Remember Microsoft Zune? Hyperkin Jokes About Bringing It Back

Zune was actually pretty cool. I didn't own one, but almost bought one right as they were being phased out. It did a lot of things better than the Jeff Goldblum player.

I had a Zune and I played Hexic all the time on it.

I’d get one…especially if it had a huge storage amount, or even micro sd support…and if adding your own music is somewhat easy.

Ahhhhh the Zune... I had a brown Zune, and honestly, I liked the build and feel of the device... then the iPhone came out and I never looked back.

Of course I do. I still use the same Zune HD I pre-ordered to this day.

Had the original Zune fat as well but that was stolen at work many moons ago.

@Rural-Bandit IDK if MS "allowed" Apple to control that space. I think Apple came out of nowhere and nobody expected them to come from that angle, they were always the weird little niche computer company a small market buys. Then they came out with a music player that was pretty popular. And somehow over 8 years or so they became this icon. Every company tried to counter them. Sony, Microsoft, smaller companies, traditional companies, but nobody really had a strategy and failed horribly because it wasn't a thing they ever planned for until it just happened. iPod became iPhone......and took off from there.

Although, Android still dominates iPhone overall, and Microsoft does get royalties for their part in Android. That's how they were covering the Xbox One losses for years, they'd just plug the hole with money from Android.

But yeah Apple dominated media and consumer entertainment quietly during a time MS was 100% focused on enterprise and entirely lost any sense of consumer tech. Xbox certainly is a big part of hitting back at Apple in the consumer space indirectly.

Surface is perfect for what it is and really shouldn't change. I think that's a totally different market. iPad is great for consumery-type applications, but Surface is something else entirely. It's a full Windows PC in a slate-like device. You buy a surface precisely because it's a full PC in a slate-like device and not a cut-down mobile experience. You can buy Android tablets for half the price, but they won't run your desktop apps. Surface will. It's a smaller market for sure. But I don't think it's intended to compete with iPad. It's not an expensive, heavy tablet, it's a thin and light laptop that doubles as a tablet, and it's the only product of it's kind (Unfortunately, prices went up from $800 to $1100 with the new version....and there's no alternative. )

Apple is kind of the console of the computing world. It does what it does super well and without hassle. But if you're more of a "power user" you hit a brick wall the moment you try to do anything they didn't think you'd want to do. Early on used iOS phones but every time I'd end up trying to do file transfers, backups, remote administration or anything on one, it was like trying to use a Playstation as a computer. Restrictions, problems, incompatibilities, "oh you need to jailbreak it if you want to do THAT" I ended up switching to Android early on. Some of the problems of the Apple ecosystem have been improved since that time, but now I have a whole software ecosystem on Android I wouldn't leave behind. And I use Surface Pro, because darnit I need a full freaking PC, not just a bloated phone!

Zune was only a joke because of the goofy name. The device itself was awesome. I had an 80 GB and if it weren't for the battery eventually dying for good, I'd still be using it (because I still have it.)

If they did re-release it, even as a gag, I'd buy it again. Toss in Bluetooth and it's a no-brainer for me.

What people also didn't realize was that the Zune service was basically Game Pass for music. It allowed unlimited plays and ten DRM-free downloads a month (to keep) for like, ten bucks. It was a damn good service.

The zune was freaking amazing! Very underrated and overlooked product. Shame never got noticed.

idk about zune but it would be awesome if xbox had a handheld console.

@I_want_avowed
Definitely! I travel a lot and a SteamDeck type XB device would be a no brainer purchase for me.

I feel like this is forgotten for what it originally was and it is only known as being a joke in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

i still have 2 i have the zune 60gb and the smaller 8gb nano knockoff version....they had better sound quality then ipods at the time and accepted more formats.

@Rural-Bandit aww, thanks! 😊

Definitely apples App store leads in terms of sales versus Google's for a variety of reasons. But in terms of total OS deployments Android wins by a landslide, and from that, Microsoft gets royalties. I'm not exactly sure what they have some rights to in it, but they basically get their money from OS activations for the OS itself, not of course from app stores. But it's a tidy income for doing nothing that helps them subsidize our video games and buy Activision with the tip jar....

