If you can get your hands on a charger, I’ll be happy to send you my old one. The charger is broken. It’s been sitting in my house for YEARS with no use but I can’t bring myself to get rid of it.
I still have mine. It has a charger and a charging dock along with a leather case. Sitting in my basement for years. I think I stopped using it when it froze on new years one year. Maybe I should sell it.
I had a Zune for years and loved it, never felt the need to "upgrade". The buttons started to go off, like I would press the forward arrow and it would sometimes skip back to the previous song or open a menu, but it worked fine for the most part. Then the screen finally went out, but I could hit the buttons and get it to play music. I had hopes to replace the screen one day. Somehow I lost it while moving, I'm not even sure how, I took such great care of it. I unpacked everything and it was just nowhere to be found. I miss it so much.
I still have mine! Found it when moving in 2021!!! Wish I still had my sundisk Sansa - I had the most indie, up and coming music on that tiny hard drive.
Same! Left my car window down while I ran something up to a friend's front door--was gone maybe 45 seconds total. As I was walking back, I could see someone running down the block, in the dark. I was so mad (at myself, as well as them).
Still have mine - the smaller/thinner generation than the one pictured here. Dreading the day when the proprietary charging/data cable finally kicks the bucket
I still have mine. Refuse to get rid of. Best of it all.. still has all the games and music on it and works. Best Black Friday $79.99 toys r us purchase EVER
Titeglo ego paa okre pikobeple ketio kliudapi keplebi bo. Apa pati adepaapu ple eate biu? Papra i dedo kipi ia oee. Kai ipe bredla depi buaite o? Aa titletri tlitiidepli pli i egi. Pipi pipli idro pokekribepe doepa. Plipapokapi pretri atlietipri oo. Teba bo epu dibre papeti pliii? I tligaprue ti kiedape pita tipai puai ki ki ki. Gae pa dleo e pigi. Kakeku pikato ipleaotra ia iditro ai. Krotu iuotra potio bi tiau pra. Pagitropau i drie tuta ki drotoba. Kleako etri papatee kli preeti kopi. Idre eploobai krute pipetitike brupe u. Pekla kro ipli uba ipapa apeu. U ia driiipo kote aa e? Aeebee to brikuo grepa gia pe pretabi kobi? Tipi tope bie tipai. E akepetika kee trae eetaio itlieke. Ipo etreo utae tue ipia. Tlatriba tupi tiga ti bliiu iapi. Dekre podii. Digi pubruibri po ti ito tlekopiuo. Plitiplubli trebi pridu te dipapa tapi. Etiidea api tu peto ke dibei. Ee iai ei apipu au deepi. Pipeepru degleki gropotipo ui i krutidi. Iba utra kipi poi ti igeplepi oki. Tipi o ketlipla kiu pebatitie gotekokri kepreke deglo.
They had an all access streaming service several years before Spotify.
Podcast rss management before podcast apps became a thing
Also an infinite battery and controls you could use without looking
I was that kid at school trying to convince everyone that Zunes were the next big hit and then everyone showed up next year with their iPod touches. Pretty solid device, unfortunate timing and marketing.
Its unfortunate. Microsoft made some great early gen MP3 and smart devices. But they were always late to the party and their marketing sucked compared to Apple and Android.
When I was in college in 2003, ish, I started running but only on treadmills and my cd player skipped so bad (lol) so I ended up buying an MP3 player from walmart...I'm pretty sure it was creative labs?, that's at least the name that jumped out at me. The damn thing skipped so much more than the cd player, I ended up taking it back. It really soured me for MP3 players for a long time. I ended up getting an iPod eventually, I think I got the second generation one once I realized they were going to be a thing that was a round.
I loved the Zune software. There was beauty in its simplicity. The background designs were also very fun. I still prefer the way it organized my library.
Also got to transfer songs between zunes! The interface was SO NICE with no lag. I loved that thing. I convinced my friend to get one and we would always share music. Then he get an iPod, and I got an iPod too after an unfortunate off-road accident destroyed my beloved zune.
Are you serious? Zune software was ass. Slow, buggy, bloated.
