http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2190855,00.asp
Apple Bricking the iPhone
10.01.07
Good luck returning or replacing your hacked iPhone.
By John C. Dvorak
Apple has released an "update" patch for its iPhone that has disabled many—if not most—of the phones that users "modified" for increased capability. Apparently, if you try to return or exchange your bricked phone as defective, Apple will be able to tell that the phone has been hacked and refuse to accept it. It seems that Apple is taking a "Hey, we told you not to do it" approach with these folks.
If I had a bricked phone, I'd run my car battery juice into one of its outputs (say, the headphones) and let it rip. Then I'd bring the phone in to Apple. I'm not exactly sure what would happen, but I assume it wouldn't look "hacked." (Of course, I'm not advising anyone to do what I would do.)
Apple could have handled the hacking mess in a million ways, beginning with warnings rather than unilateral action. From what I can tell, there was ill intent involved in Apple's approach. Apple has always been a bit of a control freak of a company. It doesn't like to see anyone do anything to its proprietary hardware and software. The company does not want the user to have any real control.
This is why there is no real community of case-modders or homebrew mavens, building modded Macs the way you see with the PC folks. There's nothing wrong with Apple keeping such control over its computers, since it does help protect the Mac from outside hackers and Trojan-horse feeders. But with the iPhone, things are a little different. There's no real reason for people to pay full price for a locked phone, and everyone knows that the price is the real issue. It's not about anything else.
All over the world, phone stores sell unlocked phones that allow the user to swap GSM SIM cards in and out of the product as needed. There are a lot of reasons you might want to have an unlocked phone, including the ability to use local SIM cards in various European countries or to simply change service providers because you like one more than another.
In the U.S., locked phones are more common. The mechanism for a locked phone is internal to the phone and consists of various codes that instruct the phone to work only with a certain service provider. Consequently, SIM cards that bill through other systems simply do not work.
Most locked phones can be unlocked, with a code that disables the locking mechanism. You can also find unlocking codes on various Web sites. Typically, a service provider will give you the code if requested, but only after you have completed the long-term deal that got you the locked phone for a cheap price in the first place.
This last little detail is key. The phones are locked, but they are sold at a deep discount if the user takes out a long-term contract that usually runs a couple of years. Here we have a practical sales trick that makes sense for everyone. The user gets a phone at a discount, or often free, and the service provider gets a customer it can depend upon for two years or so.
Nobody has ever attempted the "trick" of selling the phone at full retail, keeping it locked, tying the customer into a long-term contract with a crummy service provider, and allowing no alternatives to this scheme. Hello, Apple. Users seem to have been so dazed by their shiny iPhones that they failed to notice that they were getting royally screwed by everyone involved. Or they thought they could get around it with hacks. Now this bricking thing happens.
The end result may not be what Apple (or AT&T, for that matter) expected. The most vocal of the most technical people in the world are going to complain, and there will be lawsuits. The results of consumer lawsuits are never good for the companies involved, especially when the consumer is in the right (morally, not from the perspective of a shrink-wrap license), and the companies that are abusing their power are clearly in the wrong.
The following bad/good things may happen:
1) Locked phones could be deemed illegal in all circumstances as a restraint of trade.
2) Companies could be held responsible for replacing a product that was bought at full price and disabled by after-sale modifications. The company would also be liable for any inconvenience suffered by the customer.
3) Product licenses could be found not to be valid legal documents (this is coming someday, you watch).
4) All current iPhones could be required to be unlocked immediately.
5) Current AT&T contracts could be voided.
I'm sure there are other scenarios that one can foresee. But these would be a start.
