- Patience. The Zune is a (basically) ancient creation by Bill Gates. And, as much as I love mine, I found it on the wall by my house several years ago. Who knows how long some person had had it prior to me? How long had the sun caked the battery inside the hard, heated plastic before we finally discovered it? The truth is Zunes are old. They have no capacity for holding any charge for extended periods of time, and I have changed and replaced my battery once already. Other internal issues cause it to perform inconsistently, whether flashing different battery levels or showing that it is charging for a moment before crazily flashing the low battery warning sign.
- Time. It goes hand in hand with patience, and even if you are incredibly, impossibly patient with even the most ill-behaved technology, you also have to have the time to sit down and display this patience. You need time to charge it up to a certain level before you can reboot it; you need time to search Internet forums in order to find an answer to your dilemmas. A Zune is not for you if you have little time and are just looking for a companion piece of plastic with a drive to store a couple Top 40 hits for your morning jog around town.
- A true love of music. For me, what gets me frustratedly jamming my USB port into any available power source is the hope that the screen will light up and display my music library, scattered with Beatles and Lightfoot hits, as well as screaming rants of nonsense by Incubus, Midnight Oil, or Metallica. I want to be able, if I have a miserable night of tossing and turning for hours, to pick up my mp3 player and console myself with the eighteen-minute and sixteen-second Jamaican jam session paradise that is Cat Stevens' "Foreigner Suite." I love LPs, I really do, but they don't have the convenience of being amazingly versatile in portability or spontaneity. They are very delicately handled works of music.
- A true love of the product itself. Zunes are a foreign and mysterious product to most people. That's why, when any of my friends ask what it is, I just tell them "A really old music player," because it is. But I don't let super-Mac-lovers with their gajillion different models of iPod tell me that my Zune is a clunky old brick that should have been trashed a long time ago. My Zune is different. It has a very visually appealing menu set-up, categorized with the artists' names themselves as opposed to album covers. I love being able to have all the album art visible when I play the songs, fitting in the same dimensions (though smaller) as when I saw them on CD or LP; and when there isn't album art uploaded, it shows whatever you set as your background picture. I love the Zune software. Something about it is more compatible with me than your typical iTunes media library. I love that it is a clunky, awkward brick of a music player, because my carelessness has led to multiple droppings of the device - which might have proved fatal to many others - and it wakes up quietly without a thing askew (except a small chip or scratch somewhere).
You must understand that I'm not trying to sell you on the Zune, at all. It's not because I'm selfish and want to be the only person who still owns one; I feel that convenience and efficiency are new values for our society, and if you're going to pick up a Zune with a commitment, you have to be able to drop your iPod, or Sansa, or Kowon, or Nextar, or whatever it is you have; you have to be willing to surrender the carelessness of pressing a button and having what you want before you. If you're totally convinced, for some reason, that you need a Zune, I must tell you that what you need first are patience, time, and a true love for music.
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