1 Mercutio: You know Ophelia, the problem with any storytelling medium these days is that technology moves too fast.
2 Mercutio: A couple of centuries ago you could write a story and 50 years later people would still be familiar with everything you mentioned.
3 Mercutio: Nowadays, when a story has been around for five years, everything sounds outdated.
4 Ophelia: Oh, sorry Mercutio, I didn't hear you. I was listening to my Walkman.

I would have used Discman, but I suspect even fewer people would know what one of those was.

Walkman actually continues as a brand for Sony's digital music and video players, but I don't know anyone who refers to them as "Walkman" like people used to do for the original portable cassette players that were so ubiquitous in the 1980s and '90s.

And I realise in this case 5 years is a wee bit of negative hyperbole - although I was still using a cassette Walkman as recently as that (though only for the portable radio aspect - I gave up the cassettes ages ago).

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2024-01-14 Rerun commentary: When this comic was originally published, iPods were still more popular than iPhones. And I just discovered to my shock that iPods were only discontinued in 2022, with the last version of the iPod Touch having been released in 2019. I had assumed that iPods stopped being sold at least five years ago (in 2018 or earlier).