Microsoft does it with less than genuine copies of Windows, and now Apple is going to do the same with hacked iPhones.
It's quite alright for a company or service provider to protect their product, but to try and maintain a strangle hold over their own monopoly is a little excessive.
A statement from give by Apple this afternoon hints that their next iPhone software update could render all hacked iPhones useless. To put it bluntly; your $400 buck iPhone becomes a paper weight if it was hacked to run on any network other than AT&T.
As most will have heard, early adopter of the iPhone became quite interested in unlocking the iPhone so they could use their own service provider and no be locked into the AT&T network woes. Many people of course suspected that Apple would issue some software update to prevent this unlocking, but disabling the phone completely seems a little excessive.
"Apple has discovered that many of the unauthorized iPhone unlocking programs available on the Internet cause irreparable damage to the iPhone's software, which will likely result in the modified iPhone becoming permanently inoperable when a future Apple-supplied iPhone software update is installed," Apple had said in a statement. "Apple strongly discourages users from installing unauthorized unlocking programs on their iPhones. Users who make unauthorized modifications to the software on their iPhone violate their iPhone software license agreement and void their warranty. The permanent inability to use an iPhone due to installing unlocking software is not covered under the iPhone's warranty."
There is of course ways to restore the iPhone to its 'Factory Default Settings' should Apple's supposed update cause any damage, then allowing the iPhone to be flashed to the latest software version. This latest version of the the iPhone OS allows users to access the iPhone Wi-Fi Music Store which was launched earlier this month. Look for (or avoid) this update which is scheduled for sometime later this week.
But of course, it is quite certain that hackers will find some way around this implied software nightmare. And Apple will likely respond by disabling hacked iPhones with every subsequent software update for the next couple of years, or at least until their partnership will AT&T is over.
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If Ford says their cars wun best on Shell gasoline would it be fair of them to put something in their cars to kill the engine if it detected something other than Shell gasoline?
In my view this is a violation of fair use if Apple intentionally cripples hacked iPhones that don't run on the AT&T network.
But of course, they have a bazillion lawyers to hammer out ultra-fine print EULA's that give them more power than any deity or omnipitent being out here.
I shall also point out that when one buys a PCS phone, they realize that the only provider with whom they can use it is Sprint. It doesn't mean that someone might try to modify the phone to work on CDMA or TDMA instead of PCS but it does mean that the phone is no longer supported by the manufacturer in that configuration nor will it be expected to continue to work in an alternate configuration if the software is updated to a new version provided by the manufacturer.