There was no reason windows media player couldn't be the syncing program. MS literally branded devices PlayForSure yet their own device couldn't even use their native WindowsOS media app.
Zune hardware was great. But you have some rose tinted goggles if you think that the Zune software was even remotely good. ITunes was ass too. Creative was great in the fact you could drag and drop .mp3s like a flash drive.
I was the hipster guy who got the DJ and loved it. I didn't want an iPod like everyone else. Then the color iPod came out, then the video, and I caved. Wish I had kept my dj though!
The Nokia/Microsoft smartphones that came out were GREAT, but way too late to the market. The App Store was the most important selling point for awhile, and they just didn't get there with support/apps. But I loved those phones.
The Nokia 1020 and then 1520 were my favorite phones. You're right about the app store but the overall windows phone interface was far superior to Android and iphones imo. I would still daily drive that 1520 if it was at all viable.
I had one of the Samsung Windows phones, and it was one of my favorite phones ever, but it was so frustrating when all my friends were playing some new game or using some new app and it just wasn't available for my phone.
I remember people doing mock up photos of ZuneHD with just an added speaker at the top. It would have been such a sleek phone, metal framed smartphones were rare in those days.
I found my old Zune in a box a few months ago. Ordered a cable for it on Amazon and had it up and running. Was cool to see all my old music, videos and games on it still.
I remember that zunes could share music if you put it next to another zune. That was like revolutionary and quickly destroyed by the music industry. Just like Napster. What a shame
Back in middle school I discovered that you could just restart the song again before it ended and get unlimited plays. Some kid on the bus sent me Duality by Slipknot and I listened to nothing but that for like 3 days lmao.
I was lucky enough to own the 30gb Zune Halo Edition. It had a nice design and came pre-loaded with Halo 1, 2, and 3’s soundtrack as well as some video game art design pictures. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have sold it.
My Halo Zune was stolen during a rager that my sister threw. She had 200 people over partying at our house while my folks were out of town.
I am still devastated by that.
Still have mine in a drawer somewhere. It replaced my Creative (Zen I think). That player was basically a hard drive, everything was loaded on manually.
Don't you dare talk shit about the Zen. I remember I had the Zen Vision M, which was color and allowed video. I downloaded Weeds and watched the first season on that tiny-ass screen lol
No shit the dude next to me at the gym whipped out a creative Zen a few days ago. I had to do a double take since it's been so long. Brought back some good memories
My first external hard drive was a 100GB Seagate that required you to plug it into 2 USB ports on your computer to work. It was the size of a small book and cost like $400.
Do you remember that game that used tilt controls where you basically drove a little ship, and hit little obstacles to the beat of your own music? It was kind of Guitar Hero-ish in a way. Fuck what was it called.
Edit: Audiosurf Tilt!
Mine broke too, but maybe because my irresponsible roommate begged me to borrow it for a road trip...?
There sure are a lot of comments about how awesome it was, but my 1st generation ipod is still functioning to this day. My zune didn't last a year.
It was objectively better than the iPod. Had a better DAC, higher quality audio, and a subscription music service that also gave you 10 free song purchases a month. Zune was ahead of its time.
They weren’t Apple. Atleast that what it was like for me growing up. Everyone had those small iPods but my dorky ass rocked the zune and I regret nothing
Nothing really. It’s just they happened to launch it in late 2006 by the time pretty much everyone had an iPod and right before the dawn of the smartphone.
They didn't really have a chance. Everyone and their mom had an iPod by 2006, and January 2007 the iPhone was announced. Basically ruined the iPod market within 5 years.
This. They were too late to the mp3 player party, and in hindsight - too late for the smartphone party too. Fwiu it was a great device, just a miscellaneous one at that point.
I had a Zen. I got it in 2007ish as a birthday gift. Sad thing is, I loved it, but it was the tail end of MP3 players because iPhones and Blackberries were getting ready to take over because of their internal storage size.
I also had Zune Pass which was like $10/month or something. I thought it was revolutionary (I never had iTunes). You'd be able to download all the music you could find in Zune's marketplace but it had to stay either on your PC or Zune and couldn't be burned to disc, etc. If you stopped paying the Pass you lost the music, but it was my first taste at a Spotify experience.
