Brown zune has understated elegance. Black's just another generic Chinese $device. You can tell the people that don't have taste in an ubuntu topic when they complain about the old color scheme. Their opinion on aesthetics can be summarily dismissed.
Your dismissal of my dismissal can be summarily dismissed.
😉
Gotta say though, I loved my Zune 30 (ol' brownie), but honestly not the color scheme of the body. The OG Zune software was interesting too, kind of "meh" for the first version or two, but then it got awesome.
Got the Zune 120 after the Zune 30 seemed to be long in the tooth. Black. May be a generic color but the design was beautiful. I can't remember if I had any hardware issue on the Zune 30, but the Zune 120's 3.5mm port starting failing. Replaced it, with heavy hemming and hawing, with the Zune HD, 32GB I think. Wonderful device, held up to abuse often (it was so small and light, it got dropped). But that one ended up seeing so much use, so much music cycled through it, that the damn flash memory started failing. I'd have a few tracks that would have consistent hiccups, and when I changed up what music was stored on it, those hiccups moved to other songs, always repeatable at specific moments in songs, where the unlucky part of the song was on a dying cell in the flash memory.
Both the Zune 120 and HD got super heavy use out of me during college. Always listening when walking on campus or riding the bus, and also then even more use with the aux cable in my truck. The heavy 3.5mm jack usage is likely what killed that port on the 120, and I suspect it may have happened on the Zune 30 as well.
The downfall of the Zune music service first began when they cut off the monthly 10 DRM-free tracks with subscription. The way the software stored the music you downloaded, as actual WMA files with DRM, made it super easy to move huge libraries around to other devices - you'd just have to login and authorize that device and the DRM got updated then. I feel like some of the modern services, even when "downloaded", do so in an obfuscated manner that makes it more challenging to copy libraries locally. That may only be for how they deal with caching though, and not when you specifically say keep a local copy. Can't remember, it's been awhile since I've looked at how Spotify and others do it.
