The Zune came out with a 30GB hard drive player when the world had moved on to flash based smaller players and three months before the iPhone

The flash based Zunes similar to the Nanos came out at the same time as the second generation iPod Touch.

The Zune HD came out with no apps around the end of 2009. Peak iPod - including the Touch - was 4th quarter 2008. The iPod was already losing steam and even then it was being propped up by the iPod Touch.

These are all true, but the Zune was still awesome... Video support, awesome customizations, and a very fun interface. I had all 3 of the Zunes you mentioned. My least favorite was the original, because the spinning disc would sometimes hit buffering issues, but the rest of the device family was practically perfect.

Perfect as long as you didn’t care about third party apps - which were very much a thing by 2009 when the Zune HD came out.

It might be a generational thing but I couldn't care less about third party apps.

All I use: email, browser, maps, phone, txt, calendar, camera (non essential for me).

No it’s not a generational thing - it’s you. That’s like the old Slashdot meme - “I haven’t owned a TV in 10 years Do people still watch TV?”. Seeing that my first computer was an Apple //e in 86, I’m definitely not a young buck.

it's not just him, there is a sizeable contingent of people who focus on just these apps for all their uses, and I think it would be much bigger if mobile didn't promote separate apps for everything.

Our customer base skews older and you wouldn't believe how many customer service tickets we field where they don't know what their apple account password is because they have literally never installed an app on their phone before. And these are people with brand new, most recent model iPhones that get a new one every few years.

The Zune 30, the first Zune, and the only 30gb Zune player you could be speaking about, was released in Nov 2005. By comparison, Apple's flash offerings in 2005 included the 1G Shuffle (1gb) and the 1G Nano (4gb). These were not large and complex enough devices to be considered competitors to the Zune 30; Apple's competitor to the Zune 30 was the 5G Classic, which came in 30/60/80gb hard drive sizes.

I'm not sure how you got "three months before the iPhone" when the Zune 30 was released in Nov 2005 and the iPhone was released in June 2007. That's not 3 months, that's 19 months.

The Zune 30 was released November 2006 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune_30). The iPhone was announced January 2007.

It didn’t matter if they were “competitive”. The market had already spoken. People preferred the flash based smaller players to the larger players. MS went after the smallest part of the market.

And it was brown.

Lol. I had a Zune HD. Opening the calculator app took half a minute... and that was pretty much the only app available. It was a cool device but there’s no surprise it got trampled by iPod Touch.

Wow, you're only slightly exaggerating. I counted 11 seconds.

https://youtu.be/iIj9W74Ju2E

Loved the Zune. Not sure which I had. It wasn’t HD or anything though. It was also a launchpad for me to begin enjoying streaming and tracking things. I began tracking music listens with Last.fm and I used Microsoft’s music streaming service at the time. Usually (or always?) you’d download music onto your device and have to renew it every 30 days or so.