So Jonathan Seff over at iPhone Central bricked his unlocked iPhone by updating it. As Jason Snell said in the comments, “We’re Macworld. This is what we do. We’ll buy Jon a new phone if need be — he bricked his phone in the interest of finding out what would happen.” Awesome. People should be thanking MacWorld. A lot.
My thoughts:
1) iPhone owners agreed to the rules before getting into this. The rules included using AT&T, among others.
2) Apple has been silent about all the hacking going on. But, when it came to the update they decided to speak out about it. Why? Does this sound like the behavior of a company that wants to crap on its customers? To me it sounds like they were warning people before this sort of thing happened. They bothered to look at what the unlockers were doing, noted them doing something in an area that couldn’t be restored (for whatever reasons, legal or technical), and issued a warning to not update. People should have listened.
3) Folks should chill out and wait for the Unlock Dev Team to figure out what people can do to avoid this. They figured out how to unlock it, which is no easy feat. This is just another roadblock, and they’ll figure it out.
So there. I still love my iPhone, despite having to be with AT&T, despite EDGE being a little slow by broadband standards, and despite not having an open API for developers. I like Apple for having warned people about all this. I just wish that people would stop blaming Apple for the consequences of their own actions.