It was bizarre to personal a Zune in 2005. It’s even weirder to personal a Zune in 2021 — not to mention 16 of them. And but, 27-year-old Conner Woods proudly exhibits off his lineup on a kitchen desk. They arrive in all totally different colours, shapes, and sizes, and every could be recognized by that telltale black plastic D-pad slightly below the display screen. He owns all the scope of the transient Zune lineup — from the svelte Zune 4 to the chunky Zune HD — and among the many microscopic neighborhood of people that nonetheless adore Microsoft’s much-derided MP3 participant, no assortment of useless tech might presumably be extra enviable.
Woods picked up his Zune foraging behavior in the course of the pandemic, whereas he was furloughed from his job working safety at Finest Purchase. “I taught myself to solder, started shopping for up useless Zunes, and repairing and flipping them for a revenue,” he says. “In some unspecified time in the future I ran throughout some uncommon ones and couldn’t carry myself to half with them.”
He counts a very uncommon mannequin bearing the Halo 3 brand and one other with the Gears of Warfare seal, however to totally perceive the depths of Woods’ obsession, that you must look previous the devices and into the nice past. Click on by his put up on the r/Zune subreddit, and wander into his veritable shrine of forgotten Zune detritus. Woods owns a number of Zune-stamped touring circumstances and boombox docks. He has a Zune-branded stress ball in addition to a Zune tinderbox, full with matches which are dyed within the model’s customary burnt orange and fiery purple. My private favourite: a Rubik’s dice that, when solved, reveals the Zune’s polyhedral insignia on all the white squares, as if to say the reply to one in every of historical past’s most vexing logic puzzles is, eternally, Zune.
“It’s protected to say that lots of people are right here for nostalgia.”
Microsoft spent a lot of the 2000s a number of steps behind Apple. The rival firm was perennially slightly bit cooler, sleeker, and extra tasteful than the endemic squareness of the Gates property. Typically, the Zune was thought of the final word instance of that failure. The product was totally useful, positive, however for causes that stay tough to articulate — the online game insignias, the outsized trackpad, their baffling bulkiness — it was additionally about one million instances much less stylish than the iPod. (That very same inscrutable drawback flags Bing, Cortana, the ill-fated Home windows Telephone, and so forth.)
However immediately, nearly a decade after Microsoft terminated the model, there’s a small bastion of diehards who’re nonetheless loving and listening to their Zunes. In the event you discuss to them, they’ll inform you that these MP3 gamers are the most effective items of {hardware} to ever run a Home windows working system. Preserving the Zune legacy has simply turn out to be one other a part of the pastime.
r/Zune has about 4,500 subscribers, and it stands as the one salon left on the web for many who are pumping life into Microsoft’s most memorable underdog. Within the golden days, says Woods, the nation had many different vigorous boards like “ZuneBoards” and “Zunited.” There was completely no information for Zune-heads since 2011 when Microsoft firmly introduced that it was transferring on from the MP3 sector indefinitely. And so, a lot of the posts on the subreddit radiate with a powerful wistful ennui in lieu of any firmware updates on the horizon. “My present assortment,” writes one poster, laying out their 4 Zunes on a chessboard, Electrical Gentle Orchestra’s “Mr. Blue Sky” cued up on the one within the center.
Others administer modifications on their Zunes that push the {hardware} properly previous what it was able to in 2006; like retrofitting an imaginary future the place the Zune was not solely nonetheless round however dominant. “Began this mission in late Could, and it’s lastly completed,” says Woods, in a distinct put up, saying that he had efficiently added a 128GB SSD to a humble Zune motherboard. Another person flaunts the wi-fi charging adapter they added to an historical Zune 30. Spend sufficient time on r/Zune, and also you’ll start to consider that something is feasible.
However most frequently, the denizens right here merely wish to specific to their worldwide comrades that in addition they haven’t given up on Zune. “It’s protected to say that lots of people are right here for nostalgia,” says John, a 26-year previous from San Diego who advised me he was first seduced by the Zune in center faculty. It’s unusual to think about that an deserted boutique suite of audio {hardware} is able to making younger males emotional, however then once more, I suppose we’re solely simply now discovering how the non-public know-how growth has impacted our psyche. “Picked up this magnificence for $25. I’m pumped!” writes one poster, connected to a photograph of a prehistoric Zune sitting calmly subsequent to a whirring Xbox One S. “Just a bit Zune porn,” provides one other, who’s utilizing the {hardware}’s built-in radio sign to tune into KPBS. “Attempting to not let the flame die out.”
“Zunes have been forward of their time.”
One frequent contributor to the discussion board, 27-year-old Erick Leach, jogs my memory that, in its heyday, the Zune got here outfitted with a reasonably sturdy social media appendage: Zune house owners might ship songs to one another wirelessly and unlock Xbox Reside-like achievements for the music they listened to — each novel options within the mid-2000s. The model by no means managed to muster the cultural ubiquity of the iPod (Apple tried its personal failed social community, Ping, across the identical time), however with that emphasis on neighborhood, maybe it was inevitable for the Zune to ultimately mount a cult-like fandom. That’s Leach’s idea, not less than. He all the time felt like there was a large nation of Zune-heads on the market who he would certainly meet sometime. “That by no means ended up taking place because the Zune died out. Nevertheless it was great to seek out the subreddit and see the identical ardour for the Zune,” he says.
Leach believes the Zune has aged higher than folks would possibly suppose. He calls it the best-sounding music participant he’s ever used, and he stays in awe of the way it decoded quite a lot of totally different sound codecs. “Artist tabs within the machine itself included artist info, photographs, suggestions, a sturdy music retailer, and free music for Zune Social customers,” continues Leach. “It was a tool for music lovers who simply love music. Merely and successfully.”
That’s one of many wrinkles you are likely to be taught after spending time with the Zune Crew, most of them are lifelong audiophiles — the kind of people that get spiritual about phrases like “lossless” and “FLAC.” What’s extra, Woods makes the case that the Zune predicted all the trendy music trade as we all know it. The Zune Market supplied a real streaming subscription — lengthy earlier than that grew to become the dominant manner folks consumed music — which by no means caught on. “Individuals favored proudly owning their music again then. A paywall for music entry appeared odd to folks,” he says. “Zunes have been forward of their time.”
“I really feel much less alone now than I ever did as a Zune consumer.”
That, after all, is the connective tissue of r/Zune. As a lot as its citizenship adores its cherished failed {hardware}, they congregate on these boards largely to attach with others who’ve fallen, hopelessly and indefinitely, underneath the Zune’s baffling enchantment. Woods tells me that solidarity amongst Zuners has by no means been stronger. He finds much more thrills on this unusual afterlife, because the years have eroded away everybody aside from the zealots. “I really feel much less alone now than I ever did as a Zune consumer,” finishes Woods. “I really feel extra concerned now than I ever did up to now, and I really feel that I’ve much more to contribute now as a ‘seasoned veteran.’”
He can scour the earth in quest of each final scrap of Zune memorabilia with the arrogance that there shall be an viewers prepared to upvote his efforts indefinitely. He can strap an absurdly big SSD on the motherboard, making certain that it’s going to by no means get replaced. He can put up a Zune-stamped coaster, rescued from the deep recesses of the Microsoft trash pile, and belief that his buddies will deal with the invention just like the Holy Grail. The Zune was mocked, lampooned, and chased out of the market with its tail between its legs. Nevertheless it by no means really died, not with followers like these.