At MacWorld 2008, Apple announced an update to iTunes and along with that, movie rentals from the iTunes store.  You can now rent movies from iTunes and transfer them to your iPod Classic, iPhone, iPod Touch or 3G Nano.  Notice that the 5/5.5G iPod is missing from that list, that’s because those models aren’t compatible with iTunes rentals.

Movies cost between $2.99 and $3.99 to rent or $4.99 if you want the high-def version of the movie to play on your Apple TV.  However, the movie rentals are not compatible with 5G or 5.5G iPods or any earlier iPod for that matter.

The reasoning behind this isn’t concrete and several theories are floating around as to what the case is, but I tend to believe that Apple simply didn’t update the firmware of the older generation iPods and it is not about to do so.  TUAW believes it could be related to hardware limitations and there is evidence that the new authentication chip could be the culprit but that has not been confirmed.

Either way, iTunes movie rentals are not going to play on your older generation iPods and what better time to upgrade to a nice iPod Touch?

You can hope that Apple might eventually update the firmware or come out with some way of playing the rentals on older iPods but don’t hold your breath.  It’s my opinion that you shouldn’t expect such a gracious act seeing as how the company made users of the iPod Touch pay for an update that should have been free.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 11:17 am under iPhone, iPod Touch.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.