It appears to me that they are intentionally preventing competition, and as a long time Apple customer that upsets me. Apple does not prevent competing product

It appears to me that they are intentionally preventing competition, and as a long time Apple customer that upsets me. Apple does not prevent competing products from syncing with an iTunes library--in fact they provide a mechanism to do so. The issue there is Palm using iTunes to do so. Hijacking another company's product to support yours isn't really in the spirit of healthy competition. I mean, fixing bugs in your own software shouldn't be called "preventing competition" just because your competitors happen to be exploiting those bugs.