Wired reports that a number of iPod owners found that their recently purchased iPods won't work with Apple's new iTunes video rentals—even though the iPods have video playback capabilities.

To date, Apple has said that "movie rentals work only with the iPhone, iPod touch, iPod classic and the third-generation iPod nano," according to the report. Earlier iPods, including fifth-generation iPods sold before the September 2007 release of the sixth-generation iPod classic, are incompatible with rented videos, even though they have very similar specs (aside from hard drive capacity) to the iPod Classic.

"Why on earth would they not make this service available to fifth-generation iPods?" the article quoted one forum poster as writing. "Mine is less than six months old! If all of the other services are available for the fifth-generation video iPods, why not rentals? I have a tough time believing it would not be technically feasible."

That makes no sense to us either. It's not *technically* false advertising, but there's no reason we can think of why Apple would exclude the prior generation of iPods—aside from the cynical one where Apple is forcing customers to upgrade.

Photo credit: Associated Press/Paul Sakuma

Apple Prohibits Movie Rentals on Recent iPods [Wired]