“Macheads witnessed a Cube moment the other day at MacWorld San Francisco when Jobs trotted out the new iPod mini as a highlight of his much anticipated keynote speech. It’s an iPod that comes in many bright, funky colors. The miniPod, as it’s already being called, has far less capacity than the previous versions, but it costs about the same (only $50 less the previous lowest-price model). And it weighs just three ounces less than the heftier iPods. [...]

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.”