I Bought a Radio
I recently got a new piece of technology, and it’s got to be my favorite purchase of the last few years.
It’ll probably surprise you to learn that piece of technology is an AM/FM radio. In 2026.
This deserves some explanation.
In my bathroom I’ve had a HomePod mini for several years. I’ve got a lot of Apple products, so it slotted in pretty nicely as a radio and Siri tool when I was getting ready in the morning or winding down at night. It was never perfect, occasionally misunderstanding me, sometimes buffering or unable to respond. I wound up almost exclusively using it to play my local NPR station. I settled on an interaction model that eschewed Siri entirely: tapping on the top center of its touch surface would just continue playing the last thing it was playing.
In a recent software update, that behavior changed. Tapping the top would now play an algorithmically generated station, and saying “Siri, play KUT” would actually play KUT less than half of the time.
I was about to abandon the HomePod mini, when I discovered a technological solution to my technological problem! I could set up a shortcut in Apple’s Shortcuts app called “Play KUT,” and this took many seconds to start playing, but worked most of the time.
Unless I’d recently turned off my Apple TV. Because then what would happen instead is that my Apple TV would wake back up, and set its output speaker to the HomePod mini, but play nothing. And then my iPhone would be stuck controlling the AppleTV with an output source of my HomePod mini, which I could find no way to undo short of turning everything off and back on again.
Does this sound bananas? Yeah, I agree.
What I wanted to do was listen to the radio. What I’d taken on was a complicated web of wireless protocols, streaming services, voice assistants, and software workarounds. And this was all happening within Apple’s “it just works” ecosystem, to someone who adds technology to his life carefully and deliberately.
How did we get here? All of this technology and I cannot listen to a radio station?
So I bought a Sony ICF-506. It is, in my opinion, a handsome piece of technology, understated but tasteful. Best of all, it has a single switch that turns it on. When I slide it to FM, it turns on in under a second, every time. No buffering, “hmm, I didn’t quite get that,” or connection errors. It also has a volume knob. When I want the volume up or down, I turn it proportionate to the change I want, and it responds every time. No guessing which phrasing of “Siri, turn the volume down a little” to get my desired volume. Or gingerly touching a 1cm2 area that represents volume down if I get it just right.
The amount of complexity every device has these days, to very minimal benefit in my actual life, is remarkable to reflect on.
What’s my point? I think it’s this: I want the things I use every day to be predictable and reliable. Not most of the time. Not only when Wi-Fi is cooperating and Siri hears me correctly. The radio does that. There’s something about that kind of reliability and predictability that feels almost radical today.
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