Apple knows exactly what they are doing - commenters who think they know better are deluding themselves. Apple makes a nice profit on the phone (manufacturing cost around $200), and an even bigger profit on any contract revenue share. Apple has no difficulty to stimulate demand whenever needed. People love iPhones. Apple's actions are driven by a multi year game plan for taking iPod into a market dominated by carriers, Nokia, and even Microsoft.

I would expect Apple to incorporate vulnerabilities, and to hope they are all found by hackers. That's what will give them confidence that a lock down update can hold for the required year or so.

Geohot's original hack required temporary hardware modding to the iPhone; it wasn't the one that opened the floodgates. The "anysim" unlock did that, but also erased phone-specific data in the baseband section. That's what bricked the iPhones, not Apple's update. The anysim authors acknowledged this and eventually produced a "revirginizer" app to repair the bricked iPhones.