Apple's non-replaceable-battery policy forcefully nudges its users to upgrade their hardware every two years or so. Now they're discovering that unless they purchased an iPod after September of last year, the newly introduced iTunes movie rentals aren't for them.

Thus far Apple has yet to respond to the outcries that are current filling up the company's forums, beyond a standard PR response: "Movie rentals work on iPod classic, iPod nano with video and iPod touch."

There's a glimmer of hope in the firmware upgrades that gave iPhone and iPod users increased functionality, which was issued after the same keynote in which Steve Jobs introduced the movie rentals. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Apple will most likely not be supporting older models with this new service, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

Wired spoke with an analyst from the Yankee Group, who added that incompatibility with older models may have been imposed by movie studios (who Apple is likely to try to appease, given increased competition in the space and its much publicized falling out with NBC):

This was almost certainly a requirement imposed by the movie studios, he concludes. Indeed, some users recently discovered that by setting back the clocks on their PCs, they could temporarily extend the duration of their iTunes movie rentals, and movie studios probably wanted to limit their exposure to that hack.