting with mechanical (and electromechanical) stuff.
Sometimes I really love putting a record on a record table, flipping a switch, and gently lowering the stylus into the groove. There’s no track skip, no fast-forward, you just sit there and listen to an entire album at once. The quality is worse than what I could get from YouTube or something, but it feels so much more engaging.
And it’s not nostalgia either, my childhood music was on cassettes and later CDs, and I feel less attracted to either of those.
I would probably absolutely hate it if it was the only music format available to me. But the contrast with modern digital music blasted from a depression rectangle is what probably makes it so appealing to me.
Me too old AF and don’t miss walkman or discman or digital cameras or iPod or VHS or any of that old technology.
I understand more as you move away from technology. Like I can get why others feel an attachment to vinyl record players or film photography. Anybody can understand that stuff, while a smart phone seems more like magic.