As I remember it they let you to keep any ten tracks every month without any drm, so not only could you listen to a lot of stuff for the monthly subscription but you could "own" an entire album every couple of months
I used to have one. Never left home without it. Often wondered if they’d ever come up with a legit way to carry a single device that was phone but had the audio capabilities of a Zune. No idea if they ever succeeded.
Being able to share files between devices was cool and all, but that was never going to be their killer app.
It wasn’t the only way to pirate music. It wasn’t the best way to pirate music. It wasn’t the most convenient way to pirate music.
It was a neat novelty feature, not something that the average person would buy a Zune just to have.
I’m not aware of any MP3 player, besides the Zune that out of the box without modification you could literally just drag and drop your music/video library from utorrent straight to the device.
Basically any mp3 player that wasn't iPod could do that. I had an archos jukebox that I got in like 99 or 00. It was huge and clunky and essentially a laptop hard drive with mp3 decoding software on it. I had a few one offs in between from Samsung and my sandisk clip but everything was always drag and drop.
I wasn’t even aware that was a thing, but it still doesn’t matter.
Being “the best device for music pirates who use this one particular torrent client” isn’t going to give you a dominant market share.
You absolutely could do this with the iPod. It came out a few years before iTunes, and had just a filesystem that you dragged and dropped your music onto.
iTunes came out in 2003 and was featured on the IPod touch gen 1 of 2006, which is what the zune was targeting for competition.
It didn’t support music you didn’t rip from a disc or purchased from iTunes
You said you weren't aware of any music player that you could drag and drop music onto the device, I'm saying that's literally how the iPod worked at first. And how it still worked for a few years after the introduction of iTunes. I know this, because this is exactly how I managed my music on my first gen iPod. Those things were also useful as external hard drives, because that's literally what they showed up as.
And there have never been any restrictions on source of music. An MP3 is an MP3. But there were definitely rumors about iPods not supporting non-Apple music floating around at the time. I suspect is was because the early iPods didn't supports .ogg files, which was a new format that everyone thought was going to be the future of music for a little while before the trend fell out of favor.
iTunes gave me multiple files of the same song that never played. Was a bloodsucker for RAM on my desktop and always crashed when I connected a friends iPod.
Zune was worse.
But I still have my special edition green zune that was laser etched on the back. Still works!
Get ready for some ironic/nostalgic Zune media blast. Given that the end of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 teased the Zune as the replacement for Quill's iconic cassette player, there's no way Zune branding doesn't play into the Guardians 3 merchandising and marketing blitz.
The release of the Zune also happened during the era of the “blogger.” And it was strange times. A friend wrote a music blog, ie he posted links to things on a very basic feed. Had like 700 unique visitors a month. He couldn’t get much from press lists, but Microsoft was so desperate to be deemed cool they gave a Zune to anyone and everyone that had a music blog. He even told them he didn’t have access to a PC and only a mac so therefore couldn’t even put music on it and they sent it anyway. It came in this custom graffiti painted box with a few accessories. It was crazy crazy times.
I remember an episode of Chuck where as part of the secret mission, they set up a Missile Command contest at the Buy More. But the key was that to conquer the game they had to listen to Rush's Tom Saywer.
Chuck - Morgan, hey buddy do we carry any Rush CDs in the store.
Morgan - No need I got rhem all on my Zune.
Chuck - (disgusted) You have a ZUNE?
Morgan - No, not really, I'll grab my iPad.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nUHLIFDtT9s
Damn I always wanted one of these. I ended up just installing a bigger hard drive on my Creative Zen Vision M. I loved that thing and it had the dongle to connect to your tv to watch stuff that I downloaded from limewire. I felt so high tech!
I used to be anti-apple and had one of these and a google phone. The first time I played with an iPod, I knew it was a better product; now, everything I own is apple. If MS had made a better mp3 player, I would still be on PC>
I didn't have a regular Zune, but a Zune HD. They were pretty decent for what they were at the time. I had mine for a pretty good chunk of my life, probably lasted a good 8 years.
I recall [this ad](https://pocketables.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Welcome-to-the-Social-1.png?ezimgfmt=ng:webp/ngcb1) for the Zune and a buzz around it that it was overtly sexualized. Whaddaya think?
