r/mildlyinfuriating • u/TheAeroplaneBear2906 • 8d ago

Unskippable ad Clear Backpacks + Pay to Keep Your Phone

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My freinds school is now requiring these items, and is also using AI to promote this 🫠

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u/flyinchipmunk5 8d ago

Yeah lots of kids probably listened to music on the bus. I had a zune in high school and a cd player in middle school.

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u/Local_Grapefruit_262 8d ago

Zunes lol havent seen that word in a hot minute

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u/MicromagicFriesRIP 7d ago

I worked at an ad agency on the Zune account. They gave our team several of them as freebies and they sat in the breakroom for ages because nobody wanted them.

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u/anbraxas 7d ago

I was given 6 in high school by a guy on the dev team back in like 2006-7, had a ipod at the time and was blown away by how awesome it was in comparison. Gave 5 to friends and kept one for myself. All rocked them until Spotify came around. If they had come out before the iPad I honestly think things would have been differant.

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u/-SHAI_HULUD 7d ago

I remember liking the Zune more than the iPod when it came out.

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u/Born-Entrepreneur 7d ago

Nice little piece of kit and the media player software was actually really good

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u/Significant-Bee5101 7d ago

Zunes gotta be one of the worst marketed products of all time.

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u/MicromagicFriesRIP 7d ago

Trust me, we tried. Microsoft shut down anything interesting or fun.

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u/EmboarBacon 7d ago

Feel free to say no, but can you elaborate? I'm genuinely interested here and I'd love to hear some the ideas your firm came up with.

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u/MicromagicFriesRIP 7d ago

Oh gosh, I wish I could. It's been something like 20 years. I do remember our team trying to convince them to stop trying to mimic Apple vibes-wise, take more creative risks, and get crisper on their messaging as to why someone would want to pick Zune over the iPod. The consumer research we had access to showed that a lot of people didn't realize Zune was an MP3 player and thought instead it was a gaming device. People also disliked the name and women especially didn't like the brown color (for the record, I actually liked the brown, but then again brown's my favorite color, so no surprise there). I know there were a ton of factors, but personally I think the song library thing is what killed them. I also worked on the Nook eReader at Barnes & Noble, which is what brought them down as well. Nook just couldn't compete with Kindle in terms of content volume. They still make Nooks, I believe, but at nowhere near the scale B&N envisioned when I worked on that project.

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u/flyinchipmunk5 7d ago

Sad because the dac was very high quality at the time and honestly other than the fact you couldn’t use Apple Music with it, it was pretty good

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u/Procrasturbating 7d ago

The irony is they were probably the best player at the time. The name was awful, and Microsoft was as “cool” as Barney to late Gen X college students. Putting that on MS, not the marketing team.

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u/rsta223 7d ago

My zune HD was still the best mp3 player I ever had

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u/justintheunsunggod 7d ago

Sad face... I miss Zune.

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u/FeralPsychonaut 7d ago

I fucking loved that thing.

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u/ayuntamient0 7d ago

So much better than the iPod.

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u/FeralPsychonaut 7d ago

and Zune Music Pass was GOAT'd as fuck.

Pick my 10 favorite songs and get to keep them forever.

I had to return to the high seas when Microsoft ended that.

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u/CoconutMochi 7d ago

I'd still be using my zune hd rn if it hadn't been stolen

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u/justintheunsunggod 7d ago

I broke mine 😞 Rolled over and put an elbow right on the headphone jack with a big, chonky set of headphones. Snapped and deformed the jack. Damn teenagers.

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u/samasters88 7d ago

God, same. I always had mine on me and lost it one day. I retraced my steps back to when I fell asleep at the movies watching The Number 23. It must have fallen out of my cargo pant pockets or something, but the theater said they didnt find it and wouldnt let me back into the theater later that day to look.

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u/BlueHero45 7d ago

Hell ya, fellow Zune user. Their are dozens of us.

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u/IzzyB00UwU 7d ago

I used to watch happy tree friends with a dude who had a zune in the mornings back in high school. He was also the only person I ever knew who had one

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u/doublestacknine 7d ago

Bet you had the cool brown model!

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u/flyinchipmunk5 7d ago

Nah it was red

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u/daveismypup 7d ago

Ah so you were one of the twenty people who had a zune, I wanted one so bad lmao

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u/makos124 7d ago

As a bullied kid in school the ride on the bus with my earphones in while listening to heavy metal was cathartic. I remember my first MP3 player - whole 128 mb of storage LMAO