Kind of wild you can still buy these used and still working for $100 or way less depending on model. These were well designed and built items.

In 1980 I walked the streets of NYC in the middle of the night during a rainstorm, empty, wet, clean streets, streetlights reflecting off all surfaces, to the sounds of my new album "The Wall" playing on my walkman. To this day when I hear that album I see those streets.

Same with "Skateaway"

nah way too thick and bulky. the later designs, especially once you hit the late 90's, are much better

And if you dropped em, which you were definitely gonna do, they'd break easier too. Maybe some were made with a smaller sized but rugged performance but if so those definitely didn't exist in my house. 💔 But the OG? Still in my parents basement. Stole it for college for 10 cent thrifted cassettes.

i have a WM-FX675 myself. look at how gorgeous this thing is

I was on leave from the Navy in Singapore the first time I saw a Walkman, I bought two and I think they were maybe $50 apiece.

When I was a teenager, that was my best friend.

I had the case with the shoulder strap worn inside my jacket so it wouldn't get ripped off.

I loved my Walkman. Total game changer.

I was just talking to somebody in their early 20s about how absolutely influential the Walkman/Discman were.

Everything. The shape, the colors, the logos, That A in the middle of Walkman. Just killed it. They were pretty well-made, too, if memory srrves.

I had the Sony Walkman FM, which collapsed into a smaller size when the tape wasn't in it. And FM radio was better in the 80s.

1980’s college radio was the original Alternative Rock.

KMPX SF 20 in the ‘70s beats 70 in the ‘20s. ✌️😉

You’ve got 10 on me, but I feel you. 😂

I listened to de Peche mode a lot on mine

Sony Walkman, apex achievement of brutalism.

Basically just a cassette case.

And when the recording Walkman came out…wow!

Caution: one of those is a robot

I still have my neon color scheme one from the early 90s. It is a prized possession! My kids were in HS in the teens and used it for retro 80s/90s events. I loan it out for movie/video shoots now.

That was me, marathon training in 1998 with that bad boy

A design that likely delighted Dieter Rams.

I owned the Aiwa version that included a built-in stereo recording mic. Smuggled it into and recorded several awesome concerts in the 1980’s, literally in my boot leg (I favored cowboy boots back then).

Some of the Aiwa units are also rad

The Sony museum in Ginza had a really cool exhibit all about the Walkman

Inspired a pretty cool transformer as well

I own one, and it works great.

They were designing for the future we didn't deserve.

I'd 100% buy an MP3 player version of this and leave my phone at home.

My MuVo TxFM mp3 player was the stuff of dreams, and also beautiful. www.cnet.com/reviews/crea...

They made one for the 40th anniversary youtu.be/uzdy_2kGGhM

stuck in nostalgia

My Walkman was a later model than that, probably around 1984, but I remember being very impressed by the design and construction of it

like, i would buy a device that looked like that right now, no questions asked

I bought that exact one when it first came out. It was pretty hot stuff at the time.

I’m so old that I prefer this transistor radio I bought in 1964. I still have it. It still works.

Depends how the buttons feel

yeah, that's dope as shit I hesitate to call it a form of retro-futurism but it kinda conjures those sort of feelings for me and I love that kinda shit

One device that does one thing really well? With clean lines and a straightforward UI? Sorry best I can do is OneDrive

You’ll need bigger pockets.

I still use iTunes to sync music to my phone because I'm too cheap to pay to stream music I already purchased on cassette and/or CD in the 90s, and if Sony ever made an MP3 player that looked like *that*, I would gobble one up so fast.

I repaired some of those in the 1980s, they were beautifully designed inside. Wow! I found a teardown vid and I can't believe I immediately recognized what the guts of the Walkman TPS-L2 looked like! Like every tape deck I worked on, I replaced the belts with O rings. www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0B4...

For your consideration: www.wearerewind.com

can you even buy cassettes anywhere?

I regularly see cassettes selling as novelty purchases (like vinyl records) on Bandcamp: bandcamp.com

Here’s a label that offers lots of cassettes of pretty obscure music: worldgonemad.bigcartel.com/products

I see them on Bandcamp quite a bit lately

I got one of these for Xmas and bought a bunch of cassettes on Bandcamp and some vintage stuff on eBay/etsy. There are lots out there of varying quality and many new bands are actually releasing new music on cassettes

Got these just the other day bsky.app/profile/jmr3...

My local record shop sells them. I absolutely hate it as a medium though, even though im definitely a vinyl guy. Maybe my nostalgia for cassettes will develop in a few years but it sure as heck ain’t there for me yet.

