I hate DRM so much, but the music from iTunes is good quality, has all the album details and has high-res album art, so I put up with it. So to allow me to play my music on my Boot Camp partition, this morning I decided to authorize the iTunes install.

picture-8.png

As many of you will know you are restricted to 5 authorized devices at any one time, be they Mac or Windows PCs, iPods or Apple TVs. Currently my iTunes account is authorized on my MacBook Pro, my iPod Touch, an Apple TV and the Media Center PC in our lounge room. It then occured to me that I had authorized the MacBook Air review unit I had recently, making up the total of 5 devices.

Since I don’t have the MacBook Air any more (alas…), the only way to deauthorize it is to use the “Deauthorize All” option in my iTunes account settings. Upon confirming I did indeed want to wipe out all my authorized devices, I received the following error message:

picture-9.png

Why on earth are we restricted to deauthorizing all devices only once a year? Has this caught anyone out before, after selling their iPod or laptop?