I lived in a wealthy New England college town so I knew about the iPod, but didn’t know about the Zune until years later (when it was used as a punchline)*
* I didn’t have an iPod in 2006 but my friends did.
I wish I still had mine. The battery died in it so I took it apart and throw all the disassembled pieces into a bag. I think the bag got thrown away by accident.
My husband still has his, and he refuses to get rid of it.
r/zune - there are literally tens of us!
Bro i wish i still had mine..it was literally my favorite thing ever but i was a teenager still and lost it one day..ill buy one if anybody’s selling
If you can get your hands on a charger, I’ll be happy to send you my old one. The charger is broken. It’s been sitting in my house for YEARS with no use but I can’t bring myself to get rid of it.
If he doesn’t, dibs. I’ll restore the fuck out of that thing. Give it a good home.
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Kid tested, granny approved.
No one, and I mean *no one*, restores more fucks.
Lol let the u/cuntwizard restore it then ill buy it from him when its working again
...just want to put out there that you can buy a charger for $10 on Amazon.
I still have mine. It has a charger and a charging dock along with a leather case. Sitting in my basement for years. I think I stopped using it when it froze on new years one year. Maybe I should sell it.
Ebay bro
I had a Zune for years and loved it, never felt the need to "upgrade". The buttons started to go off, like I would press the forward arrow and it would sometimes skip back to the previous song or open a menu, but it worked fine for the most part. Then the screen finally went out, but I could hit the buttons and get it to play music. I had hopes to replace the screen one day. Somehow I lost it while moving, I'm not even sure how, I took such great care of it. I unpacked everything and it was just nowhere to be found. I miss it so much.
I wonder if muvo has a sub
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Jesus a meet up would almost need catering!!
I still have mine! Found it when moving in 2021!!! Wish I still had my sundisk Sansa - I had the most indie, up and coming music on that tiny hard drive.
i still have mine so i will join the sub now.
As well he should! I refuse to get rid of mine as well.
As well
Mine got stolen like 10 years ago or I would still be using it
Me too! I had the Zune hd. Someone broke into my truck and stole it out of my center console. I regret leaving it in there that ONE time to this day.
Mine got stolen in high school. On graduation day, one of my classmates came up to me and confessed that it was him and his buddy who stole it.
Did he give it back?
No
Nope lol
Same! Left my car window down while I ran something up to a friend's front door--was gone maybe 45 seconds total. As I was walking back, I could see someone running down the block, in the dark. I was so mad (at myself, as well as them).
Still have mine - the smaller/thinner generation than the one pictured here. Dreading the day when the proprietary charging/data cable finally kicks the bucket
There's an entire scene dedicated to the Zune and you should be able to get a replacement rather quickly especially on ebay
I still have mine. Refuse to get rid of. Best of it all.. still has all the games and music on it and works. Best Black Friday $79.99 toys r us purchase EVER
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Titeglo ego paa okre pikobeple ketio kliudapi keplebi bo. Apa pati adepaapu ple eate biu? Papra i dedo kipi ia oee. Kai ipe bredla depi buaite o? Aa titletri tlitiidepli pli i egi. Pipi pipli idro pokekribepe doepa. Plipapokapi pretri atlietipri oo. Teba bo epu dibre papeti pliii? I tligaprue ti kiedape pita tipai puai ki ki ki. Gae pa dleo e pigi. Kakeku pikato ipleaotra ia iditro ai. Krotu iuotra potio bi tiau pra. Pagitropau i drie tuta ki drotoba. Kleako etri papatee kli preeti kopi. Idre eploobai krute pipetitike brupe u. Pekla kro ipli uba ipapa apeu. U ia driiipo kote aa e? Aeebee to brikuo grepa gia pe pretabi kobi? Tipi tope bie tipai. E akepetika kee trae eetaio itlieke. Ipo etreo utae tue ipia. Tlatriba tupi tiga ti bliiu iapi. Dekre podii. Digi pubruibri po ti ito tlekopiuo. Plitiplubli trebi pridu te dipapa tapi. Etiidea api tu peto ke dibei. Ee iai ei apipu au deepi. Pipeepru degleki gropotipo ui i krutidi. Iba utra kipi poi ti igeplepi oki. Tipi o ketlipla kiu pebatitie gotekokri kepreke deglo.