I’d love to see a combo Discman/mp3 player.

So superior to the portable CD players with ESP

I have been digging into this lately, apparently literally every current portable tape player uses the same clunky, bad mechanism sourced from the same factory. No one, for any price, can make something today as good as the walkmans of 30-40 years ago

There's a whole genre of music that aims for the cassette as its target choice of release media, so much so that all the album art is crated to fit those old sleeve inserts. (Dungeon Synth is so great)

Lol did not expect to see my little music genre in a Jamelle chat

Sometimes you need some lofi adventure music on your walkman to slay goblins by.

The Industrialist (2025).

Not as sleek but:

A lot of people might call this retro, but I like to think of it as functional. One of the things I love about Star Wars--especially Andor--is how functional the tech is. Give me buttons. Give me switches. Make tactile great again.

Yessir, indeed. But man... my beloved MiniDisc player. Still play it, still love it.

Fiio makes one and it slaps

I just lugged around a Radio Shack TRS80 tape player/recorder. Built in speaker, could record off the radio, you could even save computer programs on a blank cassette.

Probably mono too, right? One channel was good enough for the computer!

A family friend brought one back from Japan for me while I was a high schooler... the only time I was the coolest kid in the school. And the tactile feel will never be recreated.

we forget but sony used to basically be apple on hardware

And then they decided they had to enshittify their great hardware with horrible, horrible software.

I had a portable minidisc player that was absolute MURDER to place music onto.

One word - rootkit

So true, so many great Sony products, rarely a SW update. Buy the next gen.

I was an exchange student in Japan in the early 90s and brought home this little blue number. Barely larger than the cassette, and vaguely reminiscent of a classic sportscar. Genuinely the sickest thing I ever owned.

may i introduce you to the Fiio Echo Mini

this is very cool

someone needs to remake these, though x.com/ObsoleteSony...

lol the first useless thing that popped into my head was the Humane AI thing but in a Walkman, gadget Freaky Friday

I’d….probably spend money on an iPhone case mocked up to make my phone look like one, TBH.

Cassette + Bluetooth

Yes

Fun fact : "Soundwave" from Transformers was directly inspired from this: he has the same color scheme.

This one or the yellow walkman sports? That’s the real question

Not only the look of it. It felt good in your hand. It was a good weight - not heavy, not flimsy. The "click" when you popped the tape in was so satisfying. The travel on the buttons was just right. It was truly an excellent device.

I remember seeing a "sport " version with rubberized grips and all that on a " retrotech " repost account and my mind was instantly like " you need one of those + an entire fit to match "

Classic Sony Consumer electronics GO. I’d kill for a MiniDisc redux, TBH.

FAM! The MiniDisc is up there with Coca Cola on my list of man’s greatest inventions.

I don’t remember what possessed me to sell that magical artifact, but the fact it would run for WEEKS on a sole double a battery still blows my mind.

I could hook it up to my mixer and review my DJ mixes in a snap. This was when recording to CD was still a pain in the tail. It was SUPER portable. That thing was amazing.

I still have a vintage iPod video I want to see if I can retrofit for some decent use. Hopefully this tariff BS will lead more of us to try to use and repair electronics we’ve got. If I get a decent repair quote, my Razer laptop is getting a trackpad fix so i can use it for ad-hoc functions.

I like mine www.wearerewind.com?srsltid=AfmB...

if you put a new engine in a 1990 honda accord i would pay $35k for it tomorrow

I'll take "things rich people say" for $5

do rich people also say shut the fuck up weirdo

That's mainly a rich person thing too LMAO

Honestly just put in a 3800 engine with low miles on it, I'm first in line to buy it

Please give me a 1986 Civic Si and a yellow Walkman Sport.

Still driving my grandma's 1989 Mitsubishi mirage. Only costs $20 to fill her up

Who Granny or the Car? 🤣

I drove the 76 Accord Great car And the 2008 Went 468K miles no problem and then destroyed *by the auto repair shop* who rear-ended a truck on a test drive That said I would like>

Ditto

I have a portable charger that looks like this. It’s a few years old at this point, so kinda slow and no USB-C, but sexy as hell.

Magic then, still magic now

I had a later model Sony Walkman that fit really well in my hand, so I'd hold it while going on long runs in high school. That thing held up for over 4 years of constant usage. Truly a great device.

This was the ultimate and final form of the walkman. I rocked one of these on the inside pocket of my leather jacket all through high school. It was a beast.

I can still hear the sound of opening and closing this!

😁 Ditto. That thing was a core piece of my life for years.

