Sony Memory Stick

~ the eulogy ~

anyone who stood in front of a camera shelf in the 2000s knew one thing about the memory stick before they knew anything else about it, which is that it cost about twice what the card in the next slot cost and fit exactly one manufacturer's products. in a market where an officially imported accessory carries its own markup on top, that gap does not read as small. it was a permanent surcharge attached to a camera you had otherwise decided you liked.

sony launched it in october 1998, a flat purple wafer about the size of a stick of gum, holding up to 128 megabytes. the industrial design was good and the thing slid into its slot with a satisfying click, both of which are true and neither of which was the point. the point was that sony made cameras, camcorders, laptops, phones through the ericsson joint venture, televisions, portable audio players and a handheld console, and every one of them would be sold with a slot that accepted this and nothing else.

the format then multiplied. memory stick pro arrived on 9 january 2003, engineered jointly with sandisk, lifting the ceiling to a theoretical 32 gigabytes. after that came duo, pro duo, micro under the name m2, pro-hg duo, and finally xc. each one needed an adapter to sit in the previous generation's slot, so the accessory drawer of anyone committed to sony filled up with small plastic sleeves whose only job was making sony parts fit other sony parts.

~ the dossier ~

~ the tax ~

the psp is where the arrangement became most visible. it shipped in 2005 with almost no usable internal storage, so a memory stick pro duo was not an accessory but a requirement, and sony bundled a 32 megabyte card that could hold roughly one save file and nothing else. the console had a real price and then a second price, and the second price scaled with how much you actually wanted to do with it. the clie handhelds ran the same arrangement a few years earlier.

there was a reason for the lock beyond margin, and it is the more interesting one. the format carried a copy-protection system called magicgate, because sony was not only a hardware company. it owned a record label and a film studio, and it spent the entire decade trying to build consumer electronics that its own content divisions would approve of. the memory stick was a storage format designed partly to make copying inconvenient, sold to people whose reason for wanting storage was copying.

~ what really happened ~

the numbers went bad early and stayed bad. by november 2003 the sd card held 42 percent of the united states memory card market and compactflash held 26, leaving memory stick at 16 despite being mandatory across one of the largest consumer electronics catalogs on earth. sd won on the only ground that mattered, which was that everybody made it and everybody's cameras took it, so the price fell every year while memory stick's did not.

sony conceded at ces in january 2010, where every digital camera and camcorder it announced could take sd and sdhc alongside its own format. that is the death, even though cards kept selling for years afterward, because the exclusivity was the format and once the exclusivity went there was no argument left for buying one. the last removal took another nine years: the alpha 7r iv, announced in 2019, shipped with dual sdxc slots and no memory stick support at all.

sony had already repeated the lesson without learning it. the ps vita launched in 2011 with proprietary memory cards priced the way memory stick had been priced, and it is one of the standard explanations for why the vita sold the way it did. the cards are still in the drawer of anybody who owned a psp, holding files that nothing currently manufactured can read.

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