The BBC convinced 13 year old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a Walkman and use it for a week. The first shock came just from seeing the thing:

[My Dad] had told me it was big, but I hadn’t realised he meant THAT big. It was the size of a small book.

It gets worse from there. Wearing the 30 year old device on his belt (“it is certainly not pocket-sized, unless you have large pockets”) Scott felt embarrassed at the attentions of passersby as they stared and shouted insults.

Other problems included lack of a shuffle mode (“I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down “rewind” and releasing it randomly”), terrible battery life (three hours), sound quality (we’d disagree — even a tape sounds better than the average MP3), and capacity (twelve tracks in your pocket!).

Scott had some operational troubles, too: “It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape.” The ultimate insult comes at the end, though:

Did my dad, Alan, really ever think this was a credible piece of technology?

Ouch!



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