Originally Posted By: drakino
Yep, and there are 3rd party MP3 players and phones that sync directly with iTunes because the companies that made them worked out agreements with Apple. Some of those are OS X only due to the companies making the agreements prior to the Windows iTunes release, and some work with iTunes on both systems.

No, really, it's MacOS-only. "iTunes for Windows can only sync with iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV." And even that MacOS list is long-obsolete players only. The ROKR phone is the only exception, but the device itself was co-branded Apple, and I wonder how keen Apple would be to enter into phone cross-branding agreements nowadays when they have their own phone products?

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Just as there are many MP3 players that work with Windows Media Player due to agreements with Microsoft. Same situation.

Quite a different situation, in fact: even after the Zune was released, Microsoft carried on entering into new agreements for WMP sync to newly-released competing players. (Maybe you can even do it with their published APIs now, and no further explicit agreement, as long as you don't care about DRM.)

Peter