Posted on 10/04/2011 2:08:31 AM PDT by Spktyr
Zune HD support page, podcast end lineup
Microsoft in spite of its earlier claims has said it will drop Zune players. A support page has made clear the company will "no longer be producing Zune players." It will keep honoring support and sales, but hasn't made mention of future OS updates.
The company quietly discontinued the Zune Insider podcast on Friday after hosts Jessica Zahn and Matt Akers said they had to move on to other projects. Zahn is working on social services involving Live.
Its end comes after two years without significant hardware updates and signs that the Zune line was coming to an end. It recently stopped selling Zune Originals and began porting Zune HD apps to Windows Phone.
While the core music component will live in Windows Phone, the Xbox 360, and the desktop, it marks an end to Microsoft's hopes of competing with the iPod almost exactly five years after entering the field in fall 2006. Microsoft had hoped to use its size and unique features to outmuscle Apple. While it had advantages such as FM radio, "squirting" songs, and later Wi-Fi syncing and the Zune Pass, they weren't considered big enough to sway users from the iPod line.
Zunes may have inadvertently helped Apple in the process. By entering with the Zune device and Marketplace, Microsoft started competing with partners that were using PlaysForSure on their music stores, such as Walmart. The Zune never got more than two percent share in the US, but it was enough to lead to the closure of some stores and mostly cannibalized device share from Microsoft's allies.
Apple's success has been credited both to stronger momentum as well as to a much more aggressive update schedule. Microsoft started slowing down as soon as 2008, when it put out a conservative update to the "clickpad" Zunes. Apple has always updated iPods at least once a year and, with the iPod nano, has had a significant redesign every year. The company was quicker to touchscreen players and had both cheaper as well as higher-end models.
Wasn’t exactly snarking. Seriously, if you had a proper backup, it wouldn’t have even been a problem. Had hard drives blow up on Macs and PCs and with proper backup the only thing lost was a little time having the iPod resync. Everything went back to where it was quite quickly with no loss of data.
If you are having to ‘recover’ files from your Zune because you didn’t have backups, you screwed up *bad* and recovering your music is the least of your problems.
oh no, there’s no such thing as a freeper tech company.
But Apple boycotted Fox News over Glenn Beck (not just his show but the entire channel) and Google likes to play snarky games with its homepage during holidays as I’m sure you’re aware. Microsoft doesn’t try to appeal to the leftist kiddies. I remember when the M in MSNBC used to stand for Microsoft. It was a pretty decent network that featured John Gibson and several other conservatives.
The M in MSNBC still stands for Microsoft, at least partially. msnbc.com is still a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC. Note the bastion of liberalism that it’s become.
“In a June 2011 interview, MSNBC president Phil Griffin stated that “MSNBC has established a sensibility, a position, a platform” and that “MSNBC is really the place to go for progressives.””
Actually, having been in that situation once for a client, I was easily able to recover all the files, intact, off the iPod using a third party utility.
The problem with the same idea on the Zune was that every music file you stuck on it was infected by the Zune with DRM, so you got three plays or three days out of it when you copied it off and then it would self destruct.
http://medialoper.com/zunes-big-innovation-viral-drm/
Hit post too soon. No, the problem with copying stuff off the iPod was 1) the names got scrambled if you didn’t have a decoding utility and 2) it was all or nothing. You either got it all off or you got zilch (there were a couple of models you could not get file system access to.)
Still, better than the “hey, where’d all my files go” Zune. :P
” even the iPod’s days are numbered.”
How right you are: that number may be 0.
Indications are Apple may end the iPod proper (the Classic line) today. The Nano and Shuffle will continue, as cheap small-capacity accessories. The iPod Touch is for most practical purposes the iPad Nano (and will be if a 3G option is added). But as for the robust, large capacity, dedicated music device, the iPod is just about done.
Does this mean we are no longer welcome to the social?
Yeah, I think the cops broke up ‘the social’ some time ago as someone complained about the smell of the drugs that were being partaken of. :P
Here’s what I don’t understand...even casual music fans have hundreds of gigabytes of files on disk and many/most of those fans have abandoned the 128k bit rate...yet the largest MP3 player is less than 200 GB.
As with USB flash drives, the 64 GB limit seems to have lingered for quite a long time in tech terms. Spinning hard disks aren’t the answer...what about solid state drives? Despite demand and ubiquity they are still ridiculously expensive and show very little of the usual decline in price per megabyte over time. Still, they seem the best answer at present.
As you say, flash is too expensive for those capacities. And hard drives are too physically large for the application.
For comparison, the largest iPod Touch has what you want, large capacity and small size, but is over $400.
SSDs are up to 4TB now, but a 4TB drive is the size of an old HH DVD drive.
Probably the only guy in the world grateful for the Zune is Walden Schmidt.
LOL - and he’s fictional. :P
And a good thing too! Now my three-year-old can have her "phone" just like mommy and daddy, and look at pictures of herself to her heart's content.
I wasn't willing to put an expensive iPad in her hands yet, but a Touch at half the price (and based on how she treated M&D's iPhones) put early apps in her hands, AND gave her a way to listen to her "Marley" whenever she wants.
“Fictional” my eye!
Have you seen the size of the “blur” on that guy? ;o)
I need to find someplace that will do an iPod Touch Gen 1 battery replacement. Have one that won’t turn on, and have two toddlers that want to play with Daddy’s iPad too much.
Highly underrated device and “ecosystem”, plagued with terrible decisions, the marketing division should be shot.
I thought the Zune was dead a couple of years ago. I haven’t seen any in stores for a very long time.
Why such visceral hatred for a consumer electronic product? Did a Zune run over your dog?
I have a brown Zune and it’s been a good music player. The brown was ridiculed, but it actually looks pretty good in person and I can assure you no one will mistake it for their iPod.
The sound quality was actually better than my first gen iPod Nano. ...and it was only $80 on clearance.
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