40 years of the device that led to the 'birth' of the Apple iPod

40 years ago yesterday a product entered the market that perhaps revolutionised the way people consume music. The Sony Walkman was introduced to the world on July 1, 1979 and was perhaps one of the first lifestyle gadget. The millennials might not be able to relate to the phenomenon – and it was truly a phenomenon that lasted for close to two decades – but the Walkman was a device that and made you ‘cool’. From Timbuktu to Trivandrum, the Walkman was what the Apple iPod became in the early 2000s: a device the cool kids carried and something which everyone wanted. Interestingly, the Sony Walkman was also one of the products that was the ‘inspiration’ behind the Apple iPhone. In fact, if there would’ve been no Walkman, perhaps there would’ve been no iPod.

The Walkman was a portable music player that played audio cassettes. The beauty of the Walkman lied in its simplicity and over the years it saw many iterations and continued to be widely popular. Once audio cassettes started to be replaced by CDs, Sony did launch something called DiscMan and then when digital music came along it went into MP3 players. However, none could touch the popularity of the Walkman and once the iPod became insanely popular, the good ol’ audio cassette player could never recover.

It’s not as if the Walkman didn’t fight a good fight as Sony continued to labour it for nine years after the launch of the iPod. It was only in October 2010 that Sony officially discontinued the production of the Walkman. By then it had – as per a TechCrunch report from 2010 – the Japanese tech giant had sold over 400 million Walkman devices across the world.

Such was the popularity of the Walkman that the term became a generic one. Even when other brands launched their portable audio cassette players, they were referred to as Walkman.

While today the smartphone might be the one-stop-shop for all things music, there was a time when the Walkman ruled the roost.