Buying second hand is not that nice (smells that never go away) and “vintage” places sell min. catalogue buy way overpriced.
They can, but people wouldn't want to pay the price. When adjusting for inflation, clothes today are much cheaper than 30 years ago, and the main producers of high-quality cotton (Kazakhstan and Egypt) are having continuous drought problems so the best raw material is even more expensive.
The combination of customer expectation for low prices, and more expensive raw materials, exacerbated by lower production volume, means that very few would be willing to buy. As an example, take a look at the high quality jeans market: there are a few niche companies in Japan, Europe, US and Canada producing jeans at the same level of quality as 50-100 years ago, in some cases the exact same model as, say, a 1950's Levi's. Those jeans start at $200 per pair, but go even up to $400-500 and the manufacturers are barely surviving.
If I want to buy a new MP3 player, I have to buy something from a company I've never heard of with a terrible screen, use an old phone, or buy some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much.
Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?
Plenty of people would lose money, break even, or God willing, make a tiny profit, diving into this problem. Regardless, it would make society a happier place.
I don’t think it’s true that the capabilities to make these devices are lost. There are still companies like ALPS that are capable of making the necessary parts.
But in the end, the market is too small to justify any investments.
I feel for them because I wouldn't mind paying 2/3 times the price for something of measurably higher quality and durability, but it takes effort and dedication to accomplish that as a customer. Effectively the market is saturated with premium-branded items that are marginally better or sometimes worse (a lot of what you see as "technical clothing" comes across that way at least), you feel gaslit by marketing, fake reviews and astroturfing campaigns, and there are only so many deceptions, defeats and financial losses you can sustain before going back to the devil you know: the default everyone else is buying.
More software? Sure. An operating system? No. There were (are?) plenty of cheap MP3 players that had screens but just drive it with some budget microcontroller.
The entry level Walkman is $400 and only has 32gb internal storage. It's all about flac and hires audio but you're paying through the nose for the brand
That product category simply isn't worthwhile for big brands anymore.
The only market is in the "enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much", just like it is currently for vinyls and DVD players.
I both have music subscriptions (Spotify for the wife, Qobuz for me: Qobuz streams lossless but sucks for music discovery) and good old files (mostly FLAC files indeed except some very old, impossible-to-find, live recordings I only have in mp3). One does not prevent the other.
Also some people self-host or partially self-host things: you stream from a server you own: be it family pictures (I'm Mich / immich), movies and/or music (Plex or Jellyfin). And, well, the stream doesn't spring out of thin air: there are good old files on the server.
Lastly: some music streaming services allows you to buy albums and/or individual songs, DRM-free.
I know the late 90s called and want their MP3 straight out of Napster and their 10 GB HDD back but you can safely up the ante to lossless FLAC files.
MP3 is, literally, 30+ years old and I traded my 10 GB HDD for a 1 TB NVMe SSD that could read an uncompressed dump of my entire 10 GB HDD in about two seconds.
FLAC files are only about 2x the size of 320 kbps mp3.
Really, it's 2026. We can do it (I do it).
Because you can do that with any phone and just not use the phone part?
I find myself researching, trying to find the smallest lightest old phone that either has decent internal memory or a micro SD slot, but it's not easy. Most phones are massive compared to an iPod shuffle
Although FiiO is probably the company to look at for these kind of products.
Is this surprising?
They are a commodity (you can literally build a fairly decent for less than $10 in parts) so therefore are low profit. Brands you have heard of generally don't want to play in commodity markets.
The alternative is to move upmarket where prestige or specific features are important:
> some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much.
There you go.
> Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?
They can and do. Look on Amazon.
They call into the two buckets you outline above. Just buy one of the $50 ones from the companies you haven't heard of.
I recently got the Shanling M0s. It runs its own OS and seems to me completely at parity with what MP3 players used to be back in the day; in fact I think it's the best one I've ever had, and I've been buying those devices since the Diamond Rio. If more people just got one, Shanling would no longer be a company nobody's ever heard of, and the economics would change to further bring down the price too (although I think it's not all that bad right now).
ChrisArchitect•11h ago
Minidisc understandably gone away (until maybe hipsters revive that too like they have with tapes?) but on the tape front ... Maxell thinks they have something with cassette players.... wonder if/how these are selling:
Maxell MXCP-P100 – wireless cassette player
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47497781
1659447091•10h ago
Same here.
I was just recently wondering if there were any places that sell Walkman's still. I remember walking around Seoul and ended up in a maze of closet sized electronic and nick-nack shops with some really random old parts and gadgets. Made me miss my old boombox. Thought that would be a good place to go back and look for a walkman, but the Maxell MXCP-P100 – wireless cassette player looks perfect
NaOH•10h ago
https://retrospekt.com/collections/cassette-players
officeplant•9h ago
That is already happening. I like to frequent Vintage Computer Festival and for the last few years a few of them have had MD-Con as part of a convention within a convention. A whole room dedicated to MiniDisc tech showing off laptops, desktops, camcorders, pro-hifi gear, etc. There is a collector that even brings a large portion of his collection which is all in blue including rare blue color minidiscs themselves from company promo's. One example is a promo MD from Boss Coffee in japan which looked fantastic.
There is even a revival in the software used to burn/format minidiscs since most of the original software is ancient now.
Its pretty fun to visit them as someone who used a minidisc player through highschool and college until I got the original Microsoft Zune. A lot of the people I met at the last two MD-Con's loved looking through all the models presented at the con to try and find the same device they back in the day.
https://www.mdcon.live/
SpecialistK•8h ago
gattilorenz•8h ago