Most digital media players function as USB mass storage devices. What does that mean? Well, basically, they function just like a USB hard drive or thumb drive. You can drag and drop files easily to them. They show up as a drive in your OS. The iPod has always been different in this respect. The iPod can only be loaded with a media player such as iTunes or Windows Media Player, and once hooked up to your PC, it's a write only drive. You can't download your tunes off your iPod. The iPod is very limited in this respect. The iPod Classic for example with it's huge hard drive would make an ideal mass storage device but for some unknown reason, Apple doesn't do that.

Now iPod users will be even more limited. Apple has sneaked a new protocol in it's latest firmware update for the current line of iPods. New iPods are now locked to iTunes, Apple's proprietary media player. Meaning that the music can only be uploaded to your iPod through iTunes. I really have no problem with iTunes, at least once I found an addon for it that allows it to play OGG Vorbis files. However, this action sounds awfully similar to some of the things Microsoft was fined for by the European Commission. It forces iPod users to use iTunes, whether they like it or not. I have a funny feeling this is going to backfire on Apple. I'm usually an Apple fan but I just don't like the iPod. Locking it to iTunes is just asinine.

Here's the story on Anandtech.