Comment by nine_k
4 days ago
IOW, it was also technically hard for Sony to launch the original Walkman, but they overcame the difficulties, because they expected a huge market success (which followed).
Now the product would be niche, and what had been originally built for its production became unavailable. The effort to stand up it all over again would not pay off.
The first Walkman from the late 70s was just an existing Sony portable cassette recorder (the TCM-100B), but with the mono head replaced with a stereo head and the recording functionality removed. Once that first unit proved there was a market, they were able to continually re-invest the money into miniaturization and new features so by the mid-90s Walkmans (Walkmen?) were high-quality cassette players that were barely larger than the size of a tape. All the tape enthusiasts would want a recreation of a high-end 90s Walkman, but the tooling and supply chain required to build one no longer exists and can't be recreated without the revenue stemming from portable cassette players being the predominant way to listen to music on the go for 15+ years.
It was also nearly magical how long my final Walkman could run with a single AA cell.
The jump from TPS-L2/WM-1 to WM-2 was ENORMOUS. Like, WM-2 was TINY - 75% the size of TPS-L2/WM-1. They were almost done before they got started! I know I got one Xmas 1981 and it was stolen in 1984 but now I have 3x.