I discovered this Christmas that the boom box/ghetto blaster form factor is just about dead.
Nathan has had a Fisher-Price CD player for several years. It was a present from Lea’s parents, and it’s been good. It reads CD-Rs reliably, so it’s been pretty easy for Nathan to enjoy pieces of our music library.
Lea and I have been thinking Nathan would pass that one to Aaron, and Nathan would get a new one for Christmas that can either read MP3 CDs, or has an audio input for an MP3 player. We finally settled on this one, and I think it’s going to be fine, but I’m really surprised at how basic it is. It doesn’t even have any tone controls.
I can remember the boom box section of the Sears Wish Book taking up a dozen pages, with all manner of complexity in controls, displays, and so forth. Now, all of the nice stuff seems to be either desktop units that dock iPods, or WiFi/XM/other expensive pieces that aren’t child-appropriate.
‘Course, what all of this is really pointing toward is the imminent death of physical media. That feels so wrong to me. I have a feeling it’s going to be one of my grumpy old man topics—you know, those things I’m going to talk about incessantly and obliviously while everyone rolls their eyes and sighs?
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