What Happened to the Transistor Radio

I watched about the first 5 minutes of it before jumping ahead and did watch about the last 15 minutes in full (at what point the video below is timestamped to start) then jumped around to different parts of it.. It's pretty interesting, but just wasn't engaging to me somehow.. maybe because it's so long. I highlighted some interesting transcribed sections of the video below.

Transcript excerpts from the 45 minute video: 

"...My name is Jonathan Reed. I spend most of my time looking at buildings, factories, infrastructure, the physical spaces where industries were born and where they collapsed. But every now and then, the object itself tells the story as Clearly as any building ever could. The transistor radio is one of those objects. It is small enough to hold in one hand. It is simple enough that a child could operate it. And it reshaped American culture, the music industry, so the broadcasting world, and the very idea of private life in ways that we are still living with today. If you are new here and this kind of history interests you, the real history, the documented physical human history of how things got built and why they disappeared, ....

..... There's something worth noting about the geography of all of this. The transistor radio was in many ways one of the first major consumer products to be designed in one country, manufactured in another, and consumed most significantly in a third. The intellectual work was American and Japanese. The manufacturing was Japanese, then Korean, then eventually Chinese and elsewhere. The consumption was global but the American market with its combination of teenager population, spending power and existing AM broadcast infrastructure was the primary driver of demand. ...

...The transistor radio did not die quickly. It faded the way most technologies fade slowly than all at once. The first meaningful competitor, arrived in 1979.  Sony, the same company that had helped create the transistor radio market, introduced the Walkman. It was a personal cassette player, also battery powered, also pocketable, also designed for individual use. But it played tapes, your tapes, music you had chosen in an order you had arranged with no DJ and no commercials and no waiting. The Walkman did not replace the Transistor radio overnight. Through the early 1980s, transistor radios were still selling in significant numbers. They were still on beaches and porches and kitchen window sills. They still played sports games through tiny speakers and went to work in the chest pockets of utility workers. They were still given as gifts, but the cultural energy had shifted. The Walkman had introduced the concept of the personal playlist, curated, controlled, completely yours. After the Walkman, waiting for the DJ to play your song felt less like a pleasant ritual and more like an unnecessary inconvenience. The appetite for control, once activated, does not easily return to patients. The FM radio format had also been growing steadily through the 1970s, and most transistor radios received only AM. FM offered stereo sound, lower noise, .... ... The audience that cared about how music sounded, and as the 1970s progressed, that audience grew, gravitated towards FM. AM top 40 radio lost its premium status. The transistor radio, an AM device, went with it. ...

.,.. Each step in that progression, Walkman, Boombox, Discman, iPod, and finally the smartphone, transferred more control to the listener and removed one more layer of the shared accidental communal experience that the Transistor Radio had provided. By the time the iPhone arrived in 2007 and made the dedicated music player largely obsolete, the transistor radio was not just outdated. It was from a different universe of assumptions about what listening to music was supposed to feel like. AM radio itself did not disappear. It survived, but it transformed. The music left AM to FM in the 1970s and 1980s. What remained on AM was talk radio, news, sports, playbyplay, agricultural programming in rural areas, .. ... By the early 2000s, the major consumer electronics companies had largely stopped making them. The market that remained was served by inexpensive imports, often sold through drugstores and hardware stores and the clearance bins of large retail chains.... ..But here is what I want to leave you with because | think it matters. The transistor radio did not disappear without a trace. It left marks that are still visible if you know where to look. The entire architecture of personal audio, earbuds, headphones, wireless speakers, portable music devices of every description descends directly from the transistor radio. The first personal listening device .... The concept of the personal device, one person, one machine, a private relationship between a listener and a signal, was first widely established by the transistor radio. Before it, electronics were communal objects shared by households. .....

.... The human need it is addressing is the same one Todd Storz noticed in a bar in Omaha in 1949. People want to hear the songs they love. They want to discover something new. They want someone or something to do some of the choosing for them. And the question the transistor radio raises which I find genuinely worth sitting with is about the relationship between limitation and richness. The transistor radio could only do one thing. It could only receive signals that were being broadcast. It could not store music. It could not connect to other devices. It could not skip. It could not be personalized beyond the choice of which station to tune to. And within those limitations, it produced listening experiences of remarkable intensity. The song you waited for. The DJ who talked to you at midnight. The distant station bleeding through from a city 800 miles away. The battery dying in the middle of your favorite song and the silence that followed. These were experiences shaped entirely by the constraints of the technology. We have removed nearly all of those constraints now and the experiences have changed accordingly. I am not saying the old way was better. I am genuinely not sure that is true and I'm cautious about the kind of nostalgia that mistakes limitation for virtue. But I think it's worth acknowledging that something specific existed within those limitations. Something that the people who experienced it remember with a vividness and a fondness ...

... The AM stations that play music are fewer now. The DJs who talk to you like you're the only person listening are harder to find, but the signal is still there. The technology still works. And for a moment, if the static clears and a voice comes through that tiny speaker, something in you might recognize something it hasn't felt in a long time. I don't know exactly what to call that feeling, but | think it has something to do with what it meant to be young and alone in the dark, with a private world fitting neatly in the palm of your hand.