#HTE

Sony’s Strange Design for a Two-Piece Walkman, Circa 1997

In 1997 Sony designed a very strange Walkman model, the YP-ES22, made from injection-molded translucent ABS.

Instead of having a hinged cassette door, as every model did, instead the YP-ES22 was made in two pieces:

To release the two, you squeezed the molded-in clips on the side, freeing them from their registration points so you could separate the units.

As for why it’s designed this way, the only reason I can think of is they must have saved something in the BOM. But the UX had to be terrible!