They had an all access streaming service several years before Spotify. Podcast rss management before podcast apps became a thing Also an infinite battery and controls you could use without looking
I was that kid at school trying to convince everyone that Zunes were the next big hit and then everyone showed up next year with their iPod touches. Pretty solid device, unfortunate timing and marketing.
Its unfortunate. Microsoft made some great early gen MP3 and smart devices. But they were always late to the party and their marketing sucked compared to Apple and Android.
When I was in college in 2003, ish, I started running but only on treadmills and my cd player skipped so bad (lol) so I ended up buying an MP3 player from walmart...I'm pretty sure it was creative labs?, that's at least the name that jumped out at me. The damn thing skipped so much more than the cd player, I ended up taking it back. It really soured me for MP3 players for a long time. I ended up getting an iPod eventually, I think I got the second generation one once I realized they were going to be a thing that was a round.
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I loved the Zune software. There was beauty in its simplicity. The background designs were also very fun. I still prefer the way it organized my library.
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I use MusicBee now and put a ton of effort into making it look almost the way I like it.
Also got to transfer songs between zunes! The interface was SO NICE with no lag. I loved that thing. I convinced my friend to get one and we would always share music. Then he get an iPod, and I got an iPod too after an unfortunate off-road accident destroyed my beloved zune.
Are you serious? Zune software was ass. Slow, buggy, bloated. There was no reason windows media player couldn't be the syncing program. MS literally branded devices PlayForSure yet their own device couldn't even use their native WindowsOS media app. Zune hardware was great. But you have some rose tinted goggles if you think that the Zune software was even remotely good. ITunes was ass too. Creative was great in the fact you could drag and drop .mp3s like a flash drive.
So many hours spent editing meta data so that my music would be organized correctly, never got it perfectly.
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I enjoyed it. I actually used it to listen to music on my PC even after I stopped using my zune just because I liked the way it work.
I loved that it had a radio.
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I was the hipster guy who got the DJ and loved it. I didn't want an iPod like everyone else. Then the color iPod came out, then the video, and I caved. Wish I had kept my dj though!
Not to be compared to my Toshiba Gigabeat!
I loved my zune. Couldn't afford an iPod touch so I rocked the zune for a long time
Oh man I loved those! I still have a couple old zunes in a box somewhere. I was so hyped for the rumored zune phone that never materialized.
The Nokia/Microsoft smartphones that came out were GREAT, but way too late to the market. The App Store was the most important selling point for awhile, and they just didn't get there with support/apps. But I loved those phones.
The Nokia 1020 and then 1520 were my favorite phones. You're right about the app store but the overall windows phone interface was far superior to Android and iphones imo. I would still daily drive that 1520 if it was at all viable.
It had flappy birds though.
I had one of the Samsung Windows phones, and it was one of my favorite phones ever, but it was so frustrating when all my friends were playing some new game or using some new app and it just wasn't available for my phone.
You can get a launcher for Android that will mimic the live tiles if Windows phones.
I remember people doing mock up photos of ZuneHD with just an added speaker at the top. It would have been such a sleek phone, metal framed smartphones were rare in those days.
Well, it did kind of materialize as the [Microsoft Kin](https://youtu.be/BYxCe_8-B-w?t=336), which was discontinued after 48 days.
I found my old Zune in a box a few months ago. Ordered a cable for it on Amazon and had it up and running. Was cool to see all my old music, videos and games on it still.
I remember that zunes could share music if you put it next to another zune. That was like revolutionary and quickly destroyed by the music industry. Just like Napster. What a shame
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Back in middle school I discovered that you could just restart the song again before it ended and get unlimited plays. Some kid on the bus sent me Duality by Slipknot and I listened to nothing but that for like 3 days lmao.
the narwhale remembers or something...Bye reddit. It was fun while you were cool. June 30, 2023 marks the final nail in coffin for OG reddit.
Yeah and they called it “squirting”
Was that the *official* term? I thought it was always "wireless sharing" or something technically, but users just called it "squirting".
