Sony on Thursday annoucned that it would stop shipping portable MiniDisc Walkmans from September due to shrinking demand. The company will stop shipping the MZ-RH1 Hi-MD Walkman model in September although it will continue selling Hi-MD discs (HMD1GA) until the September of 2012. The specific model has been available in Japan since April 2006.

Demand for MiniDisc Walkmans has been decreased as amid the growing popularity of many portable music players that use internal memory to store multimedia content, such as Apple 's iPod.

Hi-MD MiniDiscs can record up to 1GB of data. The discs first appeared to the market in 2005.