Walkman
Walkman, stylised as WALKMAN (ウォークマン), is a brand of portable audio players manufactured and marketed by Japanese company Sony since 1979. The original Walkman started out as a portable cassette player and the brand was later extended to serve most of Sony's portable audio devices; since 2011 it consists exclusively of digital flash memory players. The current flagship product as of 2022 is the WM1ZM2 player.
Walkman logo since 2000 | |
Left to right from top: an (original) cassette Walkman (1980s), a CD Walkman (2001), an MD Walkman (1998), a digital Walkman (2011) | |
| Manufacturer | Sony Corporation |
|---|---|
| Type | Portable audio players and recorders |
| Lifespan | July 1, 1979 – present |
| Units sold | 385 million (all editions, as of March 31, 2009) |
| Related | |
Walkman cassette players were very popular during the 1980s, which led to "walkman" becoming an unofficial term for personal stereos of any producer or brand. 220 million cassette-type Walkmen were sold by the end of production in 2010; including digital Walkman devices such as DAT, MiniDisc, CD (originally Discman then renamed the CD Walkman) and memory-type media players, it has sold approximately 400 million at this time. The Walkman brand has also been applied to transistor radios, and Sony Ericsson mobile phones.