Roll tape.
Back in the course of the late Eighties heyday of the Sony Walkman, the parent company of the Apple iPhone of the era partnered up with Tiffany & Co. to create a silver-plated version of the non-public, portable cassette player, in honor of the tenth anniversary of the absurdly-popular listening device.
Only 250 of those special Walkmans were made, a lot of them delivered on to a few of music’s best names.
Today, long after the revolutionary technology was made obsolete, Walkman collector Mark Ip is the proud owner of not one, not two, but three of the Tiffany Walkmans — for which he spent a complete of about $10,000 to remove from a surprisingly robust collector’s market, The Guardian reported.
Ip, 60, is one in every of the higher-profile Walkman collectors; he goals for essentially the most pristine models he can find, which he shows off on his popular Instagram page, @boxedwalkman.
“I’m somewhat bit OCD,” Ip told a Guardian reporter. “Because I’m not satisfied with only single units. I need packaging, user manuals, original headphones.”
“Like all collectors, you’re searching for perfection,” he said. “What is ideal is a recent box, never touched, no scratches, no dust. It’s almost not possible, but I’ll do my best to patiently wait.”
So perfect are most of the specimens in his collection, Ip decided to place them on display for the general public to understand, a couple of years back.
“That is one in every of my missions in Walkman collecting,” he said, to show the young to something that meant a lot to the older generation. Lots of the younger attendees were “seeing a cassette player for the primary time”, he said. “Most were genuinely curious. They were intrigued by its mechanics.”
For the Hong Kong based collector, the business is deeply personal — he keeps about 20 of the devices out in any respect times, simply to mess around with; Ip’s obsession dates all the best way back to his youth, he said, when he couldn’t afford a Walkman of his own.
“Once I was in highschool, a classmate had the primary model, the TPS-L2. The stereo sounded so good. And it was portable,” he remembered.
It wasn’t until years later, when the devices were now not needed and all but forgotten, that Ip began to construct his vast treasure trove of tape players — about 1,000 of them, he estimates, but he’s hesitant to let any of them go, at the very least for now.
Not so Stephen Ho, an energetic eBay-er who lists well-cared-for Walkmans for as much as $3,780 — though most of what he sells, he admits, goes for rather a lot less. He deals with all ages, he says, from the Gen Xers like him that grew up attached to their players, on right down to youths with a taste for the old.
“Before social media, it was limited to older generations,” Ho told The Guardian. “But since social media — Instagram, Facebook, whatever — teenagers have been exposed to old stuff. Old guys are buying for his or her memories. Young persons are buying to try. They think it’s trendy, it’s interesting.”
The fiftysomething retiree from Hong Kong, now living within the U.K., worked in Sony’s marketing department back within the 1990’s — for him, that is far more than a business. His Walkmans are a significant link to a beloved past.
“Because I grew up with Sony products and I worked for Sony, I even have a passion for his or her products,” Ho said. “During those years, Sony was like Apple nowadays. I used to be a standard teenager. I had Sony Walkman, Sony radio, every little thing Sony.”
When Ho moved to England in 2020, he brought his precious collection with him, including a whole lot of Walkmans, Discmans and MiniDisc players.
He tries to limit himself to a budget of about $600 for brand spanking new acquisitions, but confesses to paying slightly below $2,500 for one in every of the Tiffany Walkmans.
And no, he said — that’s not on the market, and never might be.
“I’m buying greater than I’m selling,” he admitted — one in every of his favorite places to search out recent acquisitions is Japan, where street markets could be filled with finds, though nowadays, it’s entrepreneurs in China using 3D-printing technology, he said, which are helping to maintain Walkman fever alive.
“For the reason that price of Walkmans has gone so high, persons are making spare parts, which makes their lifespan longer,” he said, though old tech like this has a couple of of its own longevity tricks in-built — so long as you may have normal batteries available, for instance, a Walkman could potentially live endlessly.
Try bringing your old iPhone back to life in fifty years and see how that goes.
