It does what it says on the Walkman lid: this account posts nothing but old Sony products, reminding us that tech had a golden era.
Follow Obsolete Sony on Bluesky, but it’s also on Threads and Instagram.
To be clear, we’re not in that golden era anymore.
Nobody’s going to look back at the 2020s and fondly remember the design of this decade’s iPhones and Samsungs – which are effectively the modern Walkman and Discman, when you think about it.
Maybe we’ll talk in pleasant tones about the Sony PS5 and whatever the latest XBOX is called, but apart from the Nintendo Switch (which is fairly boring to look at in its newly revealed second iteration), there isn’t much cool gadget design around these days.
In 2015, Sony announced the Aqua Blue PS Vita, set to release exclusively at GameStop in November for $199.99. This new model marked the first time the slimmer, lighter PS Vita was available in a color other than black in the U.S.
— Obsolete Sony (@obsoletesony.bsky.social) April 7, 2025 at 2:28 PM
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Well, not from the big guys, anyway.
The stuff from Teenage Engineering is obviously incredible, and the hilariously failed Humane AI Pin is at least a cool piece of industrial design, but even those are just throwbacks to an earlier age of creative genius.
And the thing is… Sony’s ’80s and ’90s gear, along with Nintendo and Sega I suppose, just felt special. Properly special. Not just another slab of glass and metal. Remember those Walkmans? The chunky PlayStations? The SNES and MegaDrive?
They had personality.
Colour, buttons that clicked, weird shapes – stuff we just don’t get anymore.
Today’s tech? Powerful as hell, sure, but just as boring. Everyone’s got the same sleek rectangles, and all anybody on social media can do is complain about the shape of the camera modules or the exact radius of the slab’s corners.
It’s not just about nostalgia either. It’s that back then, they were actually trying to make stuff fun. Think about the N64 controller, or the weird and wonderful Sega peripherals. They weren’t afraid to be out there.
So… keep that in mind as you browse ObsoleteSony’s posts of earlier PlayStations, and the PSP, and the Walkman and the Discman and MiniDisc (why was it not called MiniDiscman) and some bulky TV controllers, and laptops and… the list goes on.
Oh, and while this isn’t sponsored, I’ll add that they have a book being kickstarted right now and it looks pretty cool.
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