Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before the iPhone, what was their attempts at that? I remember using OSX a bunch before the iPhone was public, but never remember any of the ways they tried to lock it down, I might have been too young then.
Getting music on an ipod was always a pain unless you bought the music on itunes or ripped a music CD directly with itunes (yes, that was an actual feature. hard to imagine these days). No simple drag and drop onto a mounted USB drive like all other mp3 players back in the day. Maybe more of a lock-in attempt instead of lock down, but related imo.
The restriction was that an iPod would only sync tracks from one computer at a time, which was a demand of the music rights holders.