“When I purchased a (brown!) Microsoft Zune about a month ago, I figured I was getting a couple of things. For one, a pretty decent media player, with a few key features iPod lacked: a prettier user interface, a subscription music model, and a bigger screen,” Seth Jayson writes for The Motley Fool. “For another thing, I assumed I was getting a potential collectors’ item — something along the lines of an Edsel.”
Jayson writes, “But I didn’t realize just how quickly the Zune would be made into a paperweight. It only took about a month, as it turns out. Steve Jobs did it yesterday, with his unveiling of the latest Apple iPod.”
“He didn’t unveil an iPod yesterday, you say? I beg to differ,” Jayson writes. “Sure, the product he showed off was a phone, something so expensive and so limited in capacity that it won’t — can’t — have the same traction as the iPod. But it’s pretty clear what the next generation of iPods can (and likely will) be.”
Jayson writes, “Apple simply needs to tear out the pricey phone guts, thicken the form factor to accommodate the greater storage capacity of miniature hard drives, and bam, the Zune has no advantages left. The iPod’s screen will be bigger, its user interface will be prettier, and if Apple leaves that Wi-Fi chip inside, it can easily enable player-to-player file-sharing and hotspot downloads, killing the Zune’s alleged ‘social’ advantage. This also makes an instant relic out of SanDisk’s latest Wi-Fi enabled Sansa Connect model.”
“Apple gets the details right from the beginning. Jobs and his designers know that very small annoyances add up to very big headaches, so they eliminate as many hassles as possible,” Jayson writes. “The Zune is typical Microsoft: some interesting ideas for improvement lost, because the people making the device didn’t think things through all the way.”
Jayson writes, “There’s a side of me, as a Microsoft shareholder, that hopes Microsoft sticks a fork in the Zune right now and admits that it’s done. Stop wasting money on this initiative. You’re late to the game, and you brought out a nice device with some good, new features, but you blew it on the details. Meanwhile, Apple has jumped another two years ahead with its latest offering. Admit you’re beaten… Besides, the sooner the Zune disappears, the sooner I can hawk it as a collector’s item on eBay. Let’s hope it gets me enough for a snazzy new iPod.”
Full article here.
Microsoft (and everyone else) is more than just two years behind. Apple has over 200 patents on iPhone – and therefore on future iPods and other future devices – and they plan to defend those patents vigorously. Sorry, Microsoft et al. no copying this time! As for Zune, it was a paperweight on the day of release, no help from Apple needed.
Related articles:
eWeek: Apple iPhone fallout: ‘They must be crying in Nokia-ville and other telephony towns today’ – January 10, 2007
Top 10 things to love and top 10 things to hate about the Apple iPhone – January 10, 2007
How Apple kept the iPhone top secret for 30 months – January 10, 2007
Hands-on with Apple’s iPhone – January 10, 2007
The only thing really wrong with Apple’s iPhone is its name – January 09, 2007
Is Apple building ‘The Device?’ [revisited] – January 09, 2007
Analyst Bajarin: Apple’s iPhone and Apple TV are industry game changers – January 09, 2007
Time: ‘iPhone could crush cell phone market pitilessly beneath the weight of its own superiority’ – January 09, 2007
Analyst: Apple iPhone should be given its own category – ‘brilliantphone’ – January 09, 2007
Cingular to use Synchronoss Technologies’ platform for Apple iPhone – January 09, 2007
iPhone photos from Apple’s Macworld Expo booth – January 09, 2007
Enderle: Apple’s iPhone is going to do very well – January 09, 2007
Apple debuts iPhone: touchscreen mobile phone + widescreen iPod + Internet communicator – January 09, 2007
Microsoft’s Zune selling like snotcakes – November 15, 2006
Dvorak: ‘If anything is doomed to failure, it’s Microsoft’s Zune’ – November 14, 2006
Opinion: More blood on Apple iPod’s Click Wheel: Microsoft pulls plug on Zune – July 25, 2006
Guaranteed, the 6th-gen iPod will be iPhone – phone + HDD. But it won’t come out before the iPhone. To do so would be to screw Cingular over. I’m sure their partner wants a few months to be the only one offering this treat.
I’m guessing the 6th-gen iPod will come out for Christmas ’07.
I’m betting you’ll see the iPod get this stuff in September–in time for Christmas. I don’t think you’ll see a nano until next year, but it’s a vague possibility that it’d also be in September.
The reasons? I’ll admit, the iPod one is a lame reason–monetizing the work. Apple will want to make as much money off their investment as they can. That means selling it at a premium. I don’t think Apple wants to sell it for $249 when they may be able to convince people to spend $499 for it. They’ll flush those people out in June and July and be ready to sell it to the rest of us in September.
The nano rationale for next year is mostly a “wait and see” approach. The nano is sporty and I’m concerned with how well the iPhone-like screen will work after being scratched and abused. Remember that part of the reason Apple switched to colored aluminum with the nano is that nanos were getting scratched up. Some time to see what happens would be a good thing.
What the hell is this moron talking about?
It’s Apple who has the monopoly on paperweights and clips. You can clip miscellaneous papers together with one of those crappy, no-screen shuffle thingys, or put one of those dumpy-brick iPods on a stack of papers. Voilà, instant organization. That’s all those things are good for.
