The Gadget Agenda: Cassettes are making a comeback, and I can’t understand why
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I love the memories old gadgets bring back. But chewed tapes, endless fast-forwarding and a recent drive in a 1986 Vauxhall have reminded me why we moved on.
I've been reading about retro tech a lot recently. There's a company called We are Rewind that's carving out an incredibly successful niche rebooting the tech we've either already got sitting in our lofts, or we binned many years ago.
Their prime focus is on cassette players, and they've rekindled the Walkman, even down to the foam-padded headphones Sony's game-changer came with back in the 1980s.
I must admit, it gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling when I see old tech like this. The 1980s was a wonderful time and, because I was a kid with no mortgage and no responsibility, it was a simpler time. A Walkman definitely brought you joy.
But now? I genuinely don't get it. Listening to music on a cassette just seems utterly pointless.
There's been something of a renaissance in vinyl music over the last decade, and I sort of understand that. It's not my cup of tea, but the warm sound you get from a record is quite pleasant. Cassettes though? They sound hideous.
And then if you're bored of the track that's playing, you can't just skip to the next, you've got to fast-forward and just hope you land on the next one.
Eventually your cassette will get all chewed up and you'll have to get a Biro out to rescue it, and that's if the tape hasn't degraded over the years anyway.
It's not like we all gather around as a family and watch re-runs of The Waltons on a 14" black and white television set any more, so why go back to the days of cassettes?
In the same way, I don't watch my wife heading out in all weathers to run our clothes through a mangle. We've got a tumble drier now.
A company called Trettitre has raised over $2 million in crowdfunding to develop a wall-mounted machine that has a record deck, a cassette player, and a CD player. It's an absolute work of art, but why would someone pay what is set to be around £500 to listen to cassettes and CDs? That £500 would get you an armful of smart tech in Currys.
I was clearing out a drawer the other day and found my old iPod. I don't want to get rid of it, so it went straight into another drawer, but of course I'm not going to use it. What's the point? My smartphone can give me any song I want to listen to and if I'm at home and I'm feeling musical I just ask Google or Alexa to stream something. Literally anything. And I get it in glorious digital quality, too. Not a scratchy, crackly mono.
The other day I drove a 1986 Vauxhall Astra. It was in pristine condition, and a glorious reminder of my youth, when there was one around every corner.
But I could simply not get over how awful it was. The steering was heavy, the brakes basically didn't work, it was noisy, and smelly, and uncomfortable, and desperately unsafe.
I still love to see classic cars, at shows, or maybe even on the road from time to time, but there's honestly no fun in driving them. And, yes, I have driven some really special ones. I don't really get those either.
The point I'm taking a while to arrive at is retro is rubbish. We've become a technologically advanced species because we move things on so fast, and so well.
We've now got flying cars, sort of, thanks to Tesla, and as I write this a robot is out in my garden mowing my lawn for me.
For all the lovely memories it might conjure up, the thought of going back to an era when I had to flip a tape on to side B just to carry on listening to an album fills me with dread.