Zune to launch November 14th?
By Ryan Block 
posted July 31st 2006 12:13PM
posted July 31st 2006 12:13PM
Alright everybody, we've all had a few days to cool down on the Zune stuff -- hope you've been well rested. So with no further delay here's the latest from from the inside: a trusted source has given us a little more to go by on the hardware end, including a few specs we more or less expected or heard, such as that the Zune should have a 30GB drive, black, brown, and cotton color options, FM tuner, 13 first party accerrories available at launch (and who knows how many 3rd party accessories), and a 50% larger screen than the iPod with video (making it 3.75-inches if you're talking diagonal, and not areal). The jucier bits, however, are that we can all expect to find out some hard information from Microsoft in August, and that the player is slated to launch on November 14th, right in time for the holiday buying season (what a huge surprise). As always, more to come.
"the kids working the retail mac stores undergo a considerable amount of training "
So what? I can find 10,000 kids who went through all sorts of Microsoft training and I wouldn't call them pros. I can grab a bunch of fools out of CompUSA's tech support section and not call them pros.
If you want to claim you don't know a single Mac pro (which seems pretty clear), that's fine. Don't assume you know anything about these people you do not know though.
There are plenty of Mac pros who are just as efficient and/or more so than equivalent Win pros. You just don't know them.
touche tf.
Leo, I think you are using that term correctly.
;-)
Thanks.
Everything about the Zune is lame, from it's buggy OS, to it's ricuously high price. More typical Microsoft bloatware.
Don't we get this same song & dance every year right before the holiday season? The great "iPod killer" that will force Apple into bankruptcy. Every year there's a product hyped on Engadget (though nowhere near this level) with everybody arguing about iPod pros and cons and how this new player can attack those vulnerabilities. The new player will have better battery life, the new player will have better features.
And the company coming up with the "iPod killer" for that year is going to do a better job than the company that tried last year. Because Dell has the production capacity and can offer a price advantage, because Sony created the Walkman and has the experience, because Samsung hired a former Apple software designer, because Microsoft has WiFi, J Allard and gabizillions of dollars to throw behind a marketing campaign!
Problem is, the iPod-hater-club never thinks of what Apple's working on at the same time. They only consider what Steve Jobs put on the market that previous year. Then Apple drops the iPod mini. Or the iPod nano. Or the iPod w/ video. iPod sales grow from the previous year. The "iPod killer," ironically, ends up the player with six feet of dirt over its (likely unintuitive) controls.
Then it's back to the drawing board, heads low. Another year of hateration for the comments section of Engadget iPod posts, another year of bitter anger. Another year of waiting for the true "iPod killer."
I am beyond sick of these idiotic iPod fanboys/girls. Face it, the battle is over. I own a 30gb black iPod video, and I haven't been impressed at all. Sure when I first got it, it was a great improvement. But after realizing how many flaws it has, I was ready to throw the stupid thing away. First off, terrible video battery (2 hours). Secondly, this thing scratches like insane. I can't even watch videos anymore because the screen is so destroyed. I only put it in my jeans too, it's not like im throwing this thing around and playing catch with it. I spend $300 on a product, I shouldn't have to go buy a $30 case that destroys how it looks. It's constantly freezing and crashing too. With Microsoft's new offering I can finally get a good sized screen, and WiFi. I don't see how you guys aren't impressed by the features, NOTHING HAS BEEN FINALIZED. I bet if Apple decided to incorporate WiFi all of you would be saying, "THIS IS THE GREATEST THING EVER!!!1111". Morons. You're all ignorant to the fact that Microsoft has a successful branding name here (Xbox), and it will use the same business strategy to take away the market share from Apple. You know Microsoft is a serious threat, and you're gonna take it hard. Finally I can have a decent music player and not be one of those iPod girly fags that think it's the greatest thing ever. Suck it Apple fanboys, the war has begun, and it's our move.
i would love to see the iPod get taken down (until the next one is revealed)
"I don't see how you guys aren't impressed by the features, NOTHING HAS BEEN FINALIZED."
What? We can't be unimpressed because we know nothing, but we are supposed to be impressed because we know nothing? Uh huh.
"Morons."
Yeah...
"You're all ignorant to the fact that Microsoft has a successful branding name here (Xbox), "
You're ignorant to the fact that Bach said that the brands will be kept different even if the product teams are the same because they don't want to dilute the XBox brand.
"and it will use the same business strategy to take away the market share from Apple."
Lose billions. Brilliant! Hell, even Rio and others who are now dead could at least make a profit on a device before they floundered with a "Killer" strategy; why can't MS profit off of anything?
"Suck it Apple fanboys, the war has begun, and it's our move."
Our move: coming in 3.5 months with one device in one country for only 4 weeks of the Holiday season... The Iraqi National Guard had better opening moves than that.
You idiot. They're going to have Live Anywhere, and Live Marketplace incorporated. How does that have nothing to do with Xbox?
You Apple fanboys/girls digust me beyond belife. The iPod is an awful product, it just became the cool thing to get for no apparent reason. Now everybody has it, and it's not cool. The trend is dying. I don't care what you say, Microsoft will come out on top again. And you'll be crying alongside Steve with that new scratched up iPod with the locked into iTunes scheme.
