Zune — $249.99 On Nov. 14

Cubricon writes, "As expected, Microsoft has dropped their price on the Zune in response to Apple's recent iPod updates. Ars Technica has an article that discusses the Zune's use of Microsoft's prepaid 'points' system for songs. Will the masses notice the difference between an iPod and a Zune? Will they want the FM and wireless capabilities?" The Zune lists for $0.99 more than the comparable iPod and songs from the Zune Marketplace will cost just under $0.99.

Comments

Not buying it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wireless. Same amount of space as an iPod. Lame.

FM...

[Kaenneth]

Everyone should have a battery powered radio receiver. Hurricanes, Earthquakes, Flooding, Volcanos (like Mt. St. Helens) happen, and you need a way to receive emergency information about which way to run.

Re:FM...

[Frosty Piss]

Everyone should have a battery powered radio receiver.

Yes, but FM? I think AM will be more useful.

Re:FM...

[michrech]

Fuck running, i'm stealing a Hummer H1 with a radio and killing 2 birds with one stone (and anyone who won't move out of my way)!

What happens 6 miles down the road after you run out of fuel? :)

Re:FM...

[mTor]

Actually, the FM radio band is abslutely the worst choice for an emergency broadcast. The range of FM is short and the radio waves don't bounce off the ionosphere. If there's some kind of a catastrophic event, there's a very good chance that local FM transmitter will be affected by it as well. SW and AM are much better since their waves bounce off the ionosphere and are long range.

Also, relying on Zune for emergency signal is silly (and I'm being nice) since it has a short battery life and no AM/SW bands. Also, what will you listen to after 5hrs have passed?!

If you want an emergency radio, get one with three bands and get one that has a hand crank.

Re:FM...

[ruiner13]

"What happens 6 miles down the road after you run out of fuel?"

That's still 5.5 more miles than I would have gotten running!

Re:FM...

[Grishnakh]

Seriously, what's the deal with people hating FM radio? I spend my whole day at work listening to BBC Radio 1. Sure, their daytime playlist is quite limited, but they do play some new music in the evenings, but I mainly tune in for the DJs.

You're obviously not an American, and haven't listened to FM radio much in America if you've ever visited here.

Let me educate you a little. Here in America, where we talk a lot about businesses and competition and capitalism, we're actually not much different from the Soviets: all the FM radio stations in the country, except for those playing NPR (National Public Radio--like an extremely watered-down BBC), are owned by a single company: ClearChannel. This company decides what we all listen to, and plays the exact same thing on every station across the country. So they'll have a couple of country music stations, a rock station, etc., in each metro area, but it's playing the same crap that every other station of that format is playing, whether you're in Florida or California or North Dakota. Even worse, each station only plays about 10 songs, in a continuous loop; the only time you'll hear something new is when ClearChannel is working with the RIAA to brainwash us into buying some new album, and they have to update their loop with the one song they'll ever play on that album. Lastly, while a lot of your media is controlled by the BBC, it seems to actually care about producing quality media, or at least trying to. BBC News is world-renowned for being one of the best news outlets (you'll never find that reputation among any American news sources). Here, there's no such pursuit of quality at all. You can forget about any good DJs on the radio, since the DJs don't decide which songs to play anyway (that's decided by the upper management).

As for Sirius and XM, I'm surprised ClearChannel hasn't lobbied our politicians to make that stuff illegal.

Sweet

[RetlawST]

As an Apple user, I'm all for this. A REAL competitor in the mp3 player market means that Apple has to "innovate" something cooler in order to stay on the top. I'd like to see a wide-screen iPod by the end of the year. :D

Re:Sweet

[ackthpt]

As an Apple user, I'm all for this. A REAL competitor in the mp3 player market means that Apple has to "innovate" something cooler in order to stay on the top. I'd like to see a wide-screen iPod by the end of the year. :D

Yeah, that's what we'll likely see, pointless innovation for the sake of innovation, the next gen will probably have

• a color LED projector so we can watch videos on a sheet of paper, wall, etc.
• a Swiss Army knife built in
• a turnip twaddler built in
• a keyboard
• automated blood sugar/caffeine/cholesterol/heart-rate monitor
• a weight of 2 lbs, including (non-exploding) battery
• a wasabi dispenser

Actaully... naw... well, maybe...

Great advantage

[Anonymous Coward]

Song downloads just under 99 cents? Would that make them 98 cents?

I predict a flood of switchers.

Re:Monday Morning Quarterbacking

[LoudMusic]

I mean, this thing is gonna bomb anyway, minus well lower the price and hope to make more money on the music-selling end of things.

Isn't that supposed to be "might as well"? Or is there some kind of joke that I'm missing?

What about the shitty brown color scheme ?

[javaDragon]

Most people are not "artist" enough to appreciate that "innovative" brown...

Re:What about the shitty brown color scheme ?

[microcars]

It is the "UPS" version

"U2" was already taken

Fuzzy Math?

[TopShelf]

Since when does "just under" mean "equals"?

The Zune's companion music download service will charge users 99 cents per song, the same as Apple's iTunes Store pricing model.

Planned obsolescence

[chefmattrock]

How about one of the manufacturers come out with a user replacable battery. This was a major complaint for the first Ipods, and hasn't been fixed yet. A bigger screen means shorter playtime between charges. That's one feature that would make me choose one over the other. Besides that, they're all comparable.

