Sony Walkman takes its last steps

Tuesday 26 October

RIP Sony Walkman

After selling more than 220 million units through the years, Sony has announced that the original personal music player – the Walkman cassette player – has officially ceased production.

Responsible for taking music appreciation from a pursuit requiring silence and a large living room to one you could carry in your pocket when it launched back in 1979, the Walkman became a cultural icon of the 1980s as music fans the world over became believers.

A must-have gadget just like the iPod would become to the generation that followed, the Walkman continued to sell strongly into the 1990s – better, for example, than Sony’s attempt to apply the Walkman formula to the CD market with the indifferently received Discman.

It was only with the arrival of the iPod itself that the Walkman finally began to show its age – high praise indeed.

That said, it may be a surprise that the cassette-only Walkman lasted as long as it did. But it’s a testament to its everyman appeal that the tape-spinner kept on selling – albeit in much smaller volumes – even with newer, more advanced technologies costing little more.

The Walkman name itself, however, lives on through Sony’s own range of MP3 and MP4 players, though the hiss of poor quality audio, and the clack-clack-clack of tape heads spinning is not on the features list.