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And this, Apple, is how you demonstrate monopolistic behaviour. Thank you for making sure I never want an Apple product.

Seriously, what possible real reason could they have for doing this? The only thing I can think of is that they actually are afraid that the Pre will provide serious competition for their products. Were iTunes a separate entity, they would absolutely welcome another product to which they could deliver revenue generating song sales. Instead, because it's linked to a hardware vendor who makes money selling a piece of equipment in addition to selling songs they have to stop people from buying something that's not theirs. Sorry, not liking the idea Apple.

Good thing amazon.com still sells high quality mp3s without stupid copy protection. I'll keep buying there and putting them on whatever devices I desire (after converting to ogg vorbis though).

Update: Well, it looks like Palm  made it work again. Geee, there's a surprise. I wonder how long this cycle will go on until they both realize it's just a dumb waste of resources.

A few Woot offs ago, I got in on a bag of crap. For $8 I got a couple weeks of great waiting in great anticipation of what I would get. Finally, I got it. (18 HP over the ear headsets?!).

There were something like 12 or so various Sansa mp3 players of well known flavors. I gave most of them away or sold them for a nominal fee. But this left me with an interesting conundrum. I wanted one. . .but I only do oggs.

So, I grabbed a 4G e260 (like $20 all over) and decided on trying rockbox.org. Short of the fact that it doesn't natively support the USB stuff I've been enjoying it. As you might expect, it naturally supports mp3s and oggs and 13 other formats -- on ipods too! It comes with all sorts of games, including doom if you grab the wads somewhere. There's some applications, like "lamp", hard to figure that one out.

All in all, getting a cheap mp3 player on rockbox's list of supported hardware and installing it is well worth the few minutes. It'll make your couple of bucks go much farther.