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Few days back we blogged on the disappointment on the pricing of the new mini iPod. Alex Salkever of Businessweek also thinks so.

Even Jobs's Jedi-esque powers of reality dispersion can't alter the unfavorable math behind Apple's new offering. Here are the hard numbers. The new miniPod will cost $249. That's about $100 more than the rumor sites had posited. It will offer 4 gigabytes of capacity on its hard drive. By comparison, the entry-level iPod now costs $299 and has 15 gigabytes of disk space. The miniPod's cost per gigabyte is $62.50. In the entry-level iPod, it's about $20.

So Apple is asking customers to pay three times as much per gigabyte. I have one word for that. Ouch.

But now HP is going to release an HP version of the iPod under licence from Apple. The HP Digital Music Player is to be priced competitively to other digital music players currently available. Also HP is going to pre-install iTunes and a link to Apple's iTunes music store.

Dan Gillmor thinks that Microsoft will have to work harder and spend more to achieve the domination it wants. With Real Networks and Sony announcing Online Music stores, Microsoft can soon throw a spanner into the works by starting their own music store and requring resellers to have a link to their store instead.