The Verge has a really amazing article filled with pictures of Sony products from their exhibit in the Sony Building in Ginza, Tokyo.
These products are gorgeous. Here are a few that I’ve borrowed from Verge (all credit goes to Sam Byford, who I’m guessing took all the photographs).
Man, does this all have me reminiscing.
The first PlayStation was an amazing product. My uncle had one (I think he still has). Visiting him and hanging out in his condo was the thing to do when I was a kid. He had a copy of NHL 95 (in all its glory), Crash Bandicoot 3, and one of the first NASCAR games for PlayStation.
It almost makes Apple’s proprietary stuff look like hobbies by comparison. Look at this wall of proprietary formats! Insane!
The Verge says Sony beat Amazon to the e‑reader market by a few years with this thing. It still looks so good.
Not that long ago, owning a Bravia meant your family had made it. The Bravia meant you had succeeded and could afford one of the grandest niceties of suburban culture. (My parents still have one of the original Bravia TVs in their living room.)
There will never be a more beautiful clock radio.
My home town doesn’t have an Apple Store in its mall, and the only place you could buy any of it in the early 2000s was driving over an hour to get to Toronto. So the closest thing we had to a “luxury technology store” was the Sony Store. There were three of them within a thirty minute drive of us.
I loved that store. No matter which mall we were in, I would head down to the Sony Store and see what stuff they were working on. I did this even after I started using Macs and iPhones, because Sony was always so cool. Even when they were losing their lustre, they continued to experiment with the weirdest, coolest, and most expensive ideas.
The VAIOs were stunning. I wanted one when I was younger. To date, they are the only Windows computers I ever saw that looked consistently elegant. I never owned one, but friends and family who had the pleasure of using them always told me how excellent they were compared to the rest of the market.
When I took a brief look at Windows laptops a couple months ago, I was sad the VAIO lineups weren’t what they were when I was a teenager. The “good old days”.
I don’t really know what happened to Sony. By all accounts, they did things right for a long time before veering off track. For a long time, even their weird stuff — like the MiniDisc Walkmen, one of which I owned — were really cool. They worked so well, and for their time, they oozed innovation and coolness.
For a couple years, walking around with a Sony Walkman was still the “cool thing” to do when I was in school. Until suddenly it wasn’t. The iPod became all the rage almost overnight.
The thing is, some of these Sony products wouldn’t look out of place in an Apple museum. These are beautiful machines.
I miss this version of Sony.