It seems the ad wars are starting to heat back up, folks. It"s been relatively quiet lately, in context of advertisements Microsoft and Apple have been aiming at each other, but it seems that the Redmond software giant has just unleashed another video into the wild. The ad, which we"ll call "Financial Planner", features a man named Wes Moss, a "certified financial planner", talking about the differences between iTunes and the Zune Pass.
Moss states that $30,000 is what it takes to fill a iPod with 120GB of storage, whereas the Zune Pass costs you a mere $15 because it"s a subscription based service. Ars Technica has done the math on this, and has some pretty interesting statistics:
-- Since Zune Pass allows you to only keep 10 songs a month, it would take 250 years to get up to 30,000 songs for keeps, and that"d end up being $45,000.
-- It would take 166 years and 8 months to end up paying $30,000 going via the Zune Pass route.
As it"s pointed out, if you don"t mind paying for songs that you don"t yet own (and there"s nothing wrong with that), then the Zune Pass route is the key, otherwise any other à la carte based model (like iTunes) would be the more obvious choice. It"s not exactly a $15 vs. $30,000 debate as the ad would lead you to believe; both paths have their pros and cons, and it"s essentially down to the preference of the user. We"ve included the ad below for your enjoyment, so feel free to hit the comments after checking it out: