[ubermonkey]

That's incorrect, because loading music on iPods didn't require you to re-encode anything.

Sony's early digital players required your music to be in Sony's proprietary format, which was a whole additional step. And remember, 20 years ago, re-encoding took longer, so it was meaningfully less convenient.

There's definitely a case to be made that requiring iTunes to load iPods/iPhones is annoying and needlessly complex, but I think it's clear Apple did this to make it more accessible to normal humans, not to exert control or in a quixotic attempt to sideline open codecs.

(That Apple's current path is clearly away from iTunes sync and towards independent device connections to Apple Music kinda bears this out, I think, even if that's not something I'm interested in using.)