A teenager in New Jersey took a soldering iron to an iPhone in August, and by the end of the year Apple has been forced into a running fight with its own customers that it cannot win and apparently cannot stop fighting.
The sequence is worth laying out, because it is the clearest illustration of the thing I have been circling all year. Apple ships a device locked to one carrier with no way to install software. People immediately do both of the forbidden things: unlock it for other networks, and find a way to run their own code. Apple releases an update that disables the modified handsets, in some cases permanently. The community routes around the update within weeks. Repeat.
What is interesting is not that people are breaking the lock. It is what they are installing once it is broken. The applications appearing on jailbroken handsets are not exotic. They are a terminal, a video recorder, instant messaging, custom ringtones without going through iTunes, games. Ordinary software that ordinary people want, which the official position says nobody should have.
I wrote in June that the web application argument was not going to hold and that I did not believe the position survives eighteen months. Six months in, it has not survived contact with the customers. Several thousand people have voluntarily voided a warranty on a five hundred dollar device in order to install a chat client. That is not piracy or hobbyist mischief, it is demand expressing itself through the only channel available.
The bricking is the part I find hard to defend. There is a legitimate argument that Apple cannot guarantee an update will preserve unauthorised modifications, and there is a much less legitimate one where an update that disables the device is functioning as a deterrent. Apple has been careful to describe the outcome as an unfortunate consequence. The effect on somebody holding a dead handset is identical either way.
The carrier dimension makes it worse rather than better. The reason the lock exists is the exclusivity deal, which is the same deal that bought Apple the freedom to design the phone without operator interference in the first place. Apple won an unprecedented negotiation and the price was agreeing to enforce a restriction against its own buyers. That is a genuinely uncomfortable position for a company whose entire brand rests on being on the customer’s side.
None of this is stoppable by technical means. Every lock of this kind has been broken eventually, and this one is being broken by people who are enjoying themselves and publishing their work for free. Apple can raise the cost of the workaround and cannot raise it above the value people evidently place on installing a terminal emulator.
What happens next is the only interesting question, and I think the answer is fairly obvious. You do not spend a year fighting your best customers over the right to run software unless you have decided the software does not matter, and Apple has never once behaved as though software does not matter. Watch for a development kit. If one arrives in the next six months, this whole episode was a company being dragged to a conclusion it should have reached before launch.