Woods picked up his Zune foraging habit during the pandemic, while he was furloughed from his job working security at Best Buy. Woods owns multiple Zune-stamped traveling cases and boombox docks. Microsoft spent most of the s a few steps behind Apple. The rival company was perennially a little bit cooler, sleeker, and more tasteful than the endemic squareness of the Gates estate.
Often, the Zune was considered the ultimate example of that failure. The product was entirely functional, sure, but for reasons that remain difficult to articulate — the video game insignias, the oversized trackpad, their baffling bulkiness — it was also about a million times less chic than the iPod.
That same inscrutable problem flags Bing, Cortana, the ill-fated Windows Phone, etc. But today, almost a decade after Microsoft terminated the brand, there is a small bastion of diehards who are still loving and listening to their Zunes. Preserving the Zune legacy has just become another part of the hobby. And so, most of the posts on the subreddit radiate with a strong wistful ennui in lieu of any firmware updates on the horizon.
Others administer modifications on their Zunes that push the hardware well past what it was capable of in ; like retrofitting an imaginary future where the Zune was not only still around but dominant. Someone else flaunts the wireless charging adapter they added to an ancient Zune One frequent contributor to the forum, year-old Erick Leach, reminds me that, in its heyday, the Zune came equipped with a fairly robust social media appendage: Zune owners could send songs to each other wirelessly and unlock Xbox Live-like achievements for the music they listened to — both novel features in the mids.
Microsoft is turning off the spigot. Of course, DRM content "may not play if the license can't be renewed," Microsoft says, and any Zune Music Pass subscriptions still out there will be converted to Groove Music Pass subscriptions.
Of course, just how all of this unfolds depends upon your Zune account, and for the five or six of you reading this who might have one, Microsoft explains it all on its support page. It's worth repeating that copyrighted music you've downloaded with Zune may not play with Groove if the licenses didn't renew, which is a very real possibility.
And it's worth noting that although your Zune will continue playing all of your old music, anything you stream or download from Groove won't play on your Zune. There are rumblings that some Zune power users might make an open source Zune client replacement. Assuming this actually happens, such a client almost certainly would do only the simplest of tasks, allowing you to manage what's already on your Zune and nothing more.
And that depends upon Microsoft making the data accessible. The thing is, with your phone, if you download an app like Spotify, they're asking for access to data on your phone, it's connected to the internet, and they track your location, which they sell to third-party vendors.
But the Zune isn't connected to the internet at all, and what I like about the Zune is the privacy element. Vanyel Harkema 23, game design student San Francisco, California I had a 40GB Zune back in high school, and it got eaten up by the chain of my motorcycle in a freak accident. When I graduated, I found out that they stopped making them, so I had to go to eBay and that's where I got my custom blue Zune.
I'm the only one [of my friends] who owns one now. Sometimes the reaction is, "What's a Zune? I vastly prefer the Zune device user interface to the iPod user interface in any iteration later than the original iPod nano. I don't need it to be updated because a good interface for playing music continues to be a good interface for playing music.
Someone's like, "What's that? No big deal! People have questions but they keep them to themselves I guess. They might look at me and think, "This guy's a dinosaur, what's wrong with this guy? The software still works. They haven't updated it, but it still works.
If it works, I just keep using it. But on my Zune, it's the music I've had forever, and it's never going to change. I have a lot of old music that's never going to be deleted. There's a lot of music I put in here forever ago—maybe I backed it up on a hard drive—but it's not in the cloud, and it's not on my computer. It's just here. Jordan McMahon 25, personal trainer Tucson, Arizona I actually woke up the other day to a message from a friend.
In my senior year of high school, I did a video of the teachers saying goodbye, and she asked which songs I used. So, I charged my Zune for the first time in months, and I found it.
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