(Disclaimer #1: This post has nothing to do with my teaching life.)
When Apple announced the Gold iPhone two weeks ago, I immediately thought, “Sony!”
(Disclaimer #2: The rest of this post is going to date me somewhat. Not quite so much as 8-tracks, but… something like.)
Here is the last piece of consumer electronics that I owned in gold:
Back in a previous life, I used to do some consumer electronics reviews for Minidisc units — this was back when Minidiscs kinda sorta used to matter (which is basically before the iPod came out and flash/HD-based mp3 players took over the market).
In 20041, Sony released their flagship model portable MD recorder, the MZ-NH1, and one of the two color options was Champagne Gold. 2 I had to pull this sucker out from the depths of my storage, but it’s still kickin’ — I was still using it to record bootlegs as recently as 2008.
For a brief few years, these things were slick – miniature re-writable optical disks encased in protective cartridges that carried 74 minutes of music — back when we actually measured our music in minutes and seconds, as opposed to megabytes and gigabytes.3
I remember back then, me and friends would ogle at the mere fantasy of a single all-in-one device that could function as a phone and music device and camera and… you know, not actually suck. We opined that the consumer electronics companies would NEVER let it happen4.
Turns out we weren’t that far off.
- if memory serves me right [↩]
- I’ve always suspected that Apple has some former Sony electronics aficionados in their design ranks… [↩]
- Sony finally tried modernizing their MiniDisc line by allowing storage of mp3’s on their disks, and increased the capacity up to 1GB. [↩]
- since it would probably cannibalize product sales [↩]