Microsoft Zune was born in November 2006, entering a market already shaped in the image of Apple’s iPod, and departed this life in October 2011, unmourned by the industry but deeply so by the faithful remnant it had gathered. It arrived with a brown plastic chassis and a wireless sharing feature — called Squirt by its makers, a name that did it no favours — and it carried throughout its life the quiet dignity of a thing that knew itself to be underestimated. Its subscription model, Zune Pass, offered unlimited streaming long before such arrangements became the common currency of the age.

Those who kept faith with the Zune recalled its interface with the particular tenderness reserved for things encountered too briefly. The device was not without fault — it launched late, it launched dear, and it launched into the teeth of a cultural monopoly — but it was honest in its ambitions and generous in its design. Microsoft discontinued production quietly, redirecting its energies toward the mobile telephone, a campaign that would itself come to nothing. The Zune left no patents that mattered and no market share worth counting. It left only the recollection, held among those who carried one, of a road not taken.