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.