Greensn0w

Isn't Chronic Dev's Greensn0w going to get around this as well?

I'm just happy that my touch 2g is still easily jail-breakable.

WTF

Just who the fuck do Apple think they are ? It's hard to imagine that going to war with your customers in an attempt to force them to spend more money at your store will ever really work in the long run.

Simple

don't buy the crap.

"users who jailbreak the company's handsets"

Whose handsets?

"User who jailbreak their apple handsets"

It seems to me that Apple really hate their customers and don't use the fact they've already got the money as a reason to leave them alone.

It seems that it's not enough for a customer just to buy Apple - they've got to be made to suffer as well.

It's a weird corporate strategy but it seems to be paying off!

But Apple seems to have won the battle = FAIL!

Your almost saying "give up and go home", buts its just a case of deja vu, each upgrade Apple "patch" the exploits, then a couple of weeks later a hack is released...

i dont want to be restricted...

So i never bothered to get an iPhone...

Hmm..

There will always be another exploit. The only question is whether dev team et al take 10 minutes or 10 years to find it

Which is exactly why...

... I went with Windows Mobile.

DRM is for suckers.

Why....

I may be a little out of the loop on this debate but why exactly is there any reason to buy an iPhone (any version incl the GS) if after I've put forward my hard earned cash to obtain the device am I not allowed to run any application I want on the device?

For all intent and purpose the device is mine, I own it. It's not rented or leased from Apple, I don't give it back after the contract with my mobile provider ends much like any other handset. Granted the OS is licenced (as is Windows Mobile in the same way or any other mobile OS for that matter) but then why should that limit me to what I can or can't do with the device as long as I don't touch the OS???

This brings ideas of anti-competition links to the EU case of Microsoft not giving users a choice of browser when installing Windows, surely this stinks of the same thing. Apple are preventing me from choosing what applications I can use and where I source them from.

Please inform me if I've got the complete wrong end of the numpty stick here (smacking it over my head to instill knowledge is optional!).

Pwnage

You mentioned blackra1n, but pwnage tool has been updated also to work with 3.1.2 firmwares on Mac and Win, so looks like the current h/w batch is a free as ever for the time being.

No iTouch 8GB 3G MC (untethered) but Mac = Whoo!

Slight fail on this article, the MC 8GB 3Gen iPod Touch cannot be jailbroken on the Windows version and there is now a Mac version that CAN JB the aforementioned but if you need to turn it off and back on you will need to reapply the Blackra1n patch - hopefully the upcoming GreenPois0n software will resolve this issue! just my 2c

Why?

I mean, they have to spend engineering time and effort and all they achieve is to piss off a section of their userbase.

Whose phone is it anyway

Just another example of why I'll never own a device who's manufacturer doesn't allow me to do what I want with it (yes, that means you Mr Jobs).

If punters pay good money for a phone/PC/gadget, what right has the manufacturer to dictate what said punter does with it, providing they acknowledge that warranties, support entitlement, etc, will be null and void?

This also relates back to a story last week regarding software 'licences', and points out the need for a fundamental change in the way that software vendors sell software - it needs to be treated as goods, not a licence, and confer the appropriate consumer rights.

I don't get it...

... why are they spending resources combating this, when they should be spending resources fixing the small niggly bugs people are finding. I remembered a new one this morning... if you download some new email via Mail - sometimes, if you click on the first email, it loads the first from the last sync, then clicking back the new mail has gone... hit refresh, and the email you originally clicked on redownloads - and opens fine. Very bizarre bug... reported it to Apple a while ago (as I have done with all the bugs I've had)... no response... obviously far too busy blocking jailbreakers... great.

I was going to trade the phone in this weekend, but the wife has banned me from selling the phone until my contract is cleared... so I'm stuck with it AND whipped. :'(

I re-jail broke my 1st gen iPod Touch at the weekend

I was thoroughly unimpressed with the apps on offer, it seems there's fewer apps now than when I first jail broke it a year or so ago. I tried the version of Doom on there and it was unplayable.

Many of the apps I wanted were no longer free and were pricier than you would expect to find on the real app store. All the emulators I tried would crash as soon as I ran them too. Not sure what I did wrong but the extra hassle really wasn't worth it in my book.

I probably sound like some Apple fanboy defending Jobs' App Store income, so let me just finish by saying I wouldn't buy a Mac desktop or laptop even if you paid me.

Android...

..just look how many android phones have been anounced or released this week. Apple have no chance to keep up on a technology level now the Google juggernaut is behind them.

The manufacturers may not 100% match the 'style' factor of Apple products but they are generally non-proprietry and have a much lower cost.

iPhone ... your days are numbered.

