The Palm Prē and iTunes: The Saga Continues ↦

Dieter Bohn of precentral.net has uncovered the answer:

The Pre is now telling your computer that the vendor who made it is Apple. The change here is that with previous versions of webOS, the Vendor ID was “0x0830 (Palm Inc.).” So while previously the Pre identified itself as a “mass storage device” called an iPod, now it’s identifying itself as a “mass storage device manufactured by Apple” called an iPod.

This does, of course, violate the USB consortium’s rules about the Vendor ID. Palm, for it’s part, has preemptively filed a complaint with the USB group against Apple, presumably for having the temerity to discriminate among USB devices based on Vendor ID.