Microsoft killed the Zune, but the Zune heads are still here

It was weird to own a Zune in 2005. It’s even weirder to own a Zune in 2021 – let alone 16 of them. Still, 27-year-old Conner Woods proudly shows his training at a kitchen table. They come in all different colors, shapes and sizes, and each can be identified by that black plastic D-pad indicator just below the screen. It has the full scope of the short Zune line – from the slim Zune 4 to the rugged Zune HD – and among the microscopic community of people who still love Microsoft’s much-ridiculed MP3 player, no collection of dead technology could be more enviable.

Woods acquired Zune’s food collecting habit during the pandemic, while being released from his job as a security guard at Best Buy. “I taught myself how to solder, started to buy dead Zunes, fix them and launch them for profit,” he says. “At some point, I found some rare ones and I couldn’t separate myself from them.”

It has a particularly rare model with the Halo 3 soon and another with the Gears of war seal, but to fully understand the depths of Woods’s obsession, you need to look beyond gadgets and beyond. Click his post on the r / Zune subreddit and wander to his true sanctuary of forgotten Zune debris. Woods has several Zune-stamped suitcases and boombox docks. It has a Zune branded anti-stress ball, as well as a Zune candle box, complete with matches dyed with the brand’s usual burnt orange and fiery purple. My favorite: a Rubik’s cube that, when solved, reveals the Zune polyhedral badge on all white squares, as if to say that the answer to one of the most uncomfortable logic puzzles in history is, forever, the Zune.

Microsoft spent most of the 2000s a few steps behind Apple. The rival company was perennially a little cooler, more elegant and more elegant than the endemic square of Gates’ property. Often, the Zune was considered the definitive example of this failure. The product was fully functional, to be sure, but for reasons that remain difficult to articulate – the video game insignia, the huge trackpad, its disconcerting volume – it was also about a million times less chic than the iPod. (That same inscrutable problem signals Bing, Cortana, the ill-fated Windows Phone, etc.)

But today, almost a decade after Microsoft closed the brand, there is a small bastion of diehards who still love and hear their Zunes. If you talk to them, they will say that these MP3 players are the best pieces of hardware to run a Windows operating system. Preserving Zune’s legacy has just become another part of the hobby.

Conner Woods photo

r / Zune has about 4,500 subscribers and remains the only room left on the Internet for those who are pumping life for Microsoft’s most memorable underdog. In the golden days, says Woods, the nation had many other animated forums like “ZuneBoards” and “Zunited”. There has been absolutely nothing new for Zune heads since 2011, when Microsoft firmly announced that it was leaving the MP3 industry indefinitely. And so, most posts on the subreddit radiate strong melancholy boredom in place of any firmware updates on the horizon. “My current collection,” writes a poster, displaying his four Zunes on a chess board, “Mr. Blue Sky ”pointed to the one in the middle.

Others manage modifications to their Zunes that take the hardware far beyond what it was capable of in 2006; how to reform an imaginary future where the Zune not only still existed, but dominant. “This project started in late May and is finally finished,” says Woods, in a different post, announcing that he has successfully added a 128 GB SSD to a humble Zune motherboard. Someone else sports the wireless charging adapter they added to an old Zune 30. Spend a lot of time on the r / Zune and you’ll start to believe that anything is possible.

But, most of the time, the inhabitants here simply want to express to their comrades around the world that they have not given up on the Zune either. “It’s safe to say that a lot of people are here looking for nostalgia,” said John, a 26-year-old from San Diego who told me he was seduced by Zune for the first time in high school. It is strange to consider that an abandoned boutique suite of audio hardware is capable of thrilling young people, but then again, I think we are only now discovering how the personal technology boom has impacted our psyche. “I got this beauty for $ 25. I’m excited!” Writes a poster, attached to a photo of a prehistoric Zune sitting quietly next to an Xbox One S. humming. “Just a little porn on the Zune,” he adds. another, who is using the hardware’s built-in radio signal to tune KPBS. “Trying not to let the flame die.”

A frequent forum contributor, 27-year-old Erick Leach, reminds me that at its height, the Zune came equipped with a very robust social media appendix: Zune owners could wirelessly send music to each other and unlock how on Xbox Live achievements for the music they listened to – both new in the mid-2000s. The brand never managed to bring together the cultural ubiquity of the iPod (Apple tried its own failed social network, Ping, at the same time), but with that emphasis on community, it might be inevitable for Zune to eventually set up a social network similar to a fan club cult. That’s Leach’s theory, at least. He always felt like there was a great nation of Zune-headed people that he would surely meet someday. “It never ended when Zune died. But it was wonderful to find the subreddit and see the same passion for Zune, ”he says.

Leach believes that the Zune has aged better than people realize. He calls him the best-sounding music player he has ever used, and remains surprised to see how he has decoded a variety of different sound formats. “Artist guides on the device itself included artist information, photos, recommendations, a robust music store and free music for Zune Social users,” continues Leach. “It was a device for music lovers who simply love music. Simple and effective. ”

This is one of the wrinkles you tend to learn after spending time with the Zune Crew. Most of them are lifelong audiophiles – the kind of person who gets religious about terms like “lossless” and “FLAC”. Furthermore, Woods claims that Zune predicted the entire modern music industry as we know it. The Zune Marketplace offered a genuine streaming subscription – long before it became the dominant way people used to consume music – that it never caught on. “People liked to own their music back then. Paid access to access music seemed strange to people, ”he says. “The Zunes were ahead of their time.”

This, of course, is the connective tissue of r / Zune. As much as their citizenship adores their beloved failed hardware, they gather in these forums primarily to connect with others who have fallen, desperately and indefinitely, under the bewildering enchantment of Zune. Woods told me that solidarity between the Zuners has never been stronger. He finds even more emotions in this strange afterlife, as the years have worn away all but the fanatics. “I feel less alone now than ever as a Zune user,” concludes Woods. “I feel more involved now than ever and I feel that I have much more to contribute now as an ‘experienced veteran'”.

He can scour the land for every fragment of Zune’s memorabilia with the confidence that there will be an audience willing to vote for his efforts indefinitely. It can attach an absurdly large SSD to the motherboard, ensuring that it is never replaced. He can post a Zune-stamped roller coaster, rescued from the deep recesses of Microsoft’s trash heap, and trust his friends to treat the discovery as the Holy Grail. The Zune was ridiculed, satirized and kicked out of the market with its tail between its legs. But he never really died, not with fans like that.