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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 think the problem we're facing now is that we've basically hit on as good as its going to get for a while.
Previously things had to improve upon what came before, but with phones being as versatile and all-encompassing as they are, there isnt really much room for improvement until the next big leap, whatever that will look like. Companies still want to make more money though, and they will do whatever it takes to get it.
We're no longer customers as we used to be, we're targets. We're being analysed at ridiculous levels of scrutiny so they can turn the dials in just the right way to trick us into parting with just a little more money.
I mean, you know, alwayshasbeen.jpg and whatever, but the feeling is gone.
I only use streaming services to discover new music. General listening to music I like, is through local files. Those are always plug and play. No need to wait. Just listen to whatever you want.
Tv shows or movies are also downloaded and streamed from Jellyfin, a local media server on my pc. Local just works. And I'm the owner of my files.
Dump Spotify and embrace yt-dlp
Counter counter point. Your brain hasn’t been as fried by technology as the youth (I’m Gen Z). Streaming has trained our brains to never listen to full albums. Having to rewind is kinda the point. You’re way more likely to listen to an album from start to finish. Phones are overrated.
How far back are we talking? Because I remember in the '90s using the VHS recorder to record shows to fast forward through the ads later
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.
There’s no track skip
You can skip tracks on vinyl. Not at the press of a button, but if there's a track you know you don't like, and maybe it's extra long, you can absolutely set the needle down at a different point. It's literally what old school DJs did and do.
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.
People talk like the dedicated portable music player just doesn't exist anymore, but you can buy devices like that if you really wanted.
There's even better ones available now like the Tangara which is open hardware+software and it's creators are here in the fediverse!
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.
You had me in the first half, but streaming on Spotify can go right to Dell.
Most decent headphones still seem to have physical buttons. The big ones. With earbuds you're kinda out of luck
The problem is that this one device we adopted kept getting worse at what it was supposed to do and got repurposed as a real time ad delivery and social engineering machine instead.
The biggest problem we created is that you used to own things. Like music. Now you just lease them. Or stream them. And don’t forget the 65 minutes of ads for every 23 minutes of music. Or maybe that 33 minute ad in front of that 87 second long YouTube video. The device isn’t the issue, or the lack of devices. It’s the bullshit we have to deal with now that everything is a subscription or ad.
i only miss the device controls. the buttons and clickwheels were so awsome.
I miss iPod. It’s easy to use. Doesn’t spam ads in my face. And the music is my own, I don’t need to pray it doesn’t disappear due to licensing deals.
CDs suck as a portable format but is nice since it’s like MP3s but not proprietary.
Cassettes suck, and I don’t miss them.
Records are a fun novelty. They are the worse format, but the art and the experience is fun especially since I need to be careful what albums I buy. I need to like the whole thing and not just a song or two.
Gen z here. I don’t feel like I’ve earned the right to talk about cassettes as a youngster, but a Type II cassette on a well maintained dual capstan deck and a well biased recording sound pretty good. Add a touch of Dolby type b noise cancellation and it’s even better.
Specifically, I’m using a Yamaha k-1020 deck ($350 refurbished), and Maxwell XL-II 90 tapes ($5-10). I’m running a proper audio interface into the cassette deck. Since I’m using my phone, I have the luxury of rapidly skipping around an album on my phone while I’m checking levels for an entire album. And I’m using a 3 head deck, so I can hear exactly what’s being recorded in realtime.
You might read that and be like “that’s too much work”, but that’s kinda the point imo. Why do people still do film photography when it’s more work than digital? (I also shoot film lol)
Admittedly, things fall apart a little when you move to portable cassette players. Modern players are kinda crap. I haven’t gotten my hands on any vintage walkmans yet.
I grew up with cassettes. Type II was a rarity and not what you’d buy from the store. Those were type I tapes.
Plus the whole format was a compromise. CDs almost whipped them out, but when digital came both were gone in a flash.
I think the only benefit of cassette today is making mix tapes, but on a retail and purchasable music standpoint. They weren’t good.
I'm glad I only have one device now. Fuck having 12 things.
CDs and players still exist. Just go buy them and live how you want.
Though not as portable anymore, since the manufacturing capacity (small parts) doesn't exist anymore. Smae for dvd players, walkman and gramophone btw.
Right? This is confusing.
Go for it. Buy a portable DVD player with a portable screen and head phones to watch movies. Buy a clock, a dumb phone, a little portable game device. Buy a magazine with nudie pictures. Buy a camera and take it to a photo place so get physical copies of your dick pics. Mail them to your friends. Buy a megaphone so you can yell racist things to your neighbors.
All of this is still possible right now. No smart phone needed.
I remember getting my Nokia N95 nearly twenty years ago, and it was fucking awesome being able to reveal the four media control buttons, and blindly control music in my headphones from my pocket while walking to work or on the bus or train.
As other commenters have said - I look at my old Ixus camera or LG Soul MP3 player or Nokia 3330 with fond nostalgia memories... but thank fuck I'm not lugging all that about now.
I for one like all of it being in one versatile device. My issue with smartphones isn't technology, but the corpos that profit from you even after you've bought the phone.
i hear this a lot but it’s not like those things do not exist anymore? they are even still being produced.
I really do though. I would splice a guitar cable into one and use it as a portable guitar Amp so I could practice wherever
Just the other day I was noticing how you don’t see vhs or cassette tape ribbon just littering the ground anymore. It’s better this way
now you don't even see the lithium batteries leaching into the water supply!
Yup, thank God each device just has one lithium battery, instead of the HUNDREDS UPON HUNDREDS of alkaline batteries you'd go through in the life of a device in the past. You got about 6-8 hours of gameplay in a GameBoy from 2 AA batteries. Kids played these every single day. You have any idea how many we went through?
Or stereos/walkman of the time using even more? Stereos used 4-12 C/D batteries and lasted maybe 2 hours.
You have no idea how incredibly better you have it with lithium batteries and the waste they create. We used to buy alkaline batteries by the 24/48 pack as a regular grocery item.
the only answer is self-hosting
Not missing discmen, though. Those sucked.
But yeah, seriously. Walkmen were extremely primitive and all kinds of inconvenient compared to later digital devices, but that also meant that they didn't contain ads, spyware or feeds full of propaganda. And they were fairly rugged (in stark contrast to the various mp3 players I had, which didn't even have touchscreens), didn't have glued-in batteries in proprietary formats (again in contrast to mp3 players), and definitely didn't just become unable to perform their functions because of software stuff.
Can I get it all in one device without requiring an internet connection for functionality?
I still maintain the 4th gen iPod Nano was slick as fuck.
