Originally Posted by Nigel Goodwin:
“I thought so as well - it was a format that seriously flopped”
AFAIK, it *was* very popular in Japan, but did little elsewhere.
That said, IIRC they enjoyed a *very* brief- and minor- popularity surge here around the millennium (i.e. the immediate pre-iPod era). Strange, as they'd already been around for several years by then and done nothing.
Maybe the prices had fallen enough to make them affordable to the teen and twentysomething markets? I also heard that Sony had a marketing push around that time.
Still wasn't enough to get them established, especially once the iPod came out.
Originally Posted by Nigel Goodwin:
“I suppose it was perhaps a nice idea, but modern technology quickly made it obsolete - cheap SD cards etc. and MP3's soon made it fairly pointless.”
Not that quickly- they first came out in 1992(!), years before most people had even heard of MP3, 9 years before the first iPod (*) and a long, *long* time before large-capacity SD cards were dirt cheap.
The underlying MiniDisc technology had a lot more potential, but Sony hobbled it to some extent for their own reasons. (**) They restricted digital copying via SCMS and (AFAIK) only allowed copies to be made by real-time dubbing, except on much later models.
In theory, it could have been a more powerful file-based system. Now- to cut them some slack- that wasn't how people consumed music back then, and most computers wouldn't have been powerful enough to do anything worthwhile with ATRAC files anyway. Still, they could easily have made it more flexible in the way that songs could be transferred between devices (i.e. as fast as the interface allowed, not forcing real-time dubbing).
The point is that Sony *did* have the technology to create something akin to an MP3 device (rewritable disc with lots of storage for the time) years before all that came along- but they turned it into little more than a random-access audio cassette.
Then, when MP3 did come along, they ignored and resisted the trend, and let Apple grab the lead. Given Apple's subsequent success, it's easy to forget how ludicrous that would have sounded at the end of the 90s.
But remember, this was the company who had defined and led the portable music market with the Walkman, who had the technology and the experience. The market was theirs to lose... and they were upstaged by Apple- who up until then had only been a personal computer manufacturer (back in the days when there was far less crossover than there is now) with no real audio experience!
After dragging their heels for years, Sony finally released some crappy devices that required one to convert their MP3s to ATRAC (a pathetic example of NIH, particularly as by this point MP3 had become the de facto standard and it was too late for them to impose the latter). They eventually released "true" MP3 Walkmans, but it was way too late- they'd lost their position in the market, and it was no-one's fault but their own.
tl; dr version:- MiniDisc actually came out years before even the first iPods, had a lot of potential but was hobbled, then when MP3 came along they resisted change and let a PC manufacturer(!) steal the portable audio market from them.
(*) MP3 players had been around since the late-90s, but most of those early devices were too limited, expensive and finicky to be anything more than geek toys.
(**) Sony by this point had investments in the music and film production industries, leading to conflicts of interest