TL;DW: because they all use the only mechanism that is still in production. It’s not a good as the top of the line from 2000, but it’s way cheaper than rolling your own from scratch.
I’ve an old Sony Walkman in a drawer that’s is barely larger than the cassettes itself, my guess today there probably isn’t money in them anymore so it’s probably only a handful of company’s making them and doing it as cheap as possible.
Videos basically explains it. There are lots of people making devices, but with cassettes, the deck core mechanism is basically the same simple spec that Chinese manufacturers have knocked off.
Yeah just now watched it fully it’s interesting there’s no mention of any of the old Sony fancy features on the new ones either, think my old one had all the dolby stuff and could do things cassettes usually couldn’t like skip and rewind tracks etc.
Because MiniDisc got it right, and Sony refused to open source the tech.
Ok, but the piece is about plays for people who want to play the retro physical media formats. It isn’t about people asking for new smaller disk or cassette media.
Are there modern mobil cassette players that are worth it? Thought it’s just dropship slop.
