Apple CEO: Zune nothing to worry about

Apple's Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs said on Monday that Microsoft's Zune is so slow that in a romantic setting by the time a song plays, "the girl's got up and left!"

Jobs made the comment in a Newsweek interview on the fifth anniversary of Apple's iPod.

And he had a couple more comments that reveal, in his mind at least, Zune will not be competitive.

Jobs said he is not worried by Microsoft's claim that Zune's strength lies in communities of music listeners does not worry Job. He added that from demonstrations he has seen, the Zune music sharing system, which allows a user to play a shared song three times, takes forever.

"By the time you've gone through all that, the girl's got up and left!" Jobs said. "You're much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear."

Jobs also explained how Apple convinced music companies to open their warehouses to iTunes and not to raise prices.

"Our core initial strategy on the store was that if you want to stop piracy, the way to stop it is by competing with it, by offering a better product at a fair price. And it worked," Jobs said.

Jobs went on to say he convinced music companies not raise prices by telling them, "many (users) will say, 'I knew it all along that the music companies were going to screw me, and now they're screwing me.' And they would never buy anything from iTunes again. We would never recover their trust."

The Apple CEO also defended claims that some record companies think that the Apple iTunes online music store has too much power. He said that Apple resisted pressure to raise prices of music downloads because it would break a deal that Apple had with people that the company had convinced to stop music piracy.

Source: Xinhua/agencies