Disc player has less memory than goldfish

Back in March I noted a number of interaction design faults in the PURE Chronos CD Series II DAB/FM/CD/MP3 Stereo Clock Radio. Most of them were minor irritations. Now I have discovered something really stupid.

The machine plays CDs, but retains no memory of where it was when it stopped playing.

Here is a typical scenario...

You are listening to a CD. In this illustration, track 6 is about to play.

You switch to the Radio (using the Source button).

You switch back to the CD. For quite a while nothing happens, as it takes about a second for CD-playing to reload.

The machine starts playing the CD at the beginning of Track 1! All memory of the fact that we were at the beginning of Track 6 has been lost.

How stupid is that? How little storage would it require for the machine to keep track of the position on the CD when it left off? How much effort would it have taken to make this work usably? 

I can guess the explanation for this nonsense: the different devices within the machine are not really part of an integrated system but discrete modules which operate ignoring what each other device is doing. But that is not really good enough for a machine that cost £88.05 (equals $134 or €101 at today’s exchange rate). 

Consumer devices are generally stupid when it comes to remembering where they are on a CD, DVD or Blu-Ray disc – I’ll be coming back to this. This Pure machine is another example of bad practice.