Re:Planned obsolescence

[fodder69]

While that may appeal to you, a lot of other people appreciate the quality "feel" of an ipod, part of which is no seams or panels. The first time you hold an ipod, it just feels like a quality piece of hardware and that impression is part of what has made it a success. There is no big label on the back that peels off, no panels that get worn out and loose, and it just flat out screams quality. Us tech geeks talk about various features we want and how itunes kinda sucks, but most people couldn't care less.

DOA

[Cr0w T. Trollbot]

This isn't a day late and a dollar short, it's at least three years too late and $100 short.

"Hey, let's offer a player two months from now at the same price as Apple is already selling the iPod at today. Also, let's make sure that our new, unproven propriatary music DRM is completely incompatible with our previous propritary music DRM! That way we get to drive away consumers fearful of unknown technology and piss off our existing music partners to boot!"

Dead on Arrival.

Crow T. Trollbot

Busses are on the way

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone should have a battery powered radio receiver. Hurricanes...

Yeah, hearing rhetoric, empty promises and outright lies live over the air while you're up to you ears in alligators would be a heckuva plus.

ho hum

[spirit_fingers]

I can't believe what a turkey the Zune is. Here are 2 reasons right off the bat:

- It only lets you share one song at a time via wi-fi and then only with another Zune player. What's more, even if the song is not DRM'd, it infects that song with DRM so that the recipient can only play the song a maximum of 3 times or for a maximum of 3 days, whichever comes first. So much for Microsoft's wonderful social networking scheme.

- It can't play songs you've already downloaded encoded with Microsoft's own Play For Sure DRM. Dumb. Just plain dumb.

And if including an FM tuner didn't get people to flock to Creative's Zen video pod, why should it be such a hot feature in the Zune? And who the frack thought brown was cool?

What are we, retarded?

[voice_of_all_reason]

but in the US a point is currently 1.25 cents

Um, yeah. I'm not buying into some funky dirka-dirka currency that can fluctuate at the company's sheer will.

Can't wait for this to be verbed

[TheWoozle]

Just wait until some hapless teenager shares a song with his friend only to find out a couple days later he can't move it off his player. "Dude, I just got Zuned!"

MTP vs UMS

[Tackhead]

> You can mount an iRiver, an iPod, (and I gotta believe a Zune) as a UMS device, working just fine on the "next generation of car stereos with USB."

Read between the lines of this MS developer's post, in which he says "PlaysForSure does not require devices to support only MTP - UMS can be implemented too, but under certain conditions that prevent newbies from transferring content via MTP, switching to UMS and then calling tech support because they can't find/play their content"...

Now re-read that sentence while pondering the notion that Zune will not support PlaysForSure.

This is a Microsoft product. More so than Apple products, less so than Sony products, it's still all about vendor lock-in.

I speculate that Zune will be an MTP (Media Transfer Protocol)-only device. UMS (USB Mass Storage) cannot be supported, because only by eliminating UMS can Microsoft mandate the use of WMP10/11 and the accompanying XP/Vista DRM platform.

For the young slashdot whipper snappers

[Jesterboy]

A bit of Slashdot antiquity.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[-kertrats-]

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/ 1816257

To get me to buy one you'd have to ...

[OverDrive33]

... remove the DRM. That's it. I'd buy one in an instant.
I like the Zune, from what I've read and the pictures I've seen it seems pretty cool! Especially the wireless sharing of files - that's really cool. However, the DRM that the wireless transfers forces on your media is unacceptable.
Any takers on how long it will take to crack the DRM?
Or
Any takers on how long it will take to get Linux running - doing the same things - minus the DRM?

Microsoft points == Itchy and Scratchy Money

[grouchomarxist]

Ticket booth woman: Would you like to buy some Itchy and Scratchy Money?
Homer: What's that?
Woman: Well it's money that's made just for the park. It works just like regular money, but it's, er ... 'fun.'
Bart: Do it, Dad.
Homer: Well, OK, if it's fun...let's see, uh...I'll take $1,100 worth.
Homer walks in to see signs advertising that Itchy & Scratchy money is non-negotiable at various booths (e.g., "No I&S money," "We don't take Itchy and Scratchy money," etc).
Homer: "Aw!"

Who want s a dollar?

[PHanT0]

I won't pay 99 for a DRM-riddled piece of music... I will pay a full dollar for a DRM-free piece of music though.

Re:Zune for $249.99?

[Murphy Murph]

Hang on,

the Zune is $249.99. The iPod is $249.00, with $0.99 left over to buy a song with.

Ahh, but you'll make than up after you buy your 397th song from the Zune Store.

249.99+397*0.9875=642.0275 (Zune)
249.00+397*0.9900=642.0300

The Fatal Flaw, that will kill zune

[goombah99]

Zune is not Family freindly. For the single person it's okay, as long as they are the normal sort who is not religious about DRM issues or "ownership" of their music. The DRM seems to have only modest and tolerable consequences for single people.

For famliles it may be unattractive.

As I understand the Zune sales model, if you buy a song it's locked to play only on your computer and your Zune is also locked to your computer.

The problem is then families that have multiple computers or multiple zunes. If both sis and bro and mom like the latest snoop-dog tune, they can't buy it once and share it o all their computer's and Zunes. They have to buy one copy per machine/zune. That's freakin' nuts.

Or did I get it wrong. Sorry if I did, since Im itunes for the long haul and don't really care about Zune.

Re:Monday Morning Quarterbacking

[gEvil (beta)]

It's a mute point anyways, since what he said is, for all intensive purposes, correct. It's a doggy dog world out there, so they might as well keep the price low.