I am so sick of the misinformed iPhone-bashing articles and blog posts coming out because of the 1.1.1 iPhone update. There is plenty to beat them up on, but the points surrounding the iPhone 1.1.1 firmware update are starting to get out of hand (i.e. they aren’t based on the facts).
Let’s take this one, from Christopher Breen, on MacWorld.com: “Bricking the iPhone” (scroll down some for this section). It starts off pretty reasonably:
An exception to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act specifically states that you are not in violation of the law when you unlock a phone to use it with another provider. While Apple and AT&T may not like it, regardless of the EULA or TOS, I’m within my rights to unlock my iPhone. If you want to make that difficult to do, fine.
Its not against the law for apple to lock their iPhone to AT&T. What’s legal, under the DMCA, is unlocking it. This is a huge difference, and one that keeps getting missed in the scramble to denounce Apple. This is more a case of mis-interperation than anything else, and nothing I can fault Chris for directly (I’ve seen other articles twist this point in far worse ways).
Apple has an exclusive agreement with AT&T, partly because certain features require it (Visual Voicemail will only work with AT&T, since it requires software on the VoiceMail system to operate). And while they rushed the 1.1.1 update out, and it unfortunately bricked some of the iPhones on the market (both hacked and un-hacked). This doesn’t mean that they are doing anything illegal by providing an update that relocks the phone to the AT&T network, since the unlocked versions are unsupported.
And whether or not they knew it was going to brick a phone – no property is being destroyed. Almost every bricked iPhone can be unbricked – and if you didn’t hack it before it was bricked, then you can get unbricking support directly from Apple. They are not turning people away that didn’t (knowingly) void their warranties by installing 3rd party apps. But that is exactly what is being intimated by far too many “experts”, with poor arguments such as this:
…under whose code of ethics is it allowable to knowingly release an update that will assuredly destroy someone’s property? If I install a third-party ink cartridge in my Epson printer against Epson’s wishes, I do not expect an Epson representative to come over to my house and take a sledgehammer to my printer.
What?!? This is about the worse analogy I’ve ever heard, since:
A) Epson doesn’t update printer ink, and
B) bricked iPhones are not physically destroyed.
Instructions for downgrading your firmware, and reviving bricked iPhones are already starting to appear online. Instructions for re-hacking v1.1.1 will probably start to show soon too.
The article continues its little diatribe:
I’m aware that Apple feels it must do right by AT&T but to offer up an update that it knows will destroy hacked iPhones—and provide no provision for undoing the damage—is a despicable act.
These bullshit arguments have to stop being passed off as truth. I admit, I may be a bit of an apple fanboy, but I am not blind. Articles like this are laughable to anyone that’s willing to go an inch under the surface. And since none of the people that are writing this article are on Apple’s QA team, they can’t just make up ‘facts’ to support their argument. The truth is, we don’t know exactly how much ‘damage’ they knew the update was going to cause – which is evidenced more by the fact that both hacked, and unhacked phones were being bricked by the update. But of course truth is never convenient when you’re going to an old fashioned witch burning.
AT&T’s and Apple’s business practices may not be consumer friendly – and of course that sucks – but they are far from illegal. What gets me the most is that no one is mentioning this very basic fact:
The update was not solely for re-locking the phones (which was probably more of a side affect of updating files used in the unlocking process, than a deliberate attempt to break hacked phones). Saying otherwise makes you look like just another idiot on the bandwagon.
I haven’t switched my Blackberry for an iPhone yet, but I plan to in the future. Leave a comment if you have one. Let me know how your update to 1.1.1 went or if you avoided the update because you unlocked it.
This is the professional blog of Eric Marden, a veteran web developer, entrepreneur, and inspirational speaker.
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I don’t see any reason to think otherwise. I work for a software company that does extensive customization work with a commercial asset management software system, according to the needs of our customers. The tools and SDK’s are provided for us to do this work, but often what we are provided is simply not enough to do what we need, so we have to code around the system. Once we get into the core of the development cycle on a new release, we lock ourselves down to a particular patch release of the parent software and do not change, because it is not infrequent that a new patch will break parts of our code. This is not part of any intentional conspiracy by our upstream vendor (in fact, they are often astounded by our ingenuity), it is simply because they have made updates, changes, or bug fixes to a particular file that we have made functionality changes against, and changes in that file break our code. I have no doubt that is the case here. These software unlocks apparently do some pretty extensive modifications to the core software, so you can’t expect it to simply keep working after even a minor bugfix update, much less one as extensive as this one.
I have one. I haven’t unlocked it. I’ve been with BellSouth/Cingular/AT&T for six or seven years and don’t have any need to change. I haven’t modified it in any way, and honestly don’t understand the desire (and I’m a tinkerer to the nth degree). I’ve never understood the need to have games and obnoxious ringtones on a phone. Update 1.1.1 went extremely smoothly for me. Just click and forget. Took about 10 minutes to apply. A warning is displayed in large, bold letters before the update warning you not to run the update if you have unlocked or otherwise modified your iPhone software, so anyone who did install it has no excuse whatsoever. They have the right to unlock it if they want to, but Apple is under no obligation whatsoever to support them.