“I use Pandora on my iPhone to listen to music, but I am not convinced by today’s many iPhone docks – none of them say “music player” in the iconic way that radio-cassette players and boom boxes did back in their heyday.”
and then later in the comments, the author says
“Everything we design is a form of communication, and sometimes it is most effective to use a language we all understand. I referenced decades old technology not for nostalgia, but for its communicative aspect: they are icons of their functionality, well known to everybody.”
Are they well known to everybody? Does everyone understand and remember cathode ray TV’s? How long will we keep this nostalgia up? It’s funny, we’re all in love with retro - instamatic, hipstamatic, digital Robert’s radios - but this is a shared memory for people of a certain age. I wonder what people will reminisce about in 20 years time?
What will be ‘retro’ for the next batch of product designers - at the moment, they’ll be harking back to our false memories, because we’re not giving them anything of their own.
That said, they’re nice objects.
