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If you’ve seen more old tech out in the wild lately, you’re probably not the only one.
Speaking to WhistleOut, Laser managing director Chris Lau said that while the prior decade had typically seen the retro tech category record consistent sales, the Australian tech brand had seen consumer interest in older tech has grow “exponentially” over the past few years.
“Our retro sales – and we supply to everyone, so JB, The Good Guys, Harvey-Norman, Big W – have increased.”
“We had thought it would be a fad or a trend or it's going to come and go, but it actually hasn't. It's just been steadily growing every year,” he said.
While some part of the audience for retro tech is still buying for nostalgia, it’s no longer the only factor in the mix.
Asked why retro tech has seen a resurgence, Lau noted that, while more modern products are more technical, retro tech does offer an escape from the tyranny of lock-in platforms and subscription fees found elsewhere.
“There's a charm in the old school retro tech where you can put a record player or cassette in and press play and it just plays,” he explained.
Of course, what products do and don’t fit into the broader retro category aren’t necessarily set in stone. Older generations might not consider a DVD to be a retro product, but younger generations (and retailers, according to Lau) feel differently.
Gesturing at the recent resurgence in DVD and Blu-Ray sales, Lau framed it as a trend driven by broader changes in the nature of content and media availability.
As a contrast, he also highlighted the growing interest from younger consumers in old-school point-and-shoot cameras. For those consumers, the technical limitations are part of the appeal.
“There's no editing and you still get the grainy or the lower resolution type charm of those older photos,” he said.
According to Lau, the main audience buying these are Gen Z and Gen Alpha – neither of which grew up amid the heyday of pre-digital photography.
“There's no one over 25 or in our experience that is buying those sorts of things,” he said.
According to Lau, there’s also been a shift back towards older approaches to consuming content as well.
As the rising cost of music streaming services like Spotify leads more and more consumers back to old-school MP3 players, it was perhaps only a matter of time before distributors like Laser followed in pursuit.
Lau said that the brand is now looking to bring back MP3 players to Australian retailers by November – with the goal being to take advantage of both the retro tech revival and the Black Friday sales period.
However, when Laser first got a request from its retail partners to bring MP3 players back to the Australian market, it initially struggled to find a factory capable of meeting that request.
Then, once it did find a manufacturing partner that was up to the task, it had to reckon with the harsh realities attached to the rising cost of RAM.
“The price of memory made this thing jump like five-fold,” Lau said.
Of course, the flip-side of that inflation in cost is that Laser’s next wave of MP3 players are going to come with a lot more storage than its last.
“We sold MP3 players 15 years ago. The last one we sold was 256MB, which isn't a lot. I think it was $19. I think the new one's going to be a gigabyte and it will be $49 or $69,” he explained.
Asked for his broader perspective on the ongoing components crisis, Lau reiterated the basic but brutal reality that the memory shortage has affected pretty much everything that has RAM in it – which is pretty much everything the company sells.
“A lot of things that we sell – retro or non- retro – have memory of some form.”
“Even if it's a small amount of cache – where the Blu-Ray player is remembering your last playback position or the dash cam has remembered your settings or the gaming console has memorized certain positions in your game – everything takes a little bit of RAM,” he explained.
The other big difference between now and 2011 is Laser’s new generation of MP3 players will be able to read high-end audio formats – which they couldn't do 15 years ago.
“If you've got a FLAC file, which is basically a high resolution uncompressed audio, then you can listen to it in much greater quality than a higher compressed MP3.”
Of course, as opposed to a lot of the other retro tech that Laser sells – which are typically more plug-and-play – its upcoming MP3 players will require a bit more technical know-how on the part of consumers.
While Laser will provide you with the hardware and instructions on which file formats will play nice with it, you’ll still have to know where to get content and go through the motions of putting it onto the device directly or via some form of external storage.
It’s hard to know how consumers will react to this extra layer of friction, but Laser’s recent foray into gaming handhelds suggests it might not be as big a hurdle as you’d think.
In recent years, Laser has dipped into the retro gaming space with handheld devices and projectors that allow for the easy emulation of older titles.
While loading up a ROM for an old Sega Genesis game is a little more complicated than sticking a vinyl on a record player, that complexity hasn’t translated into much of an increase when it comes to customer service issues.
“We were expecting a lot of those calls. We didn't get any of those calls. We've sold maybe 6000 to 10,000 of these devices over the last two years [and] we've barely had any calls of that nature, which leads us to believe that people who want to do that sort of thing, they know how to do that sort of thing,” he said.
As with things like point-and-shoot cameras or MP3 players, the consumers buying these retro products seem to know what they’re getting into from the outset.
“It would be the same and I guess this is a sidebar [but] back in the day, if you wanted to get content off Pirate Bay or Lime Wire or if you wanted to torrent content illegally, then you would just know how to do it."
“We just provide the device, but as an association, I can see that – I'm not sure what the percentages are or I really can't comment on who's using it for what – certainly us having sold so many of these gaming devices with ROM emulators indicates to us that a lot of people can get access or know how to use ROM emulators.”
Fergus Halliday
Digital Content Editor
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