The phone market has kind of 3 general markets. The low end of people that just want a phone that does basic things a phone does, which is the bulk of the market, and it's almost entirely Android. The premium phone market that, in the us and Japan, is dominated by apple, and then the power user/enthusiast market that tends to revert back to Android with Samsung, Google, HTC etc. flagsflagship models. Apple definitely has that console-like appeal, and there's a lot of people I'd say it's best (but overpriced) for. For me, I can't help but look at it as an enthusiast..... So many times I ended up with "seriously? How is it not possible to just copy this from here to there without jailbreaking??" 😆. For me, Android has is quirks, and I hate hate hate Google with a passion, but.... The os let's me use it like a little pc..... So I got stuck into it. Though now Samsung charges as much or more than Apple and it's infuriating..... I shopped around but every other model lacked something I needed.

Surface, yeah, I agree a full os on touch isn't great for all tasks, but the surface has that tablet mode for tabletey features. I mostly use it with the keyboard cover as a laptop, but, I use it hybrid with touch and its perfect. I still find it infuriating apple refuses to add touch to MacBooks. After getting used to having it, I can't go back. And I was even considering a MacBook air instead of surface at first until I realized that. They don't want to cannibalize iPad sales and the lucrative appstore. But they artificially limit their laptops to go it. It's a shame. Tough I'm not happy about the price jump on surface at all. Technically it didn't jump that much, they eliminated the low ram model. But 800 to 1100 is a horrible price jump.

Bring back windows phones. I actually liked those.

Man, I had a Zune 80, a Zune HD, 2(!) Zune 30s, and I still have my Zune 8 with the Zune Originals art on the back. I still think Zune Pass was the best music subscription service. If Hyperkin wants to bring the Zune back, I would be all for it.

@Rural-Bandit There's a lot of good points in that article, but at a high level, I think it makes the classic mistake of analyzing Nintendo like a traditional Western company. It makes links between events as though connected as a long term strategy, but Nintendo doesn't really work that way. They do like to reuse ideas they think are good, but they usually do so in experimentalist ways. 3DS was 3D because they played with 3D on GameCube prototypes. Obviously portability has been their great strength, but the article takes a western view of how they arrived at switch as part of a long term vision. But based on iwatas comments at the time, I don't think that's the path that led them there. To them, it was about how to satisfy the Japanese market that's all handheld and the western market that's all console simultaneously. Switch was meant to solve a problem, and wiiu led to that solution, but I think the article takes an inverse line of thinking.

The article assumes wiiu was intentionally a throw away product to realign customer expectations to move entirely to handhelds as part of a long term strategy to move to mobile gaming. If Nintendo were headquartered in Redmond, thats exactly what it would have been.

In reality I think it's the other way around. WiiU was just assumed to pick up with a "gamer"audience from the Wii after the Wii successfully covered non gamers to gamers. It was the Wii social engineering experiments second phase. The experiment failed colossally, and wii gamers didn't become gamers, they got their casual fix from the new smart phone industry for "free". It also set the stage to bring the DS handheld games to the TV just like Super Game Boy and the like had done in the past (EVERYONE misses that point!). That reality never happened of course because the console crashed and burned and went into maintenance mode within a year of launch.

People talk about Nintendo reinventing, but in reality they were the power console up until og Xbox launched and console started merging with PC. They radically reinvented with the Wii out of desperation. Tried in a sideways way to reinvent with wiiu that didn't work. They reinvented single screen handheld to dual, as a parallel experiment that eclipsed game boy so it replaced it. But, with switch, really what is switch other than just a Super Game Boy Advance? With a TV out? It's back to Gameboy in all but name.

Detachable controllers are the only gimmick that separates it, but the lite doesn't have that, nor a TV out. It's literally a new game boy.

Plus the experimentalism came from the duo of iwata and miyamoto. Yamahichi was a traditional model guy. And furukawa is a modern businessman. I don't see them doing the experimental things iwata was known for. They seem more like playstation executives.

My only worry is that they return to yamauchis downward direction as a result. The experimentalism didn't always work but it kept Nintendo relevant. I do wonder how well a switch 2 will go down as the much bigger mobile and cloud industry starts to erode handheld interest. With a phone, a controller, and game pass ultimate you basically have a switch. Streaming limitations for now keep it from being a full successor, but switch 2 has to survive the changes of 10 years from now. Nintendo has to reinvent in that time.

Truly I wouldn't be surprised if they punted at the casual vr scene. After switch 2. It's mobile, it's casual, it's social, it's right in Nintendo's wheelhouse, and they were the first to dabble in vr, stereoscopy, and even on switch with labor vr. And they love coming back to old ideas with new tech. And they could decimate Facebook's feeble mobile games approach without competing with pc vr or psvr2, just as switch didn't complete with PS4/5. But they'd do it a Nintendo way that makes it more social.... Whatever that way may be.