Makers of Betamax machines have long waited for this day. It’s just too bad it’s more than three decades too late.
The last Video Cassette Recorders, or VCRs, for short, will be manufactured this year, according to an article in Popular Mechanics.
For those of us who remember them, VCRs ushered in the era of watching movies at home. I can still remember the first movie I ever watched on VHS — Night Shift. I’m not sure what it says about my parents that they let a nine-year-old watch a movie about a morgue attendant who finds a new life running a prostitution ring out of the morgue, but it probably has something to do with a decided lack of supply available at the time.
Why has the last company manufacturing the machines decided to stop making VCRs, two decades after the technology became obsolete? Because, until recently, people were still buying them.
The reasons for Funai’s halting VCR production aren’t surprising: they’ve cited declining sales and difficulty finding parts, which translates to “nobody’s buying them anymore.”
Funai, the last company manufacturing the machines, has been doing so for the last 33 years. Not a bad run, when you think of it.