@ All the "why?" posts,,,

Why they do it in a nutshell: Control of the app revenue stream.

They don't want a homebrew community growing and providing free, open sourced etc applications for the platform because then they can't charge for them or cream off a % on sales through the Apple App Store. It costs less to have an extra developer or to to combat the jailbreaks than it would if a lot of the app sales were lost because there were free alternatives posted around online.

Morally right to control what you do with your phone after purchase? No.

Make business sense to control the platform so tightly? Yes.

Legal? Debatable...

Good idea

I think what some people here don't realise is that if Apple keeps making it tricky to jail break iPhones it'll keep us developers happy. If the developers are happy then we'll keep writing apps for the AppStore. If there are tens of thousands of apps on the AppStore then customers will be happy.

If Apple made it trivial to jail break a phone why would a developer bother writing an app? Why do you think the AppStore is such a success?

@AC

"iPhone....your days are numbered" How many times did I hear this about the iPod? Hundreds of times, new MP3 players came out, had more features but ultimately faded in to obscurity.

The reality is, and its missed by most on here, most people don't care that they can't do whatever they want with their device. They're not interested in jailbreaking, they're not interested in running unsigned apps etc.

When people buy a car, most don't want to remap the engine, they don't want to switch off the driver aids, it's the same with technology, they don't care.

Of course, techies find this concept hard to understand.

From an iNoob

Just got a 32GB iPhone 3GS from Italy.

Was in the mobile industry for 7 years, as a stack and UI test engineer.

No wonder they're petrified: this thing is simple and it holds together beautifully. It seriously kicks the living shit out of any handset I've tried. It's compelling, slick, solid, seamless... I'm not surprised it engenders such wildly exaggerated emotions from people.

And the reason it holds together is, in part, because the API is restricted and you can buy apps from the store and nowhere else. This is the level of quality control which needs to be present for these very VERY complex devices to not fall apart under the weight of endless hacked up pieces of cack (like Windoze inevitably does) and to give that pleasing uniformity of interface and style.

If anyone is so pissed off with Apple for doing this, they should just ignore Apple products. I bought one because I'm tired of badly-implemented, slow and buggy smartphones, and right now it feels like I made the right choice to "dumb down".

As for the guys creatnig the jailbreaks - good on yer lads, a technical challenge is always worth havnig a go at. Anyone willing to break their iPhone out - good on them too, if you want to experiment and open your handset up to the risk of (non-apple) malware then it's your look out - enjoy the range of apps doing stuff we just don't get in the apple apps store.

But fer gawd's sake, get a life if you think this means apple are satan incarnate... I've worked with mobile software for years and I can see apple's model should mean that the bloody phones still work in a few years. Touch wood.

lol

Apple fanbois defending this sick company is just laughable. Their pathetic attempt to lock down hardware is just disgusting I can't imagine why anyone, even die hard Macbois, would want to buy something like the IPhone. Silly people.

Thanks, but clever people will stick with S60 or WinMob where the platform holders do not go through such draconian matters to limit the platform.

Eh?

@Sean O'Connor 1 - If Apple made it trivial to jail break a phone why would a developer bother writing an app?"

What are you even talking about?

Why would easily opened phones stop developers writing apps?

We're not talking about piracy here, we're talking about the ability to run software written by people other than apple-approved apps.

At the moment it's a lottery for developers whether they'll even get into the app store. Having alternative stores or letting people buy direct would be a big boost to some vendors.

Adobe would love it - they could actually put flash on the system!

"Why do you think the AppStore is such a success?"

Because apple users lack imagination or the ability to decide for themselves what to do with their shiny gadgets.

iPhone Kills Freetard's Arguements!

Sean O'Connor was the first to mention it, and I agree completely: keeping the iPhone locked keeps developers happy, and happy developers = many apps = happy customers.

Developers find real value in a mini-payment level of app pricing that gives them a revenue stream but still enables most iPhone users to have dozens or hundreds of apps installed on their phones. Of the Top 25 paid apps on the App Store, the highest price currently is £5.99 for FIFA 10, the mean is £1.69, and the modal average is £0.59...hardly break the bank terrirory. And there are hundreds of free or ad funded apps as well. Sure, there are expensive apps (TomTom UK at £59.99, CoPilot Live UK clocking in at £25.99), but the top Grossing app is Jamie Oliver's £4.99 recipie book, and the fourth highest is a £1.19 barcode scanning app. In short, there are many models to making money on the Apple App Store - and we don't even have the numbers published for ad supported apps.

