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Apple Archive

Sony Just Doesn't Get It - the Digital Walkman Can't Compete with the iPod

- 2004.07.12

This past week Sony unveiled a Walkman digital music player to commemorate the Walkman brand name's 25th anniversary. The Walkman certainly was a groundbreaking device when it came out in 1979, because of its ability to let you listen to your cassettes in stereo without annoying anyone else around you.

Yes, there were earphones and shirt pocket radios, but they weren't generally stereo - and they didn't play cassette tapes. The Walkman was really a big step forward when it first came out.

The same could be said for the iPod. Yes, there were other digital music players on the market, but few held more than one or two CDs worth of songs, and none were as stylish as the iPod. The iPod essentially moved the portable music player market from the analog Discman to the digital player. Considering that the iPod currently has greater than a 50% market share, Apple must have done something right - just as Sony did with the Walkman in 1979.

I've still got an old Walkman that I use occasionally - in fact, I have two, a WM-1 and a slightly newer WM-22. While they don't work as well as they once did (for example, the forward and rewind buttons don't work very well anymore), it's easy to see why the Walkman sold well from the beginning: It's easy to use. The controls are right there, and you don't need to read the instruction manual to figure out how to use them. There are no unnecessary features, either. You're probably not going to be recording anything, so why have that feature? (Although Sony did put out one Walkman model with that feature.)

The most important feature was that they worked with the standard format of the time, the cassette tape.

Does this sound a bit familiar? That's right, because Apple's iPod is the modern-day Walkman.

The iPod moved the industry forward in the same way the Walkman did. While not the first digital music player, it moved the portable music industry over from CDs to compressed digital music. It had what people wanted. It sounded good, held a lot of music, and - most importantly - worked with the existing music format, the MP3. This allowed people to transfer their MP3s right onto their iPod without re-ripping their CDs or converting their files.

The new Sony digital Walkman doesn't support current standards, just Sony's proprietary ATRAC3 format. You have to buy all of your music from Sony's download site or use their SonicStage software (Windows only, of course) to convert MP3, WAV, or WMA files from your CDs or hard drive.

Then there's the claim that Sony's 20 GB Walkman holds more songs than the high-end 40 GB iPod. Well, it does, but the problem is sound quality. The iPod holds 10,000 CD-quality songs (128-bit AAC encoding). CD quality, something Sony's engineers don't seem to see as a concern (the digital Walkman uses 48-bit encoding). After all, music is music, right? The more music it holds the better, right?

Sorry, but if the music doesn't sound good enough, who wants to buy the device that plays it?

The iPod sold and continues to sell because it provides the right combination of style, storage, ease of use, price, and sound quality. It remains to be seen how well Sony's digital Walkman will do, but I suspect they will have a hard time with sales. It's simply not a flexible enough device.

My advice? If you want a good digital music player, look at an iPod or other similar device. And if you really want a Walkman, hop on eBay and look for a WM-22. It doesn't play MP3 files, but it does come in cool colors - like lavender --and it's a lot more flexible than the Digital Walkman.

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