What costs 1.2531646¢ each and ends up being trapped inside a black, white or baby-shit green-brown prison?
Why, a Zune point, of course!
In a marketing move that borrows heavily from Barumian tactics, the Zune player debuted today along with the Zune music store. In the Zune store, you must first buy Zune points, in blocks of $5 at a time.
Then, you browse the Zune store to discover that songs are only 79 points!!!
Wow…they’re totally spanking Apple now! First a brown-noise-player that’s bigger and bulkier and browner than an iPod, and then songs undercutting iTunes by twenty cents….errrrrr….points….Points. Make sense?
Here’s the kicker. 79 Zune points costs you 99¢.
Did they really think people would fall for that?
On the iTunes store, I can click a 99¢ song and it downloads, and the charge is added to my Visa card. Done.
On Zune, I must buy $5.00-worth of points…about 400 points. Then I can go buy about 5 songs. At 79 points per song. Total point cost: 395 points. Leaving me about 4 or 5 points remaining.
Seriously, do you think we’re dumb as brown-green Zune shit?
But hey, at least I can wirelessly share a song from an obscure CD that I ripped myself, and you can listen to it on YOUR zune for 3 plays (even 1 second’s worth of play counts as a full play) or 3 days, whichever comes first. At which point, since it’s probably not on Zune’s store, you won’t be able to buy it, but it will still just sit there on your Zune, unplayable and taking up space.
At least the Zune’s bigger-but-not-higher-rez screen will let you play those Zune movies you bought on—oh wait. No movies.
One upside: take your Zune to Quebec and let them giggle at you calling it your own personal pee-pee/tinkle/hoo-hoo/kitty.
Technorati Tags: god of biscuits, iPod, zune
well that seems about as smart as a box of hair
and who in the hell makes this Zune thing?
(googles and finds out that it’s Microsoft)
OH! well i guess that explains it!
(heheheheheh)
I don’t see that 79 points thing being an issue. The way to do it is just get the Zune pass for $14 a month and have unlimited music. Much better than paying $1000 on a DRM’d music collection that I might not be able to play anyway even if I “own” it that way.
And when you stop paying $14 a month, at least you’ll still have all that music that you’ve already downloaded to your Zune….ooops!
What do you mean, “might not be able to play”? You mean if iPods, Macs and Windows boxes all just disappear one morning, you won’t be able to play it?
I guess burning your iTunes songs to plain old audio CDs guarantees you won’t be able to play it one day.
All the big labels are heading toward subscription models. $14.99 is dirt cheap for unlimited music. That is about the same price as a basic sirius subscription, except that I an hear exactly what I want exactly when I want to hear it.
Yeaaah, tell that to napster and buymusic and listen.
You still didn’t answer the challenges to what you claimed. What happens when you stop paying $14.99 a month? How are you going to guarantee that all that music you paid to listen to will still play after you’ve dumped the service?
Oh, and XM online subscription is $6.99 a month.
But brown is the new black. (Of course, someone forgot to tell marketing that it’s chocolate brown, not baby diarrhea brown.)
It’s gotta sell with the .5” screen size improvement Ok, it’s sideways, so you have to keep turning the player for the buttons to make sense, but then that’s Microsoft’s usual attention to detail in the UI.
This product screams Microsoft. Only thing missing is the first 100 viruses transmitted by sharing songs.
From appleinsider.com:
Zune incompatible with Windows Vista
“Apparently, Microsoft has been so focused on getting Zune out the door in time for the mad holiday rush that it hasn’t gotten around to supporting the player under its next-generation operating system…”
“‘This operating system is currently not supported by Zune,’ reads an error message when trying to install Zune software on the latest versions of Microsoft’s own Windows Vista operating system.”
“In an official Zune support document, Microsoft, which will begin selling Vista to business customers in two weeks, confirms that the system ‘is not supported at this time.’”
Here’s the link:
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=2237
I think you can add this to the “LAME” column when weighing the pros and cons of the Zune…
It will sell some. But not a lot. More than the Toshiba or whatever it’s based on, but probably not a lot more.
It will sell because 1) It’s not the iPod 2) It has MS’s name on it 3) It has a feature the iPod doesn’t have 4) MS has struck that peculiar deal with Universal 5) The music is sold in a way that looks cheaper
But it will not capture a significant segment of the market. At least not this version. The xBox360 was a joke at first, too, but it’s come a long way. Windows was a joke, but it too, has come a long way. It’s not going away and it’s going to keep Apple on its toes.
This thing is only news because it’s from MS. And I think the biggest reason it will not enjoy immediate success is that it’s not the iPod. Lots and Lots of other DAPs on the market offer greater feature sets, but none of them have toppled the iPod, either.
The market will change, and Apple had better have other tricks up its sleeve than just the iPod. The iPod will not keep Apple afloat forever. There was a time Sony was untouchable, too.
Thanks for doing the great public service of trashing this Zune thing so eloquently. I was halfway interested by the first few news accounts I heard, but you’ve convinced me not to waste my time looking into it. For now, I’m happy with my 30G iPod. Love the rest of your tres gay site. Very Smart. Keep it up.
…and then there’s this…
http://engadget.com/2006/11/13/i…he-zune-sucked/
Fish in a barrel, isn’t it?
And “welcome to the social” — what does that even mean? It’s like when Faith would always call everything “five by five.” No one knew what that meant either, but at least she was all cool and leather-wearing and stuff….