General purpose computers serve as a means of making devices/formats interoperable. It is not the job of apple to make their preferred music player WMA compatible.. to do so would mean apple would willingly and knowingly make their ipod sales and support subject to the whims of their main competitor, microsoft. Would you put your product line under the control and influence of your competitors?
The majority of the even mildly computer literate know this, and do not object. The only reason this “objection” exists at all is because the cartels are pervaying it in press releases.

Did it ever occur to you that apple may be making a point (to the detriment even of their own sales!) that DRM inhibits fair use activities? Apple is not the bad guy here.. in fact they are helping “our side” of the issues by making joe sixpack realize those files on so called copy protected disks are packed with this unreasonable restriction he’s not heard about called “DRM”.

apple should be lauded, not derided.

Bull***, he didn’t design his player with WMA audio decoders. He uses aac format for his files, and has support for other more open formats like mp3 and wav, but WMA has been by it’s nature proprietary.

The simple truth is the ipod’s processors can’t decode the format, just like a DVD player can’t decode ogg or h.264. It has nothing to do with DRM.

–Microsoft has refused to open the standard to allow proper legal support for it on non-windows platforms, and insists you install a very buggy mac version of windows media player to play them (windows media player has a nasty tendency to take over mac browsers like a virus, and cause kernel panics because of terrible api support)
–Because of above fact, the support of windows media on it’s competitor’s platform would be a sell out by apple, allowing microsoft to use format hegemony to extort from any company trying to include media encoding software. I for one would rather have format wars than see a terrible format like WMA under the control of an international monopoly become a truly accepted standard.
–Any mp3 player which supports wma is probably doing so thanks to hefty format license fees and contract terms.
–WMA format itself is a JOKE to those who actually know computing. It is designed for interenet streaming, and is not properly optimized to perform at higher bitrates required for downloadable files. This is part of the reason why mp3 is still ubiquitous.

“Mr. Jobs has so far refused to make the iTunes software compatible with music players from other manufacturers, and he has prevented the iPod from accepting music sold from competing services that use a Microsoft-designed music format.”

Oh.. so apple is evil because they didn’t design their ipod with the ability to play windows media, a codec basically forced on people by monopolists at microsoft, but it’s not evil for the REST of the industry from supporting aac audio, which they are probably refusing to do because of microsoft’s notorious “incentive programs” by which they give their software out for pennies on the dollar if you promise not to use their competitor’s formats.