My Zune on the other hand blows that iPhone vaporware out of the water. Available to the public in June? Don’t make me laugh. That thing is going back to the lab for more redesigns than Joan Rivers’ face. When you consider that OS X abomination is running things on that Zune wannabe you know it doesn’t have a chance. My Zune is available now with a more fluid and intuitive interface than the hacks in Cupertino could ever come up with. Just wait until there is a ZunePhone. My first call will be a conference between me, clyde and Buster.
You won’t all be so smug then. It will have Windows Mobile. Windows Mobile! Redmond, you rock.
Your potential. Our passion.
The real revolution here seems to be overlooked by everyone but Steve Jobs! The iPhone is just a phone, an iPod, and an internet device combined. It’s really a hand held Mac that can make cell phone calls, and that’s the true revolution. It won’t really be clear until the 2nd generation iPhone, when storage capacity will undoubtly be much higher, but when it happens, we’ll see these things hooking up to external displays and keyboards. The laptop is the new desktop and the iPhone is the new laptop.
Waiting for my relative at Apple to send me my iMac. Welcome to the revolution!!
Ugh! That should read “The iPhone ISN’T just a phone, an iPod and…”
http://www.applefritter.com
Pathetic shtick, ZT.
Please, please, get a new act! Vaudeville is SO dead!
I’ve been checking Amazon’s top 100 electronics listings every week or so since the Zune came out. After the initial hype the black one settled into the 60s range out of 100 best sellers — sometimes in the 50s sometimes in the 70s, but mostly sitting comfortably in the 60s . The white and brown ones didn’t show up on the list at all.
Today I checked again. Now there are no Zunes of any color in Amazon’s top 100 sellers.
Seems like the social got moved to a new location.
My Zune on the other hand blows that iPhone vaporware out of the water.
by far Zune Tang‘s best line ever. That was awesome.
Oh my God! kirkgay is right! It’s gone from the Electronics list! It’s also down to 22 in the MP3 Players category.
But it’s still sitting at #6 in the Hard-Drive-based MP3 Players category, behind the Creative Zen Vision:M. So that’s the stat that Microsoft will be showing.
Zune Tang, I Love you man
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”tongue rolleye” style=”border:0;” /> It seems that most of the time you’re the only person with humor around here. I find it amazing that people are still so stupid as to take you for a windows troll.
So… I was thinking. You know how the Zune sharing feature totally blows for so many reasons, such as the 3 day/play limit, the transfer time, only enabling ‘push’ transfers instead of ‘pull’ transfers, and not being able to actively search other Zune’s libraries?
Well… now we’ll have a device that’s a Wi-Fi (yich.. I have always hated that term) enabled iPod running full-on iTunes. Would iTunes LAN sharing features work just like they do on the Mac? Could you browse and stream other iPhone users’ shared libraries at the coffee shop and stream content from them the same way? I certainly don’t see any reason why not.
The question is – Would this be 7 hundred million times better than Squirting?
I’m gonna go way out on a limb, here, and say Yes.
Thoughts?
-c
MW: ‘built’ (with humans in mind)
ZT: Your signature should be ‘Your stupidity.’ ‘Our passion-a bulging bank account from that stupidity’
I just watched a story about the iPhone on a German news program, where they interviewed a writer from the German tech mag CONNECT. He shrugged off the iPhone, saying that it doesn’t do anything that curent smartphones from Nokia and Sony Ericsson do. The point is not realy what the iPhone can do; rather, how it does it, which is much more intuitive than anything else. This is a point that is unfortunately lost on the majority of tech writers outside of the US regarding the iPhone.
New cars can’t really do anything that old cars can’t do. So I wonder why people keep buying new ones…
“Apple has over 200 patents on iPhone”
They obviously don’t want to repeat the same mistake of letting MS copy everything they do, like the original Mac. Apple only received about $100 million for it all. Despite this, I hope they begin to licence a limited number of technologies to defined companies to make products that do not compete with Apple.
No one has said this yet – the iPhone, with it’s WiFi, graphical & programmable interface would be great for all those warehouse and medical PDA-type uses. Also, I think the GPS function will come as a plug-in option.
Finally, the aTV with MacOX X, Intel processor (Core 2 Duo?) and 40 Gb drive would make a great gaming console. Install games via iTunes. Plus I reckon it can REALLY support 1080i, but they’re only saving 720p for now. A firmware update will update this once they have the content deals ready.
You know, when Zune Tang first came on here I really did think he was a real Zune user and pro MS guy. Up until now I still had my doubts that he was just a Mac head messing about but after todays comments….
… well, now I think it’s MDN just having fun to get more posts on their site because anyone who says the Zune is in any way better than Apple’s new phone should really be comitted to the nuthouse.
MDN word: TAKEN
[ TAKEN the piss all along ]
Zune Tang: thanks for the laughs man. You’re one funny geezer…
Nuthouse?
Shithouse!
Turdzune.
Flush!
Hey Cisco, now that’s an iPhone, eh? Lol. Just like pornography, and shit from shine-o-la, we know it when we see it don’t we? And on that note: Suck it Zune! Take a serious, serious dirt-nap.
Go Apple,Inc.!
My goodnes! Another pc moron. What a waste of bandwidth…
I simply cannot find that kind of article funny. I find it insulting.
Apple makes Microsoft’s Zune a papeweight?
Jobs makes Microsoft’s Ballmer a pantywaist! [Sound of chair smashing against wall.]
The Motley IDIOT!
ZUNE prettier design? this guys is a TOTAL IDIOT!
Bah. Go away, Fake Zune Tang.
MW: soon. Please!
Zune, from mp3 to coprolite in just weeks.