This seems to be a theme. Toy quality going down. There was a tape recorder with mic from fisher price. You could use the mic to record on the tape and keep it around. I thought to buy it for my kids because I had good memories of it, but guess what. They replaced the tape with tiny memory that you have to overwrite all the time. If they at least would have supported some removable memory.
> They replaced the tape with tiny memory that you have to overwrite all the time.
Until that point I fully expected you to say that they replaced the tape with storage on a cloud account. I bet this will happen one day. So many toys are already trying to suck on kids' data and hook up the parents to cloud services (see e.g. toys that feature "extra experiences" that you access by pointing your smartphone camera at them, and looking through the toy maker's app).
I can totally see that happening. And then it's 'oops we leaked all your kids audio', 'our ml researchers are listing to your kids audio to improve ads that will soon play on your tape recorder', etc.
> And then it's 'oops we leaked all your kids audio'
Especially that this has already happened at least once - there was a company storing unencrypted audio from a plush teddy bears in a publicly-accessible MongoDB instance.