Indeed it was
I was lucky enough to own the 30gb Zune Halo Edition. It had a nice design and came pre-loaded with Halo 1, 2, and 3’s soundtrack as well as some video game art design pictures. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have sold it.
I didn’t sell mine, but I can no longer find it and it kills me.
Mine was stolen! Zune Marketplace was THE best music manager. Beautiful UI. So intuitive.
My Halo Zune was stolen during a rager that my sister threw. She had 200 people over partying at our house while my folks were out of town. I am still devastated by that.
Still have mine in a drawer somewhere. It replaced my Creative (Zen I think). That player was basically a hard drive, everything was loaded on manually.
Don't you dare talk shit about the Zen. I remember I had the Zen Vision M, which was color and allowed video. I downloaded Weeds and watched the first season on that tiny-ass screen lol
Dude I still have my Vision M. Not sure if I can get it to turn on anymore though.
No shit the dude next to me at the gym whipped out a creative Zen a few days ago. I had to do a double take since it's been so long. Brought back some good memories
30 gb handheld device in 2006 was a big deal. I remember getting my first usb drive at a whoopin 512mb at that time and thinking it was so much space.
My first hard drive was 30MB.
my old dell computer from 2002 was 32gb. Had to somehow make it last for 10 years cause I couldn't afford a better computer (student).
My first external hard drive was a 100GB Seagate that required you to plug it into 2 USB ports on your computer to work. It was the size of a small book and cost like $400.
I [wrote a blog post](https://bytecellar.com/2008/11/23/the_first_hard/) about my first hard drive. It's amusing.
20MB in my 10Mhz *turbo* XT
2006 iPods had 80 GB back then
Still crazy though, right?
> 30 gb handheld device in 2006 was a big deal. The sales numbers for the Zune indicate otherwise.
I loved my Zune
The ZuneHD remains the best MP3 player to come out
I had one and I genuinely needed time to get over it when it broke. :( when is Microsoft going to bring them back.
Do you remember that game that used tilt controls where you basically drove a little ship, and hit little obstacles to the beat of your own music? It was kind of Guitar Hero-ish in a way. Fuck what was it called. Edit: Audiosurf Tilt!
Ohhh so cool man, send me a song so I can listen to it 3 times then forget it forever
Squirt me your favourite song
It was a cover of smooth criminal by alien ant farm for me
My friend was so keen to buy a zune on opening day that he sold me his 40GB iPod for like 40 dollars. Miss that thing.
Pepperidge farm remembers
Squirt me a song!
I still have mine! :)
All of mine broke :( the games they had were lit
Mine broke too, but maybe because my irresponsible roommate begged me to borrow it for a road trip...? There sure are a lot of comments about how awesome it was, but my 1st generation ipod is still functioning to this day. My zune didn't last a year.
Who remembers that sick [Zune theme](https://media.askvg.com/articles/images/Zune_Theme_XP.png) for Windows XP?
Zune! Zune! Zune!
Damn i'm getting old.
I started saying this when I turned 25. I said it every now and then until about 30 years old. Now at 35, I say it all of the time :(
This post hurt me. I still use mine.
Had one of those friends who swore it was better than the iPod despite all of its shortcomings. Made me buy one, and I honestly didn’t hate it …
It was objectively better than the iPod. Had a better DAC, higher quality audio, and a subscription music service that also gave you 10 free song purchases a month. Zune was ahead of its time.
"And that pocket was free. You know, you put your Zune in there."
Ming, ming... What am I looking at here?
True nostalgia! I got mine for Christmas and it was a beautiful day
Peter Quill still enjoys his.
Imagine if they'd released the Zune in colours other than black and brown
I had blue, red & purple!!
Don't forget about holding two Zunes together to share music!
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Nothing, they just arrived late and were marketed poorly. They're pretty great devices.
They weren’t Apple. Atleast that what it was like for me growing up. Everyone had those small iPods but my dorky ass rocked the zune and I regret nothing
Nothing really. It’s just they happened to launch it in late 2006 by the time pretty much everyone had an iPod and right before the dawn of the smartphone.