So LOCKED iPHONE = BIG, BENEFICIAL APP STORE for customers. And earned profits for developers. The only people that don't like that are freetards, who hate to pay for apps even when the modal average price of a good app is £0.59 each, and the average is £1.79...which kills the arguement "I would buy it if it were more affordable or worth what it costs" now, don't it?

The success of the iPhone App Store really is the experiment that shows the success of DRM and mini/micro-payments for content. And all the CONTINUING work on jailbreaking shows that the freetards will never stop trying to get something for nothing, even when content is nearly free, and no artists have had their rights abridged or been taken advantage of by their publishers...some people will always demand ownership of what is not theirs to take...

just for noobs and the dim-witted

Apple's great, as long as you don't have any ideas of your own, what features you want in a phone or a computer, and how you would want ot use them. Choose Apple, and there is only one way to do things-- the Apple way. I've been around too long for that, and when I want to do something, I usually already know how I want it done-- with Apple, I might as well bang my head against a wall. In my book, computers MUST follow MY workflow and adapt to ME, not the other way around. Consequently, Apple has "bricked" all Apple hardware as far as I am concerned.

The rest of you can say "ooh, look-- shiny," all you want, I'm just not impressed with your pretty toys.

Anyone who jailbreaks is a moron anyhow.

Paying a premium for something that isn't what you want then potentially invalidating your warranty to make it more like what you want makes you an imbecile. You are paying for the exact technology you are trying to circumvent.

Capitalism 101: vote with your money.

@David Hicks

Uhhm, people don't write apps for non-locked app stores because people STEAL them rather than pay for them, same as PC apps, except the user base of mobile applications is so much smaller that those lost sales really hurt profitability for small publishers. It's simple maths - just because you are writing for a user base that is a small fraction of the overall PC user base it does not mean your mortgage and car payments are only a fraction.

And ADOBE putting Flash on it? Adobe can't even get around to releasing a 64-bit Windows version of Flash (which MANY of us want so we can use 64-bit browsers on our 64-bit OSes!), and that's free and clear for them to do, and is a relatively easy port. To think that Apple is the only thing stopping them from releasing Flash for iPhone doesn't exactly ring true...

@ Sean O'Connor 1 & Robert Hill

I suspect you boys speak from a position of ignorance...

Just like the official App Store, not everything available via unofficial stores is free - some of it has to be paid for. This is not a bunch of 'freetards' trying to scam the Man: The argument is "Why should I be restricted to just the Apple App Store?". If I want an app badly enough I'll pay for it alright, but competition is nearly always a good thing as it ensures that prices remain fair and balanced. Also we are not then at the whim of what Apple deems to be fit for our consumption. If I should wish to download a paid-for, legitimate app which serves up a daily dose of quality hard core bongo, then why should I not be able to do so? Just because someone at Apple thinks it's not appropriate?

If the AppStore put prices up 100% tomorrow there'd be much wailing and gnashing of teeth but eventually it would make no odds, people would still pay because there is no other officially allowed alternative. But would that be a good thing? No it wouldn't, it would be a pretty questionable bit of business practice.

Someone else drew the parallel of the EU case against Microsloth for it's IE shenanigans and I can't help but agree this seems like a very similar case. And no, I am not a fanboi. I resistsed the iPhone for a long time because of my distaste for all things Apple generally, but relented eventually and yes, it is jailbroken and yes, I am happy with it. However, I would never buy any other Apple product and in fact I earn my living developing software on the MS platforms, so I can't be a fanboi :)

@Robert Hill

Erm, what's your definition of "freetard"? If I develop a piece of software for my iPhone (assuming I bought one, of course), jailbreak it and install it, *who* am I freeloading from? Is this self-piracy? No it isn't. It's RETARDED to call this "piracy" or "freetardery". In fact, the AppStore came into existance because of these jailbreakers, as you will remember that Apple originally said "nope, no apps on the iPhone!"

What's the difference between the AppStore and, say, Handango? Well, I can buy software for my Blackberry at Handango, or somewhere else ... or hell, download some open-source software for it. Or even roll out my own software for the thing! The only "restriction" RIM has on this software is when the app uses certain libraries; and even then, you only need to pay a one-time fee to get your "sensitive" code checked and signed by RIM. This restriction is for security purposes, so that you don't release a Blackberry virus. This is understandable.

Those who downplay the effect of jailbreaking and the AppStore lock-in haven't factored in that many iPhone users are either Apple Fans, fashion users who buy the phone just to show it off, or casual users that don't care much about apps. Those who do care, and especially those who have used other smartphones are being irked by the restrictions in place.

