I used to buy a lot of Sony gear. When I was growing up, my dad used to work for a production company that was owned by Sony / Columbia, so he got discounts on Sony gear. Their TV is a 32" Sony Trinitron (top of the line CRT from 1993), and their home stereo is a Sony.
My stereo in high school was a Sony bookshelf model, and all of my portable audio players are Sony--my Discman, my Walkman (yes, I still have one), and a handheld portable tape recorder. Two of my four pairs of headphones are Sony. I bought or received nearly all of these things in high school. I even had a MiniDisc player for a while, when MP3 players were still overpriced gimmicks and before MP3 CD players were common.
Unfortunately, Sony has been in serious decline for many years now. Their customer service has been garbage since the '90s, and their product quality has been deteriorating noticeably over the past ten years. Compare the build quality of a Sony product from the '70s or '80s to my parents' gear from the early '90s (which is still pretty solid, though the TV needed a new logic board last year), to my old stereo from the late '90s (which has had many problems, leading me to leave it behind when I started college), to their current gear. It's not as sturdy, and it doesn't last.
Their headphones don't even have metal bands any more; it's all very flimsy plastic, and the audio quality of their gear is no longer superior to the other manufacturers in their price range.
The only Sony console I ever bought was a secondhand PS2 (which I sold nine months later), and the only Sony product I've bought this millennium is my MP3 Discman, in 2004. (SIDE NOTE: I once found a PSone that had been abandoned by a former housemate, but after using it to play through Castlevania, I gave it away with some games I sold). My computer is an Apple, my home theater is secondhand JVC gear (all of which is from the early '90s except the DVD player, and it all works as well as it did the day it was built), my TV's a Toshiba, my phone is a Uniden, and my game consoles are Nintendo.
One of my New Year's resolutions for 2006 was to spend my money where it's deserved, but *only* where it's deserved. I've been pretty good about it. I switched phone companies and computer companies, I've supported more independent productions in the arts, and I've started making fair-trade products and fresh organic produce a larger part of my groceries.
This *would* be the final straw for me with Sony, but this thread has made me realize that I don't really buy their stuff any more, anyway. It's another bullet in a growing list of reasons I won't buy the PS3, but in all honesty, I wasn't going to get one anyway. The PSP was never interesting to me, and my home theater has been complete for several years. I did consider a Vaio when I switched computers last spring, but I got a better deal on the Mac. Sony doesn't make PDAs any more (though the Clies kicked ass), and my next portable audio player will be an MP3 player, which Sony is notoriously bad at.
I wish there was something I could do to impact them a little. I feel like the vegetarians in Futurama who are threatening to boycott the seafood restaurant
