Apple gimping iPhone

[sactoking]

CNN story

Apparently Apple's newest software update for the iPhone (which will probably be force-fed to consumers) MAY 'unintentionally' cause hacked iPhones to brick.

How convenient. They're not sabotaging their customers officially, but if you're an Apple hater, I can see how you'd draw that conclusion from how this goes down and the timing of it.

 

[pm]

I basically read their statement as:
"We are releasing a new firmware. It may or may not cause user's whose iPhones are hacked to have issues. If you have issues with our new firmware and you have hacked your iPhone, don't come crying to us for warranty repair."

As someone with a hacked iPhone, I have no problems with this at all.

 

[bigrash]

well, if someone is hacking the phone why should Apple be responsible for that? Plus they have a contract with AT&T, and if I were AT&T I'd be very pissed if Apple wasn't doing anything about it.

 

[pm]

Plus they have a contract with AT&T, and if I were AT&T I'd be very pissed if Apple wasn't doing anything about it.

Well, there's hacked and there's unlocked and they are not the same thing. AT&T may be annoyed over unlocking but Apple didn't say anything about the new firmware re-locking unlocked phones. It may or it may not, but that's not what I read in the message they sent.

Hacking - at least what most people call hacking - is installing other non-Apple apps on the phone. The Navizon GPS app is one well-known app. There are plenty of others - instant messaging apps, and others. There's a flashlight app (turns the LCD white to use as a flashlight), there's iSaber (which uses the accelerometer and the speaker to make lightsaber like sounds when you move the iphone around). There's iBeer ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3MfQIswl3k ) which pretends to fill the iPhone up with beer.. the list goes on.

Basically Apple is saying that messing with your phone may or may not make it unstable with new firmware releases - which is presumably why they didn't release an SDK in the first place. Rather than try and test their new firmware with a bunch of random apps that they don't control, they essentially said that whatever happens is not their fault and so don't come crying when the new firmware may or may not work well with the jailbroken phones with apps installed.

But I know plenty of people (easily a dozen - the iPhone is popular where I work), who are legitimately on AT&T and pay the correct plan and are otherwise playing by the book, but they have all these instant messaging and GPS apps... we'll see.

 

[BabaBooey]

This is a bunch of bully pie,I paid for the damn thing I can do what I want and use it with any damn carrier I choose,did they actually think this was not going to happen...



Easy fix,do not update your "other than ATT iphone"




Maybe if ATT improved their service this would not be such a cash loss for them,but greed moves the world .....spin on bitch,spin on.....:evil:

 

[sactoking]

TG Daily article

Here's another article on the same topic. Notice the conspicuous usage of 'unlocked' instead of 'hacked' in this article.

That's how I read the CNN article too. Apple is saying, conveniently not too long after consumers exercised their rights to unlock their phones, "We're not making making nearly as much money off of you. How dare you!".

Since they can't overtly sabotage the phones without facing lawsuits, they will release a firmware update that will cause unlocked phones to suffer an "accident". It wouldn't surprise me to hear that the firmware update will contain so many critical fixes that Apple has decided to force-feed to consumers instead of making the update optional. Just another piece in the 'convenient' puzzle.

 

[pm]

Notice the conspicuous usage of 'unlocked' instead of 'hacked' in this article.

Ok, ok, point taken. They are targeting unlockers - not just hackers.

Although when they talk about tools that allow unlocking - I think of Jailbreak, iBrickr and AppTap - all of which can be used by regular users to hack their phones. So it's hard to picture what they think they are going to break in unlocked phones with the firmware that won't also break regular users.

 

[intogamer]

I'm sure they have use the hacked software with their demo units. As Apple says it causes may cause damage to the software.

So why can't they test the firmware with hacked software. Apple is playing teh mind games.