Marcel Winatschek

Zune Originals

The Zune Originals were actually kind of cool. Those limited-edition players came wrapped in custom covers designed by real artists and designers—not just different color options, but actual design work. Some of it was weird, some was genuinely good-looking. The whole thing felt like a small, doomed gesture toward making a media player into something you’d actually want to carry around, an object worth looking at rather than just functional hardware. It didn’t matter that the Zune was already losing to the iPod by that point. There was something respectful about going down swinging with some visual culture involved.