MiniDisc
- Cause of death
- Killed by a successor
- Made by
- Sony
Flash memory made a rewritable optical disc for audio pointless.
MiniDisc was technically excellent, beloved by a small and permanent constituency, and commercially irrelevant outside Japan. It arrived to replace the cassette just as the CD burner and then the MP3 player made the entire premise moot. Sony announced in 2013 that it would stop shipping MiniDisc players after twenty-one years, and the format retains an unusually devoted afterlife among people who like owning physical media that clicks.
Replaced by The MP3 player.
Standing in the archive
Rank 68 of 127 by lifespan. MiniDisc outlasted 47% of everything else on file.
Cite this entry
"MiniDisc." How Long It Lasted, https://www.howlongitlasted.com/thing/minidisc.
Died nearby
- Betamaxabout 41 years · killed by a successor
- PlayStation Vitaabout 7 years · killed by indifference
- Adobe Flash Playerabout 24 years · killed by a successor
- Amazon Dash Buttonabout 4 years · killed by a successor
- Apple AirPortabout 18 years · killed by a successor
Sources
- MiniDisc — Wikipedia (archived)
- Sony quits manufacturing the 21-year-old MiniDisc player — PCWorld (archived)
Last checked by a human on 24 July 2026