"You idiot. They're going to have Live Anywhere, and Live Marketplace incorporated. How does that have nothing to do with Xbox?"
You're the one who mentioned branding, not me. All I'm doing is citing the head of the program.
And as for features, tie it to a service that only reaches 18 million consumers/devices: that's brilliant! Apple sells 18 million iPods in two quarters, but the Zune will be a killer by having its best functionality tied to a userbase half the size of a year's worth of iPod sales. Brilliant.
Apple fanboys... to your battle stations!!!
This is just about the most perfect player! Hopefully it will be around if not a little cheaper than the iPod. I'm sure that someone will hack it so you surf the web too.
Leo, just about the "single mouse button" thing. Most Mac Pros have not been hampered by this for a very long time. Older Macs running the old Mac OS eventually gained support for multiple mouse buttons, and Mac OS X has always had support for multiple mouse buttons (because NextStep before it also had this support). If you plug in any multi-button USB mouse, right-clicking will work just fine and as expected. The only thing has been that Apple has always remained fairly committed to using single-button mice (and even with the Mighty Mouse, it's still sort of a weird approach to left and right mouseclicks), but this just means that people have needed to use a third party mouse, which isn't that unusual (frankly, on a lot of PC's the bundled mouse is usually junk anyway, so getting another mouse isn't that odd).
As others have said here as well, dual-monitor support is actually pretty simple with Macs. Actually, Macs supported dual monitors for quite a while before Windows gained that capability.
But will it play .avi files and record mp3 audio or will it be bastardized into something useless through DRM and proprietary rubbish?
What I find fascinating is despite the many many hyping of products by Microsoft only to let everyone down when release (Windows, Origami, MSN Music, Tablet PC, Spot, the Butterfly etc.), the fans are still licking their chops over yet another hyping. How about we let them prove themselve this time around eh, instead of being an extention of their marketing department.
I'd really like to hear more about the Zune Live service and the user interface. Also, I'm hoping for centrally stored user playlists and music so you can access content from anywhere (pc, windows mobile, 360, etc.) Hope they can pull it off...
@ Tiger check out allofmp3.com, it's awesome, choose your filetype and bit rate from like 32 kbps up to 300 I think, 2$ for a whole album sounds darn good to me!
Zadillo, thanks for explaining:
Amazing that we are still hearing people say Macs can only work with a one-button mouse. People actually refuse to buy Macs thinking such. My first Mac 12 years ago, I was using 2 button mouse, multiple monitors.
Follow the link for a little Mac envy runnig Windows XP, Mac OSX and Linux:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE1XQyT_IbA&mode=related&search=Mac%20Parallel%20
While I don't particularly like OS9 or OSX, I would say that Apple understands portable mp3 players. MS has shown no prowess at this whatsoever. PPC2003, PPC2003SE and WM5 are clear indications that MS thinks that mobile MP3 players should be as much fun as DOS. Don't get me wrong - you can do plenty with DOS but it isn't user friendly as Windows. (Yes I still use DOS for quite a bit of technical work but MP3 playing shouldn't be technical).
WMP10 available in WM5 is a POS. You have to go through FAR TOO MANY MENUS just to play a song or to select a group of songs. Playlists are unreliable and a PITA to set up. I think MS should work on making WM5 have a nice MP3 player before they try to convince us they know anything about portable media players.
The only thing that could hurt the Ipod at this moment is getting the idiotic public to understand the great benefit of subscription music. How many of us have heard the argument "but you don't own the music", as if we are not aloud to buy it, frequently for 20% less than ITunes sells it for? Until some company explains in simple terms how subscriptions work, the foolish public will continue buying a machine simply because it has a clickwheel.
The best product does not always win. The best advertised product does. When will all the non-Apple competitors finally realize this and hire an ad agency that understands this?
Brown?
I can see the ad: "The Brown Sound of Zune!"
Hopefully they can get this thing to get thru a song or two before getting a blue screen of death.
Ah, yes, the uniquitous "blue screen of death" comment, undoubtedly from someone who doesn't use a Windows computer.
I work for a small company that utilizes about twenty high-end computers, both Mac and PC based, and part of my job involves tech support. Our computers get a LOT of use, so we rely on them to be workhorses that don't fail often, if ever.
I haven't seen a single "blue screen of death" since we moved to Windows XP. I have, however, seen that lovely "YOU MUST SHUT YOUR COMPUTER DOWN RIGHT NOW" message, in three languages, on our OSX workstations at least a dozen times this year alone.
I can't really picture a brown zune, unless it's wood grain.
I love screen dumps on tiger, they are a beutiful thing. We to have our share of macs running 10.3.7 and Windows 2000 server. We have about 40 boxes running server the rest of the workstation run xp. We only have 15 macs and three xserves. I will say that the macs do crash quite a bit more... of course they are used a lot more(processing floating point calcs and fly trap and graph, probably 22 hours a day) However, when the macs do crash we can usually bring them back up in about 5 minutes or less. Now when our XP and Server 2000 boxes crash I get paid overtime. So, if it was me I woud love to have windows boxes only since it really takes some tinkering under the hood to find the problem and fix it... most of the time, we just pray. But truth be told, I can't afford my boss to purchase macs, I don't want to lose my job... and I really enjoy sitting around doing pretty much nothing everyday IT is really just a big insurance policy.
