Sorry, stu: I was there. The Walkman 'play' button had to move, because the head had to move. If it's a design requirement (and it was), throwing meaningless insults like "clunky" at it is stupid. An elegant solution to an engineering problem doesn't cease to be elegant when the entire matter is overcome by technological advancement.
, sorry you take that fact personally.
Try to refrain from mindreading, you're no good at it. Go ahead and use "clunky" and other meaningless noises to express yourself. It's very revealing.
I was there too, spent the better part of a decade with a walkman or clone attached to me. And I remember all the problems, bumping the stop button, mechanical failure.
Necessity doesn’t improve design. Yes they had to be clunky for reasons we both pointed out, that doesn’t make them not clunky, it just makes them nor more clunky than was needed. Big giant buttons with a half inch of play aren’t elegant. The fact is until you get into high end home decks that used electronic motors to move the play head around there were no clunky cassette decks. Some LOOKED nice, but then you pushed the button half an inch until you heard the click and all elegance disappeared.
Nobody is mind reading, you’re demonstrably offended at having the painful obvious mechanical deficiencies of the 30 year old device acknowledged. The short way of saying that is you took it personally. And every time you insist that clunky is meaningless you show you continue to make it personal. It’s in the dictionary bud, and few things in this world are as awkward or clumsy as tape deck buttons, heck they even made a clunking sound.