I hated how proprietary it was but I always though the physical form factor of Memory Stick was perfect. It was long enough to actually write something legible on a label, which also made it harder drop and lose.
Micro SD is almost ludicrously small and completely un-label-able.
Sony was always pretty good at the ergonomics of physical formats, actually. MiniDisc is such a wonderful format to use.
Yeah, Sony was always pretty good at the ergonomics, but I decided long ago against buying anything they make because they always wanted to go it alone and define their own formats, and refused to join in with other manufacturers to create a common, interoperable standard. E.g. Memory Stick, MiniDisc, etc.
Sony gear always seems high enough quality, but the proprietary lock-in that it inevitably comes with, one way or another, is a nonstarter for me. I haven't bought anything they make in decades.
MiniDisc was decently interoperable as Panasonic, Sharp or JVC licensed it.
The main flaws I think were the price outside of Japan (tarrifs?), and how bad the digital interface was. And there was no other choice than Sony’s junk software running on specific versions of windows to read/transfer tracks from a computer. Which is pretty much the path Apple chose with iTunes/iMusic.
Speaking about the digital interface, there's some music industry skulduggery involved with that. It goes all the way back to when the RIAA decided they were going to ratfuck Digital Audio Tape. While the labels weren't successful at outright killing consumer digital recording, they were able to kneecap it with SCMS, and they basically boycotted DAT so you couldn't buy any legal music for it.
When Minidisc came around Sony had "learned their lesson", so to speak, and just outright bought a music label. While this sounds like the player manufacturers "won" over the copyright owners; the reality is that the opposite happened. When you buy a business, you tend to inherit the business's problems; unless you specifically decide to just run that business as a subsidy for your other business units. That rarely happens[0], it's not like Sony was going to make music for free so that they could sell more players.
So when Sony decided to add a way to copy MP3s to Minidisc, they decided to kneecap it in the worst manner possible, because at that point they had become the music label that they had once fought against. The whole industry was very opposed to unencrypted music and tried to make MP3 players illegal[1]. I imagine at one point when designing NetMD, someone from the Sony Music side of the business just outright dictated to the MD engineers how the system was going to work.
Apple is an interesting case because they were very much willing to ride the wave of music piracy[2] to sell computers, but only to a point. The limit was that their portable devices weren't going to let you copy music - that's why you had to "sync" MP3s to iPods instead of just copying them to the filesystem, and the transfer was only one way[3] unless they were iTunes purchases you owned. This is probably the only reason they were even allowed to license music for the iTunes store, as the labels were otherwise demanding ridiculously consumer-hostile DRM systems nobody wanted.
[0] Counterexample: Google buying On2 and having them make all their patent-royalty-free video standards also Free Software. If they hadn't done this, we would be stuck with VP3/Ogg Theora, and MPEG-LA probably would have killed the $0 licensing rate for free Internet video on H.264.
[1] See RIAA v. Diamond. The Audio Home Recording Act that had kneecapped DAT was still in force; but the judge decided it didn't apply to MP3 players because they didn't record digital audio. This is why you don't hear about AHRA or SCMS anymore.
[2] Remember "Rip, Mix, Burn"? Or, for that matter, that one time Steve Jobs went up on stage at MacWorld and showed off a PlayStation emulator for Macs?
Yes, I know CD ripping and emulators are not piracy, but they're integral components in a piracy workflow. Apple today is the company that refuses to allow iDOS 2 or UTM, specifically citing the fact that emulators allow "content without licensing". Their words, not mine.
[3] Technically speaking you could just copy them off the iPod, but the filenames were all mangled up, and you'd have to reconstruct them from the ID3 tags.
On NetMD, the funniest thing was that high end devices still accepted analog 3.5mm input for recording, and it was more reliable sometimes to run an audio cable from the computer, record on device and cut/rename the tracks afterwards than to transfer by USB (or it was the only choice in the early mac days). The only downside was the fixed compression rate.
This! I too appreciated that you could label them. I've been tempted to 3D print "cartridges" that hold a microSD for this exact reason. Hard to lose, easy to move around and label.
Sony Memory Sticks, at least the early light purple ones, had a recess rubbing the length of them where you could affix a sticky label. Some even came with a little plastic case and a set of labels.
I used to do embedded firmware, we actually had micro sdcard labels. The other thing I did was keep mine on a sticky note and label the space around them.
Micro SD is almost ludicrously small and completely un-label-able.
Sony was always pretty good at the ergonomics of physical formats, actually. MiniDisc is such a wonderful format to use.