Last year my wife suggested for her Christmas present that I get her a bedside DAB radio-alarm. I started looking but she changed her mind so I got her something else. This year I wanted to get one for her birthday so I went out looking again. What was different was how few DAB radios there are in the shops now. Last year I had concluded that really the only ones on the market that really fit the bill were the Pure Siesta series so I popped into the local Currys, who had no Pure models and only a handful of others, most of which were reduced for a quick sale. No matter, I knew they had them in Argos. During the epidemic you have to order for delivery so I went home and selected the
Pure Siesta Mi Series 2 DAB+/FM Alarm Clock Radio. When you try to 'add to basket' it shows 'not available' so I went to the Pure website where exactly the same events happened.
In the end I went on eBay and found an earlier and arguably preferable model from the series: it is white and doesn't have Bluetooth. Pure now only make docking stations, Bluetooth speakers and internet radios. Why would anyone want a radio which has to receive RF signals from outside your room? I mean, your wifi is always on, and all the music you want to listen to is already on your phone. Young people now don't know what a radio is and don't want to listen to the news or 'programmes' about anything they are not already interested in. I sound cynical but they all manage somehow to explore new and emerging artists and music styles through media channels that I don't know about.
I don't buy many new cars these days so I don't know if DAB radios are offered as up-market options now, but when I was browsing for what to choose for my next car I didn't see that option. - again it's Bluetooth and docking stations that people want.
It's not just DAB radios that are disappearing from the shelves these days, radios of any sort are going out of favour. Another product that is getting scarce now is the corded headphone or earbud. Just look in the shops. Plenty of Bluetooth earbuds which obviously you use with your phone which contains all the music you want to listen to, but there doesn't seem to be any kind of Bluetooth sender device that you can plug into your phono preamp or CD player. Cordless proper headphones are wonderful but you can't walk around with the base unit plugged into your mp3 player. The domestic TV nowadays is an internet-connected device which offers more channels that you can get from any transmitter, terrestrial or satellite.
btw, the pre-loved radio-alarm suffers from the Pure malfunctioning buttons syndrome: you press one and nothing happens, so you press it again, and again... until suddenly you've pressed /every button simultaneously and started a rescan or switched to FM or overwritten one of your presets. Otherwise they are all functionally wonderful.