Leave a subtle hong somewhere that someone clever can find out. Wait for news of the functionality to go viral and additional products to walk off the shelf bought by people who feel clever.
When I was about 10, someone lent the school a tape of Holst's The Planets for a school play, one of the other students pressed the record button, and shortly thereafter the teacher played to the class a recording of me shouting "no stop" as I rushed for the stop button having seen what they'd done just a moment too late.
Now imagine that happening by undocumented feature, where nobody knows it would happen before it does.
Though I'll admit, when I used to use cassettes, I never write protected them
One time my older sister and I got into a fight and to get back at her, I erased side A of her Michael Jackson's Thriller cassette she had just gotten a few weeks prior. She got it replaced at the music store and the salesperson was completely befuddled by the entire situation. That one day the music was there and the next day just gone? Inconceivable!
I just played stupid at the time, but felt like a god knowing that little trick. So, sorry sis. But John C, you were the man.
Music back then wasn't cheap.
At some point during design, one person must have said “you know, why not add a brilliant white light that turns on in silent mode? Wouldn’t that be cool?” and there was no one powerful or smart enough to stop their hubris.
Every hot summer night, I turn off my bedside lamp, and scream internally when I notice I forgot to put a dark piece of cloth to obscure the blinding white light on the fan. In these nights, I dream of sending an email to Rowenta’s customer team, and asking them to present me the head of the person responsible for this.
I am reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance lately and how technologists have made the world ugly by forgetting to keep in touch with Quality and Beauty, and this is painful reminder of it.
Solves every LED problem.
Xerox, why did you think the power led on your multifunction should light up not only my home office, but the room next to it too?
I have some Black 3.0 (blackest paint on earth) I'm gonna try this with!!!
Ideally instead I need some stick-on semitransparent dark-alpha stickers to reduce brightness. Maybe I should use two polarized stickers, and rotate the second until brightness is perfect.
Are there non-linear solutions or HEV-sensitive photochromic solutions - so that LED brightness is low in the dark but bright enough in sunny conditions?
Every drug store, bus stop and storefront in my city is painful to walk around at night.
The cycle of enshittification.
Lets say the sales do start dropping once you avoid it. At some point it will make sense to change it because most people likely want the change.
But from their pov, nothing is really different right? They are always catering to the most common demand in the market. How will this affect them or teach them a lesson?
Recording was the killer feature for me. I recorded thousands of hours of band rehearsals with their stereo omni mics and the media quality.
If you can find a player, you can still get the discs on Amazon which is awesome considering how disposable tech has become.
You suggest adding it as a "bonus", but for whom? Recording what on the walk? How would you advertise that along the main feature people actually buy the thing for? If not, what purpose does it serve? It's a few cents, but that's still a few cents too much if that's not what you're convincing people to buy.
Try to think of someone who didn't buy a walkman because it lacked a recording feature. What's their story? Can that easily be represented in the marketing material?
It's often easier to just throw in everything that's easy to do with little thought about cohesiveness or user experience. Leaving the record feature out of the walkman was likely a more difficult idea to push than including it and I think they were right.