With the recent release of the software unlock for the iPhone 3G, and comments like the one on this Slashdot article basically saying that Apple is an evil corporation and they only approve apps for the store that will further their evil corporate desires (because 17 shitty “flashlight” apps will further their market share, right?) and as a result, users are “forced” to jailbreak their phones.
I want to state clearly that I do not want to stop people from jailbreaking and unlocking their phones. You bought it, and you’ve got a right to do what you want to it. However, don’t be pissed if someone at Apple tells you to pound sand because you’re dropping a lot of calls after installing baseband firmware written by a bunch of guys freezing their asses off in Ostrov Rudolfa. Think of it like this: you are a leet iPhone hacker kid, which means you own a Honda Civic (of course) and you put “Nos” in your Honda, not knowing that “Nos” is a brand of nitrous oxide injector systems made by Holley (of carburetor fame), not a genericized trademark for nitrous systems. You’re driving down the 405 to Irvine (because that’s where all of the kids with modded Civics live) and you crack a piston trying to race a guy from Newport Beach in his Murcielago. You aren’t going to take it back to the Honda dealer and ask them to fix your engine under warranty, right?
My iPhone works pretty damn well with the factory programs and the few iPhone apps I’ve downloaded from the store. Unlike most JesusPhone owners, I don’t consider it a way of life nor do I consider it a political battleground. I consider it a tool, and people will use their tools as they see fit. I’ve got Chess with Friends, Shazam, TouchCalc, the iTunes Remote, the Weather Channel, WootWatch, and a couple others that I screw around with. Other than that, my phone serves every purpose I want, and it’s only gotten better with the launch (and later, usability) of MobileMe, the over-the-air information syncing service from Apple.
Last year, I unlocked my phone and played around with the jailbreaking apps, and it was fun for a while, but like my experience with Linux on the desktop, I wanted to actually do something productive rather than just have a novelty toy. Apple’s development of the iPhone software hasn’t been perfect, but it’s been good and it’s been better than anything I’ve experienced, long term, from a jailbroken device. Recent jailbreaks require, rather than running a website that exploits security vulnerabilities to crack it (which is sketchy anyways) that you install custom software installation images. I’m sure that the folks posting those images are not using that medium to spread malware, but what is stopping them? I’ll trust factory images to run my phone thankyouverymuch.
My iPhone does pretty much everything I want it to do, with the narrow exception of what some of my smaller candybar Sony Ericsson phones do. But all in all, it’s a nice device that I don’t feel I have to hack and customize to display my uniqueness as a human being. I have the rest of the internet to do that with.