It wasn’t very easy to get my hands on a Zune. After Microsoft’s long-pitied music player won Slate’s Reader Takeover poll—in which I’d promised to reassess an overlooked technology of yore—I had to scramble to get hold of a device I hadn’t used since at least 2008. My local Craigslist listings overflowed with iPods of every variety, but there were only a couple Zunes for sale, and they were the earliest, least-memorable versions of the device. I was looking for a later-model Zune—specifically, the 2009-era...