Background: I get along very well with my Mom. She’s normally a really reasonable shopper, and we have a relationship where we can be honest with one another.
She owns a little portable radio, which she listens to while biking to and from work. She gets teased for it, and it has static while biking.
Her solution? To buy an mp3 player that has a radio. She seemed genuinely offended when I said that that was a really strange solution to a problem that could be (much more cheaply) fixed by buying a new portable radio and/or headphones. She’s adamant that it’s an mp3 player that she wants, even though she doesn’t listen to music (she listens to CBC-1). I feel bad, but it seems a bit like buying a camcorder to take snapshots.
I’m not looking for advice or anything. I just thought I’d mention the spring strangeness already that’s taking hold in me and those around me.
I have a friend who runs very long distances—like, 20 miles at a time, even when he’s not training for a marathon. He still listens to a Sony Walkman tape player while running.
Somehow this seemed like the right place to mention this.
Well MP3 players play podcasts as well. Being able to listen to those on demand would be a benefit to having an mp3 player, and the CBC has quite a bit of podcast offerings.
'Twas exactly what I was going to say. Also, my cheapo MP3 player has a radio built in and it’s incredibly tiny, as I guess they are these days, so maybe she likes the small size as well as the ability to play CBC podcasts?
That’s the crazy thing. She takes teasing incredibly well! She just turned 60, and I announced that the best part was that I could save money on her birthday dinner, since she qualified for the senior’s discount.
Update: we went to Future Shop, and the portable radios are overpriced. For only $10 more, we could get a decent mp3 player. It looks like she might have been right, after all. I promised her if we got it that I’d show her how to set up podcasts of her favourite shows.
Probably a function of the economies of scale at this point. Very few people want a device that is ‘just’ a portable radio anymore, so it’s becoming something of a specialty item. Same deal goes for just about any audio hardware that will handle cassette tapes, except possibly for the big stereo systems where they’re still semi-standard.
MP3 players with FM radio pickup are much more popular, and so the ease of producing and distributing larger quantities pays off. (Also, the parts as in flash memory, USB connectors, and signal processors are dirt cheap.)
Good luck, and pay attention to make sure that she’s getting one that’s a GOOD radio player - where the reception comes in well with less static than her old radio, and where the controls are easy to work. I’ve owned a few where the FM tuner component was pretty clearly an afterthought and not worth much - but then, I live in an area where it seems hard to get a clear signal. Listening to the radio online gives me fewer headaches.