I had a cheapie serial mouse that decided to die. After we replaced it, I got the bright idea to see how strong it was. So I stood on it. With one foot. It took my entire weight and didn’t break until I did a little hop on it. I don’t think any of my mice would take that now. But try telling that to kids these days and they won’t believe ya.
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I think all of these are “find a kid who’s never seen the old technology and get their first impressions.”
Most any kid can easily figure something out, especially old analog technologies. It’s probably more interesting to do a video based on “watch a kid figure out a record player” or “watch kids figure out walkmen,” but it’s not as humorous.
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In the true spirit of the Four Yorkshiremen I should probably start bragging about the cuneiform we did in primary school. Still got calluses from chiselling.
But like you said, they won’t believe ya.
This is the most scripted, contrived set of reactions I’ve ever seen. Where did they get that many annoying kids?
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I’m confused by your use of the word ‘confused’. Are you talking about actual confusion arising from an unusual and difficult to parse use of every day English language? Because English speakers have been using that expression in general parlance for several years now. Or did you actually mean to make a show of pointing out that you are more fluent in technical usage of audio terminology?
Edit: Or, I guess, were you deliberately playing the pedantic audio fiend?
In which case; well played.
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5:43 this kid looks and sounds like butters from southpark
Yeah bull.
Kids love things like this. They would have it totally figured out in 30 seconds, want to keep it and demand all your old cassettes. Personally I wish I still had one to give my kids.
Why is it assumed that new technology erases the past? So, we have iphones, ipads and the internet, so what. They still learn how to ride bikes.
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The difference between “kids not knowing how something works” and “kids not knowing how something works while on camera.”
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Actual parsing of the language. I’m going to school to become an acoustical engineer, and the exact wording was between two things I hear people complain about all the time: 128 kbps MP3s and 32-bit vs 64-bit audio. I saw the number I associate with compression and the word I associate with quantization and I wasn’t sure which was meant.
Question was answered, though. They were talking about compression.
You’ll notice the kids most outraged by that are under-10. 6 years ago may not be that long for you our me, but for everyone in that video, it’s between a third to half their lifetimes. So the 10 year old being confused that a device has no external speaker like the iPad, iPhone or any number of audio devices that are commercially available (or even things like portable dvd players, etc) it would be kind of confusing.
Are they confused by Walkmans? Or Walkmen?
They DO recognize the buttons. You see a couple of them specifically recognize the ‘PLAY’ symbol on them. That’s not the issue they’re clearly having: there’s no FEEDBACK to the buttons. They press them and nothing happens. A couple clearly don’t realize they have to push the button in far enough to have it lock in position, in particular. Part of the point here is that we assume a whole set of circumstances from experience they don’t have. There is no screen, no visual information or anything to inform them of what the device is doing.
My own kids understand intellectually the idea of 8-tracks and cassette tapes, for example, but the actual use of them is not as intuitive as you might think, if you hadn’t used them for years and grown with the technology. Even the assumption that I see some people have that OBVIOUSLY they would know it would HAVE to have headphones is coming to the exercise with assumptions the kids don’t all have. A 10 year-old wouldn’t know that the device HAS to have headphones to work and has no speakers of its own, since the iPhone has been able to do that since 2007 and some MP3 players could do that before that (though rare).
They were kind of cheating by not giving them the headphones right up front, but that was to highlight that assumption, I think.
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Yeah! How dare you hint there are $9.95 mp3 players on the shelf at walmart that do exactly what a $300.00 Apple product does!
I remember my sister having a wind-up gramophone which she took on punt-parties on the Cherwell, to play 78’s. That was pretty old school back then but those things and their records lasted well. But some Japanese friends were completely gobsmacked by this: clockwork record players with no electronic amplifier - that’s a real thing? Woah! I guess Japan had gone straight to transistor technology in the fifties.
When I was in college (this was 2006) my language classes had recitation homework that had to be recorded and turned in on cassette tapes. They didn’t start allowing digital submission until 2008, no idea why. But yeah, in some circles this technology was very much still in use not that long ago.
Really? If Apple is so crappy why do people need to make shit up to put them down. Your $10 mp3 players has 160GB of storage or can play videos and games at high resolution? Show me.
Yeah. I get the feeling that we’ll be seeing this video again in few years. In a “before they were famous” segment on your favorite holo-beam neural-net infotainment based program. They’ll be laughing about the phones that people had to carry in their hands like savages in the mid 2010’s, because phones weren’t yet chips that were embedded in your brain shortly after birth.
The actor will be promoting “The Fast and the Furious 15: The Even Newer Breed”, and they’ll show this video to show how adorable they were way back then. This will be the last F&TF film to feature “Old Man Diesel”, aged 53. I can’t wait for 2020!
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COM ports! 
A couple of them recognize the buttons. One of them – and not one of the younger ones – makes a great show of not recognizing the buttons, and thumping on the Walkman cassette slot as if she expects that to do something.
The buttons do have feedback, particularly the play button, which locks into position with a loud click, but most of them would noticeably have an effect on the axles that turn the cassette, which you could feel and see through the window on the cassette slot. And the buttons are quite prominent – you might not realize instantly what the buttons do, but if you were trying to figure out how to operate the device, anyone would realize the buttons are important.
Still not buying it. Where’s the speaker on an iPod Nano? I’ve almost never heard anyone playing music over the built-in speaker on a smartphone or small MP3 device, except by accident, when they’ve forgotten to plug in the headset. When I was posting earlier, I was on a commuter train, at the train station adjacent to a large university; a large proportion of the people getting on, and nearly all the college-age passengers, were wearing earbuds or headphones, plugged into the 3.5 mm audio jacks on their smartphones or other portable devices – the same sort of audio jack that the Walkman popularized, and that is prominently highlighted in light green on the Walkman in the video. Listening to music through headphones is ubiquitous – in my experience, it’s now rare for people to listen to music any other way, especially kids. And headphones are often treated as fashion accessories, especially for teens. Yet two of the kids express surprise at even seeing headphones – one claims he last saw a pair six years ago, and another claims her grandpa owns a pair.
No, the more closely I look at this video, the more obvious that this whole thing is a sort of hoax, intended as click-bait in self-pity articles for Gen-Xers to complain about feeling old.
My $30 Sansa clip cost, well, $30 and is actually of higher sound quality than its comparable iPod which costs about $200 (maybe less, now?).
Why do people buy the iPod? Status. That’s why.
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