When the Palm Pre debuted, many made noise over its ability to sync with iTunes. The talk mainly centered on how Palm figured this out, and what actions Apple would take.
So it comes as no surprise that the latest iTunes update basically “disables devices falsely pretending to be iPods, including the Palm Pre.” Palm’s reaction to this isn’t clear yet, but here are some possibilities:
Palm Sues Apple. Given Apple’s dominance of the portable music industry, could Palm’s lawyers argue that Apple is being anti-competitive?
Someone hacks iTunes to restore Pre compatibility. Or simply comes out with a program that fools any version of iTunes into accepting non-iPods for syncing. You know it’s going to happen, especially if the Pre was able to re-motivate the Palm faithful.
Apple Sues Palm. So the iTunes+iPod ecosystem is a closed, proprietary setup. Which Palm tried to violate. There should be a legal liability or two somewhere there, and Apple could imply industrial espionage at the very least, especially since a former Apple executive was responsible for the Pre’s creation.