Zune v. iPod cost debate

I'm sure you've probably seen the Zune ad and its claim that it costs $30,000 to fill it up at $1 per song. And the claim is that the Zune only costs you $15 per month to fill up. You also get 10 free songs per month. Not that they're free though, they're $1.50 a song. Note that's 50 cents more than iTunes (for the most part).

Penny Arcade did a great little comic on it too. They're joke is that it takes infinity dollars to fill up the Zune, so the ad is really stupid.

Gizmodo thinks it's sort of right, but ignores the 10 "free" songs you get to keep per month. Well, how much does it take to fill up the Zune? Let's assume you get a 120GB Zune. You have to make some other assumptions too on file size. But let's say it's 5 mb. So it takes 24,000 songs to roughly fill up your Zune. Since you can keep 10 songs a month, it will take 2400 months to fill up. Assuming that the monthly rate stays at $15 per month, it will take you $36,000 to fill it up. Obviously, this is based on some assumptions, but this is a rough order of magnitude calculation. You can tweak it a bit here and there, but the bottom line is at best, it costs the same amount of money to fill up either product.