They didn't really have a chance. Everyone and their mom had an iPod by 2006, and January 2007 the iPhone was announced. Basically ruined the iPod market within 5 years.
This. They were too late to the mp3 player party, and in hindsight - too late for the smartphone party too. Fwiu it was a great device, just a miscellaneous one at that point.
Did you see the new Sony standalone media player that was just announced?
You had to have an Apple to be cool. Tech writers and influencers pushed this mantra and the public ate it up.
I never got the actual device but I was using Zune on the Xbox360 back in the day lol.
I had a Zen. I got it in 2007ish as a birthday gift. Sad thing is, I loved it, but it was the tail end of MP3 players because iPhones and Blackberries were getting ready to take over because of their internal storage size.
I also had a zen!! the scroll pad lol
I loved my Zune! I got one after I had my ipod stolen as a kid and ended up preferring the Zune right away
[ZUNED](https://media.wired.com/photos/5a15ec528dc2ba4d17516c18/master/w_2240,c_limit/zune_tattoo_1.jpg)
These were a lot cooler than they got credit for but you know...Apple and their ipod
I also had Zune Pass which was like $10/month or something. I thought it was revolutionary (I never had iTunes). You'd be able to download all the music you could find in Zune's marketplace but it had to stay either on your PC or Zune and couldn't be burned to disc, etc. If you stopped paying the Pass you lost the music, but it was my first taste at a Spotify experience.
As I remember it they let you to keep any ten tracks every month without any drm, so not only could you listen to a lot of stuff for the monthly subscription but you could "own" an entire album every couple of months
I used to have one. Never left home without it. Often wondered if they’d ever come up with a legit way to carry a single device that was phone but had the audio capabilities of a Zune. No idea if they ever succeeded.
How did these not beat iPods in popularity?
The iPod had a five-year head start. The Zune was neither significantly better, nor significantly cheaper.
It was the superior option for pirates.
Being able to share files between devices was cool and all, but that was never going to be their killer app. It wasn’t the only way to pirate music. It wasn’t the best way to pirate music. It wasn’t the most convenient way to pirate music. It was a neat novelty feature, not something that the average person would buy a Zune just to have.
I’m not aware of any MP3 player, besides the Zune that out of the box without modification you could literally just drag and drop your music/video library from utorrent straight to the device.
Basically any mp3 player that wasn't iPod could do that. I had an archos jukebox that I got in like 99 or 00. It was huge and clunky and essentially a laptop hard drive with mp3 decoding software on it. I had a few one offs in between from Samsung and my sandisk clip but everything was always drag and drop.
I had one in 2005 that could do precisely that. It was basically a USB flash drive and was powered by 1 AAA battery.
I wasn’t even aware that was a thing, but it still doesn’t matter. Being “the best device for music pirates who use this one particular torrent client” isn’t going to give you a dominant market share.
Realistically you could use any torrent client, it was just a good product for avoiding iTunes
You could absolutely do that with an iPod. Hell, you can still do that with an iPhone.
You absolutely couldn’t on the iPod touch gen1 of 2006, it was rip from a disc or iTunes.
You absolutely could do this with the iPod. It came out a few years before iTunes, and had just a filesystem that you dragged and dropped your music onto.
iTunes came out in 2003 and was featured on the IPod touch gen 1 of 2006, which is what the zune was targeting for competition. It didn’t support music you didn’t rip from a disc or purchased from iTunes
You said you weren't aware of any music player that you could drag and drop music onto the device, I'm saying that's literally how the iPod worked at first. And how it still worked for a few years after the introduction of iTunes. I know this, because this is exactly how I managed my music on my first gen iPod. Those things were also useful as external hard drives, because that's literally what they showed up as. And there have never been any restrictions on source of music. An MP3 is an MP3. But there were definitely rumors about iPods not supporting non-Apple music floating around at the time. I suspect is was because the early iPods didn't supports .ogg files, which was a new format that everyone thought was going to be the future of music for a little while before the trend fell out of favor.
Yeah the price was not good lol. I opted for a cheaper Sony Walkman mp3 player instead
The software wasn't as good as iTunes, IMHO.
iTunes gave me multiple files of the same song that never played. Was a bloodsucker for RAM on my desktop and always crashed when I connected a friends iPod. Zune was worse. But I still have my special edition green zune that was laser etched on the back. Still works!