I agree, apple ipod has no features per say. just plain old mp3 shit. Microsoft has a history of innovating to beat competition. They will offer the edge that is required to get the market share. For the end consumer this just means better pricing, more features ... i'm lovin it. Go Zune!
How is this thing different than all the failed players from Sony, Creative et al? It can't be that it's Microsoft and they have millions of dollars cause Sony did as well. It can't be that they had a recognised brand name cause Sony did as well (Walkman) and one that was more closely related to music than Xbox.
So what's the difference? Why will this thing succeed where other players have failed? If you can't come up with a good reason then, as CTG said near the top of this page, the Zune is just another 'ipod-killer' that will get annihilated by Apple's holiday season offerings.
Also this thing is 30GB which is still too expensive and too big for the vast majority of people who buy mp3 players. The most popular sized mp3 player is uder 10GB. When are Microsoft going to start catering for the mass market and not for the geek brigade?
You act as if the price of an mp3 player is directly proportional to the size of the HD.
Um the price of an mp3 player is directly proportional to the size of the hard drive though. Like the 30GB ipod is cheaper than the 60GB. Or the smaller capacity Creative players are cheaper than the larger ones. What point were you making again?
Also you've totally missed my point which is that most people want a very small, flash based mp3 player that looks good. Features come a distant, distant second to all but the geeks. The nano and the mini aren't the best selling ipods (and therefore the best selling mp3 players) for nothing
1) it better be able to download podcasts directly over WIFI or someone should get fired
2) 30GB is lame. Come on, get with the program
I am so sick of my iPod. It crashes all the time, and the battery life is crap! That, and you see so many losers with them nowdays, it is emabarrasing to be seen with one!
I can't wait for this!
November 14th is very close to the PS3's release date! Perhaps MS hopes to steal some of the media's attention and consumer dollars away from Sony's launch. It could backfire. With everyone watching the PS3, the Zune's launch could go virtually unnoticed.
Wow..
I have alot of comments that I'd like to address-
First off - the two button mouse guy ...
You have been able since Mac OS 8(1996) been able to use a two button mouse or- take that left hand thats already on the keyboard and hold down the "" key.
(DONT BE A TROLL its BEEN 10 YEARS)
I bought an iPod so I wouldnt have to listen to the radio.. so FM is worthless to me, infact, I find it kind of offensive to have it stuck in my MP3 player.
..so Fm = worthless to me.
Features are great, but the iPod already has a stack of features that .. guess what .. NO ONE USES
I use my iPod for unprotected MP3s, always will.
No off the wall oddball formats, no atrac, no wmv, no mp4, no AAC. (I convert anything I buy before the first play)
Video is a great idea, but I dont wanna watch it on a tiny screen , i want it on my TV, guess what..
iPod dock>TV> done
Video games? iPods already have solitare, the little parachute game, and the Music quiz(isnt that more than comes on windows? Oh crap! No minesweeper), want more games- Buy a DS, the iPod is a MUSIC PLAYER.
I have several iPods, and in 4 years I can't say I've needed more than a battery replacment.
(you should treat it like a computer, not a cell phone)
The fact that the Zune coming with "13 first party accessories" is simply the fact that they couldnt find 13 3rd party accessories that will even BE made.
and to the connector guys bickering-
Apple licenses the "made for ipod" logo-
The connectors are available from FoxConn to anyone.
Anyone can make an accesory , its just up to Apple if you get the "for ipod" logo. (and thats just at a fee)
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=633
there is the link if you'd like to buy some. (im not affiliated)
My Guess is that the Zune will have a few unique accessories, but they'll be adapted to iPod , not vice-versa.
We've all gotten the "whats an iPod" question ..
"Whats a Zune?"- the microsoft iPod
My Zen M has been indispensible, I don't see anything here making me want to upgrade.
I'm so tired of ppl saying all the iPod is is an Image thing or Fashion Statement... BULL! Just because it's popular does not make it a fashion statement. I mean God forbid Windows ever be considered a fashion statement just because it's popular.
The iPod is simple to use and is well integrated with iTunes. iTunes alone with it's easy usability is what makes the iPod so well liked. I mean ever try Sony's SonicStage, that thing is so bloated and slow I don't understand what ppl see in that software pkg.
Not only that, but ppl want to OWN their music with DRM out of the way instead of most of these companies that put it straight in your face all the time and make you RENT your music and control your use of that music. Let's leave renting to apartment dwellers and not my music.
Wake up ppl, You don't have to buy into Microsft's underrated propaganda and slogans. Just remember one thing, MS loves to underprice it's competition to hook you in, but once everyone's in, they know they got you and that's when the prices go up and way up... Look at MS Windows, MS Office. Overpriced, Over-featured, Over-bloated... Who needs it when simplicity is just easier.
is that what they are using to take away attention from the PS3? lol thats pretty funny.
http://www.laptopbatteryclub.com/