It was weird to own a Zune in 2005. It is even weirder to own a Zune in 2021 — let alone 16 of them. And yet, 27-year-old Conner Woods proudly shows off his lineup on a kitchen table. They come in all different colors, shapes, and sizes, and each can be identified by that telltale black plastic D-pad just below the screen. He owns the entire scope of the brief Zune lineup — from the svelte Zune 4 to the chunky Zune HD — and among the microscopic community of people who still adore Microsoft’s much-derided MP3 player, no collection of dead tech could possibly be more enviable.
[…]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. If you talk to them, they’ll tell you that these MP3 players are the best pieces of hardware to ever run a Windows operating system. Preserving the Zune legacy has just become another part of the hobby.
I’ve never once seen a Zune in real life.
I would totally dig a Zune phone. The Zune had a fantastic design and interface, and much of that design was retained in Windows Phone, which also had a fantastic design and interface.
Too bad those concepts were shoved into Windows 8, where they didn’t belong. That likely means they won’t be revisited until much later.
Coming from Microsoft Zune always struck me as a bit of a dad dancing product. They may have done everything right technically but somehow it just seemed wrong. This picture of Bill Gates kind of illustrates why.
https://imgur.com/gallery/9XkCSmn
My daughter (now 28!) still uses her 120G Zune.
I know in the past years (a long time ago) I showed her how she could use her phone for all of that…. I guess that didn’t stick.
But, in all fairness, says a lot with regards to the quality/interface of the Zune (I guess).
I still have multiple Zune 30 brown ones still working and a Zune HD (which I still use) that has been our spare car since it was released. They were built just about as tough as Nokia brick phones think sitting in a car outside a garage in northern Wisconsin all winter with like -25 wind chills to mounted on the dash in summer so hot you could fry an egg on it all without skipping a beat. They were great for not getting scratches since they had Gorilla glass and they were also fun to develop for as a hobby. obviously I have moved on to Windows Phones then to using an Android phones for PMP’s but even after I finally stop using that car I will always have fond memories of Zune’s (and no I never seen anyone else use them in the wild)