By the way, I own a Blackberry, and I've only seen THREE guys with an iPhone. The rest carry either regular phones, WinMo phones, or Blackberries.

Quality control?

"And the reason it holds together is, in part, because the API is restricted and you can buy apps from the store and nowhere else. This is the level of quality control which needs to be present for these very VERY complex devices to not fall apart under the weight of endless hacked up pieces of cack (like Windoze inevitably does) and to give that pleasing uniformity of interface and style."

LOL, that is the stupidest thing I have ever read. Quality control? You must be joking. The level of junk on the App Store is just horrendous. As for quality of of software, that is silly. The games are no where near as good as the DS and PSP, and the applications no where near as good as those available even on the old Palm OS platform, WinMob and S60. The only thing going for them is they look shiny and the icons pretty.

Give me a break.

Apple fanboys are hypocrites

I can't believe that people are actually wanting a locked device that does not allow you to do whatever you want with it. After all you paid hundreds of pounds for it. Mac OSX isn't locked and I don't see you complainig about it. You can't even change the battery for goodness sake, instead needing to travel to one of their store or send it off for a couple of days to have it replaced. Inconvenience much? Stepping into the Apple world is stepping backwards, you get locked hardware (iPhone, iPod, Macbooks), locked software (iTunes) and yet some of you willingly champion this disgusing behaviour.

Bleeding hypocrites, the lot of you.

They don't want my money...

Fine. I keep looking at the Touch 16 or 32GB to replace my aging first gen nano. The Touch is great for me and does everything I want in a nice way. But since jailbreaking is such a sore afair, I can't risk losing the money. You see, I run Linux, and that's where all my 20 GB of music is. I don't have, nor want, a computer running the latest Windows (shudder) or (shudder even more) OSX just to run iTunes. Now go and look how full of uncertainties the process of managing a Touch in Linux is... I don't want to risk some $300 to then have a luxury paper-weight. I don't care (yet) about installing non-Apple-store apps in the thing. I just want to be able to use it. If they let the hackers in peace, like it was more the case with the older iPods, then I'd gladly use a Touch -- as I have used the nano perfectly since it was first released.

Anyway, you guys contradict yourselves in the Apple-defense, methinks. Apple revenue from the store must be low, because apps are cheap, therefore Apple only wants to keep the experience intact (for the sake of devs and users)? Only a tiny proportion of user jailbreak their devices? These two sort of kill each other. If only a tiny amount of users jailbreak (is it true?), and these tend to be more technical people who won't get confused by changes in the "experience" anyway (is it true?), then why would they care? If 99% still have the original experience, what's the problem? The tiny minority shouldn't interfere with anything. Or is the jailbroken experience so much better than the Apple-locked one that they are afraid the other people will see, and the 1% will become 10%, then 20%, 50%, etc.?

Erm…

Isn't it normally a good thing when a company patches a security flaw. I mean, aren't most of you mouth-foamers the very same individuals that mock/berate Apple for their lack of security? Make up you mind kids! Which is it?

Shoot self in foot.

When the iPhone first appeared and was locked down tight I thought that's typical Apple. You pay, but never own.

Then the jailbreaks appeared, and continued to work, so I thought maybe Apple had learnt something, and had implemented the lock to control features that keep the networks happy (like Nokia did with things like VOIP via wifi on the N95), but left the backdoor slightly ajar so they don't really alienate techie customers who can easily free things up (on Nokia you change the model code to that of a generic Nokia instead of a carrier supplied one, also useful for getting generic firmware which your network hasn't bothered to authorise/release).

Unfortunately Apple have proved they were just inept, and not actually being rather smart. All your iPhone does not belong to us. It belong to them. Just be grateful they let you use it at all.

History Repeating Itself

Apple have a history of shooting themselves in the foot.

Come up with a good product, and then alienate the users. There’s only so much loyalty available for a company which falls over itself to exclude users from the process. In the case of the iPhone, there are many shortcomings, and Apple have locked users from fixes to them.

I love my iPhone, but my next phone will be a phone which I can call my own and doesn’t bar me from adapting it to the way I prefer to do things. Whether it is an iPhone, or something based on Android is entirely up to Apple. If they want to chase away their customers, well, we’ve seen it happen before.

Once they do this... Im switching to linux

Once they do this, I will be switching to Linux, and Nokia Mobiles mark my words. And I will either take up Acting, Or follow my music abilities, and ditch programming, IT, an the likes, as much as I enjoyed it. It can happen!!

@WTF

"Just who the fuck do Apple think they are ?"

Why they are the new Microsoft, ofcourse?

(Reg: I think it is time for Steve Jobs halo + horns icons?)