We used to have sick fonts on electronics. We used to have CULTURE.

Love the 90s rave flyer font on this little guy

The arrow rocks

I’m giving away my age, but…I remember when they first came out, and it was jaw-dropping. A school friend got one and we were all so envious. At ~$150 in 1979 (about $660 in 2025), it was too expensive for most kids. Certainly me!

These still sell like hotcakes

Have you seen Teenage Engineering’s stuff? You might like their aesthetic. teenage.engineering

I agree! It also looks like an amazing pack of smokes.

"Walk. Man." Revolutionary

Impeccable

Loved my walkman!

In general, 1980s Japanese product design was fire. Personal electronics, cars, pens...

Some of it is still pretty good. There's a reason Muji is so popular in the states.

Oh man. Just the sight of that thing brings me back to St. Mark’s Place on Thanksgiving 1980 when I walked morosely down the street listening to Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. My boyfriend was cheating and I was out at dawn looking for a meat thermometer.

This feels like it should have been part of the plot of 200 Cigarettes

Couldn't you just have inferred that his meat was hot?

😝

Still have mine.

I always wanted this one. all the cool kids had one

I had a similar model and how did I not realize until now that the “SPORTS” looks like it was cut and pasted from the City Sports logo? Which I had on a couple of t-shirts at the time?

I still have mine somewhere...

Brutalist iPod.

That thing looks fuckin sick (in a good way)

I had one and I wonder if I still have it somewhere. Probably not this model, though, a later one, early 1980s. Remember listening to Etoile de Dakar (Yousou N'Dour) and some nice Highlife from Ghana (I think Atakora Manu, and Alex Konadu) on it.

I had one of these, it was the best thing ever. I worked in data entry at the time, and I could set it on my desk, put headphones on, and tune out the rest of the office. You couldn't do that before the Walkman.

It was perfect

They still can't make a better design for soundwave.

The first(ish?) discman was pretty sweet too

It was the skipman for me when I walked with it.

Nah. That thing skipped if you breathed wrong.

Lol. The birthplace of “you gotta hold it just like this…”

the idea was to just take it wherever you were going (library, friend’s house) and press play and do not touch. it was cool how you could connect to a stereo without the need for a big unit

Yes. I had all the iterations of the discman. Great idea, cds are a garbage format though.

I had one that played cassettes and you could insert a radio component. Got me through grad school architecture studio. Wish I could buy one now.

I had a pink one. (When I was on a cruise ship as a comic, the singer asked me to rate the sound on her Walkman. I said, “Mine’s pink!” She got it…)

This looks like the one that could slide into the larger boombox.

Sony has always been great at design

Right??? Not only were they game changing, there were really well built.

I. HAD. ONE. So great!

I had one that lasted sooo long. Dropped sooooo many times. Only reason i stopped using it was because tapes eventually disappeared.

I had one of those. My girlfriend was on tour in Japan with the Ailey company, before this was released in the US. She brought one home for me. Game changer. Columbus Avenue never sounded better.

I lusted after that thing and knew I had to have one to play Back in Black while skiing. Took a lot of hours at $2.75 to save up.

And who was the Sony exec who led the program? James Williamson, formerly of Iggy and The Stooges

That is Soundwave

Still have my old Sony Walkman which has FM functionality all in the size of a cassette. Wish I had the headphones but I used them for years after this one was shelved.

That's how we rolled in the 80's: the bigger, blockier and clunkier the better.

Yep, changed my world. Loved it.

What’s even more impressive is that the industrial design is so good while being fabbed by manufacturing processes from 45+ years ago.

I remember as a really little kid playing MJ's Thriller album on one of these over and over and over again. "Beat It" was my fave, and I rewound and replayed it ad nauseum, mostly because Vincent Price scared the crap out of me every time if I let "Thriller" play to the end.

I don’t know w the other it’s iiiioiioooo

Soundwave superior.

Pretty sure I still have two originals floating around in my family somewhere

Pronounce walkman like wokeman

I like to think that somewhere my purloined Walkman still plays Grace Jones's "Pull Up to the Bumper."

I feel like teenage engineering has a similar design language!

First cassette that went into my Walkman: Def Leppard--Pyromania

My first cassette was adrenalize. They were the perfect band to start with.

The orange talk button was a path to a better society that we did not take

Seriously this is hard af. The buttons on the top is so good.

🫶🏼✨💯

I still have a very large cardboard box in my closet filled with cassette tapes. I just can't throw them away.

$500 on ebay

So important that it had two headphone jacks. It was for listening to music together

It was gorgeous and it went through batteries like pez on account of Queen..