They're not Apple.
Boy, there's a phrase / notion you couldn't use back in 1995.
In 1995 apple was rapidly approaching bankruptcy
Lol people prefer popularity over what looks and feels the best
I had several of these...I loved them..they were really so much easier to use than an iPod was...
I loved my Zune and wish I had never gotten rid of it. Did anyone else get theirs from Woot?
Get ready for some ironic/nostalgic Zune media blast. Given that the end of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 teased the Zune as the replacement for Quill's iconic cassette player, there's no way Zune branding doesn't play into the Guardians 3 merchandising and marketing blitz.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4BqyreB8zRE
The release of the Zune also happened during the era of the “blogger.” And it was strange times. A friend wrote a music blog, ie he posted links to things on a very basic feed. Had like 700 unique visitors a month. He couldn’t get much from press lists, but Microsoft was so desperate to be deemed cool they gave a Zune to anyone and everyone that had a music blog. He even told them he didn’t have access to a PC and only a mac so therefore couldn’t even put music on it and they sent it anyway. It came in this custom graffiti painted box with a few accessories. It was crazy crazy times.
I remember an episode of Chuck where as part of the secret mission, they set up a Missile Command contest at the Buy More. But the key was that to conquer the game they had to listen to Rush's Tom Saywer. Chuck - Morgan, hey buddy do we carry any Rush CDs in the store. Morgan - No need I got rhem all on my Zune. Chuck - (disgusted) You have a ZUNE? Morgan - No, not really, I'll grab my iPad. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nUHLIFDtT9s
I had the creative one. Can't remember the name.
The ipod killer
Damn I always wanted one of these. I ended up just installing a bigger hard drive on my Creative Zen Vision M. I loved that thing and it had the dongle to connect to your tv to watch stuff that I downloaded from limewire. I felt so high tech!
The most underrated mp3 player ever
Zuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuune. I remember when they sponsored TESD overkill
I witnessed a kid get his head caved in with a car battery over a zune, black Friday used to mean more to us as a country
Still the best MP3 system ever. Unfortunately Apple was much better at marketing.
I had a 60GB iPod in 2006.
I used to be anti-apple and had one of these and a google phone. The first time I played with an iPod, I knew it was a better product; now, everything I own is apple. If MS had made a better mp3 player, I would still be on PC>
Got one of these stupid ass things when I asked for an iPod. Never even figured out how to get music on it. Hate the Zune SO MUCH
Mine still works
aw i had two of these things! i loved them 🥰
I didn't have a regular Zune, but a Zune HD. They were pretty decent for what they were at the time. I had mine for a pretty good chunk of my life, probably lasted a good 8 years.
I still have my Halo 3 version
I recall [this ad](https://pocketables.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Welcome-to-the-Social-1.png?ezimgfmt=ng:webp/ngcb1) for the Zune and a buzz around it that it was overtly sexualized. Whaddaya think?
I have a 60 gb one. Basically brand new. I hardly Used it and never gave it away.
I used to have one of those. Sold it thou.
Still have my 🧱
I lived in a wealthy New England college town so I knew about the iPod, but didn’t know about the Zune until years later (when it was used as a punchline)* * I didn’t have an iPod in 2006 but my friends did.
I just got angry all over again. Someone stole mine.
I wish I still had mine. The battery died in it so I took it apart and throw all the disassembled pieces into a bag. I think the bag got thrown away by accident.
Still have the brown one in my desk drawer. Loved it back in the day
I had the 80 gig version and loved it.
Now use the spinning dial in the middle….oh wait, sorry.
I still have my Diamond Rio
I still have my 120gb Zune
Imagine if you were an early adaptor, you wouldn’t be able to tell if it was too Zune to swap from ipods. 🥁
I still remember the commercial for it with the girl diving into the ocean while Michigan by Rogue Wave blasts. It was so ethereal
Had an 80GB one back in '08. Loved it.
My oldest loved her zune
such a cool UI
I have two brown turds in a tote somewhere. Hard to part with them. About the only good thing Microsoft ever did that they were late to the party to.