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"      I felt so cool when my parents bought me my first and only MiniDisc player. It was one of those chunky silver Sony contraptions with the collapsible headphones and digital-readout controller that vaguely suggested the future. The problem, as everyone found out, was that MiniDisc was not to be the future. It was basically a burnable cassette, the awkward in-between child after analogue became a relic but before portable digital music storage really came into its own. Until, in other words, Apple showed us that having the equivalent of an LP and change to write over endlessly would not be sufficient past the year 2000. Now Sony has announced that it will stop manufacturing and shipping MiniDisc systems, to which you might reasonably ask, Wait, what, MiniDisc isn&amp;#039;t dead already? Apparently the Japanese are fond of the format, for reasons that I can only assume come down to the kitsch factor. There are formats to mourn (Polaroid) and many others not worth the effort. To understand how genuinely and painfully dated a format the MiniDisc is, you need only look back on the commercial for it starring Jamiroquai (above). MiniDisc has now gone the way of &amp;quot;Virtual Insanity&amp;quot; and Hackers (a movie I&amp;#039;m almost sure the MiniDisc must&amp;#039;ve made an appearance in) and Natalie Imbruglia, and it can never be recovered from our collective nostalgia for the 1990s. Why? Because, honestly, it always sucked. It&amp;#039;s time to say goodbye. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a18822/minidisc-dead-15059027/?click=news>