No portable music player in history could ever live up to the popularity of Apple's iPod, first introduced in 2001. But in 2006, Microsoft tried to shake up the market with its own portable media player, the Zune, which started a short-lived line of products that many still hold in high regard to this very day. The first Zune launched on Nov. 14, 2006, or 17 years ago, so let's take a look back at how Microsoft hoped to win over iPod fans.

Piggybacking off of Toshiba

The Zune was a repurposed design

Despite looking pretty unique, the original Zune model was actually a repurposed device designed by Toshiba. It was based on the Gigabeat S30, another media player that ran Microsoft's Portable Media Center interface. However, the Zune came with a larger 3-inch display (though it used the same 320x240 resolution), and it replaced the cross design for the D-pad with a circle shape. While it was somewhat reminiscent of the iPod's click wheel, it didn't support any rotation gestures and was just a basic D-pad, with some reviewers even pointing out how you might have been tempted to try to spin the wheel at first.

The Zune was so similar to the Gigabeat S, in fact, that both suffered from the same Freescale driver issue that caused devices to freeze on Dec. 31, 2008. The driver was not prepared to handle leap years, and a specific part of the code caused the devices to freeze during the entire day due to having one extra day that year. The device also used the same 30GB hard drive.

However, the Zune definitely looked different, especially since Microsoft went for fairly unique color options, including the signature brown option, as well as more typical white and black models (plus a limited-edition pink version). It was a good bit thicker than a comparable iPod at the time, though, so it lost some appeal due to its inferior portability.

The first taste of Windows Phone

One of the biggest legacies of the Zune line is its interface, which, for better or worse, would live on for many years later. The Zune used a mostly text-based UI that looks simple and clean in a way that makes it very elegant. It may not have a lot of flair, but there's undoubtedly a charm to the pure text interface and it also helps things run more smoothly.

This UI actually proved appealing enough to permeate a lot of other Microsoft products. most notably Windows Phone. Starting with Windows Phone 7, these phones also had heavily text-based UIs with large headers and text, making it easy to identify UI elements. This would live on in future versions of Windows Phone and even appear on Xbox and Windows PCs during the Windows 8 era. Many (myself included) still find this UI to be visually appealing, though Microsoft started moving away from this style with Windows 10 and even more so with Windows 11.

Interestingly, most of the products featuring this design language were considered failures, with Windows Phone being crushed by the top smartphones on the market and Windows 8 often regarded as one of the worst iterations of the OS.

The original Zune had some limitations

One of the big problems with the Zune was that it completely broke away from Microsoft's previous efforts in terms of music distribution and DRM. Zune used its own completely new music distribution system, with Microsoft shutting down MSN Music just months before the Zune launched, meaning any purchases you made on that service were gone, and you'd need to buy the same songs again.

What's more, Zune also didn't support Microsoft's PlaysForSure DRM protocol. The Zune required dedicated software for syncing music that supported the new DRM protocol, rather than using Windows Media Player for syncing.

The original Zune models also had fairly limited file type support. Despite the larger screen, images were only supported in JPEG format, and videos had to be in WMV format, though later models would add support for MP4 and H.264. Audio support was also limited to MP3, WMA, and AAC. The Zune software for PC would handle transcoding for other file types when moving them onto the device.

A short-lived product line

Despite its popularity with some enthusiasts, the Zune line wasn't really successful. During its launch week, it managed to attract 9% of the portable media market, putting it in second place after the iPod, which led the market with a massive 63% market share. It never managed to reach anywhere near the sales numbers of the iPod, with Microsoft having announced just 2 million units sold by May 2008, which included the second-generation model launched in November 2007. By September 2009, data from NPD Group (known as Circana today) showed that the Zune held just 2% market share in the U.S., behind the iPod line, SanDisk, and Sony's Walkman line.

The Zune line received a couple of new iterations after the initial launch. The second-generation models launched almost exactly one year later, with a completely new design, including a touch-sensitive navigation pad (called the Zune Pad) along with introducing new models using flash memory instead of a hard drive. In 2009, Microsoft launched the Zune HD, the third and final iteration of the Zune, which moved exclusively to flash storage, coming in 16GB and 32GB versions (with a 64GB model launched later).

All Zune products were discontinued by October 2011, just under five years from the launch of the original Zune, and a year and a half after the latest model had launched.