The business minded on this thread are right, why would microsoft want to spend money on mac support when a person so interested in a zune should just use a windows operating system?
Sure there may not be too many advantages to this besides a happy consumer. But, Bill Gates and Microsoft donate a lot of money to the well being of the less fortunate, so it wouldn’t be asking much to donate some time and effort into making macbook-zune users happy by making an adapatable version of the zune software on a mac interface.

I’m a college student majoring in advertising – a creative job. I’ve scoped around at advertising agencies and marketing teams and they all use macs – the creative computer, I carry around a macbook to get all my work done on photoshop, illustrator, dreamweaver, and i also use microsoft word for all of my classes. I also carry around a zune80 and come back to my desktop in the dorm. (A gaming rig I built from the ground up sporting windows XP). Though I have the windows running desktop, it would make life more convenient to have a compatible zune software on my mac for trips away from school.

It’s not like there isn’t a market of macbook touting zune using people. The differences between the iPod and zune are so slim that I wouldn’t be surprised if the zune/mac and iPod/windows ratio would close up on each other by the end of 2010. If Microsoft was really looking for money to be made they would market their technology to everyone who could afford it rather than exclusively windows users.

An even better innovation for microsoft would be a sort of transformer so a zune would be able to use all of the iPods accessories because the zune is seriously lacking in accessories.

I for one will buy a Zune over an iPod simply because I don’t like the security features built into the iPod/iTunes that make it a pain in the ass to work around. I want my media player to work like a hard drive.

If it was really that important to be able to sync with your Mac, why didn’t you just get an iPod to begin with?

There is no reason in the world for Microsoft to worry about being able to sync a Zune with Mac OS. Since it has gotten your dander up so much, and as much as it pains me to say it (being an all things Microsoft “fanboy”), you should get an iPod.

No need to get mad at Microsoft though.

PS: Please put in the ability to turn wireless on and off in Community in the 1.5 update. Cuz, y’know, it kinda belongs there. =)

Ignore this guy. We both know he’s an outlier: Zune 1.0 was never targeted at Mac users, or really, even existing iPod users. And more to the point, he knew that too. It’s too bad that you can’t serve all customer segments in all markets, but only ruthless prioritizing is going to help you build on your successes.

(That’s right, successes. Don’t let the naysayers get you down – you met an aggressive deadline to get your product on store shelves, it was relatively bug-free, and you snagged 10% of your market segment to sit comfortably in the #2 spot. You realistically didn’t expect anything more than that. Good.)

For the past year or so, you’ve had two main options. One was to make small, incremental improvements to the 1.0 – add a clock, add calendar support, add Mac support, etc. The other was to fix broken stuff with point release firmware updates, but mostly crank away on version(s) 2.0 with the unspoken promise that some 2.0 features would also work on the 1.0 product. You chose the latter option – wisely. We’ll never know for sure, but it seems pretty clear that even if you made big improvements to 1.0, like adding podcast support or integration with WMP, you weren’t going to move the needle very far. 1.0 was targeted at customers who didn’t really care about podcasts, or even wifi – you won them over with the FM tuner, of all things, so it seems pretty likely that most of them didn’t care about a wireless synch. And lord knows hardly any of them are Mac users.

Here’s my open-letter request – or rather, hope. Even though it was much more hype than substance the first time around, I hope you’re differentiating the Zune2 around the “Welcome to the Social” (with or without that particular catchphrase – I happen to like it, but it may have met too much scorn to keep in use). Surprisingly, Apple hasn’t squeezed you out of the niche you badly stake a claim to, so this is your chance. I’m looking forward to your exact implementation, but some ideas include: Bonjour support for computer-to-computer streaming, built-in FM transmitter to broadcast your music to other Zunes (or other DAPs with FM tuners), multi-stereo Bluetooth support that allows more than one person to listen to the same player on Bluetooth headphones at the same time, and some improvement to the “squirting” of songs. It’s too late for you to buy last.fm and integrate some kind of music social networking service, but maybe you can work that angle as well somehow.

Anyway, the most important thing is this: stay on point. Eyes on the prize, that prize being the Zune 2(s). Ignore Mac support and all the rest. Focus, Zune team, focus!

I think that its pretty safe to guess that Microsoft didn’t port the Zune software over to Mac as the overwhelming majority of Mac users are fanatical about Apple products and there would likely be just too minimal of an audience to invest their R&D dollars for this feature. However, on the contrast, Apple had to make their iTunes MMS available on Windows to be able to make the iPod successful since Mac is such a small segment of the OS marketplace.

Gotta say, though, it was dumb buying a Zune and expecting it to work with any kind of non-Microsoft software. Their whole strategy is lock-in. Look at Windows handhelds and phones, they aren’t provided with software to sync them with anything but Windows and Office. They even require that you have IE as your web browser for some functionality.

What I don’t get is that MS can criticize apple for using the zune strategy on the iphone. iphone is only out to make money on a small share of the market. That is all that zune was intended to do as well. When MS does it, it is a great idea, hen apple does it it is the biggest mistake ot their life (according to MS)