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There have been numerous reports of Apple going through with their thinly veiled threat of bricking modified iphones. From a purely corporate prospective it actually makes a lot of sense; given that Apple receive a cut of every AT&T subscriber’s bill. From a consumer standpoint, assuming it is not just a malicious attempt but a legitimate case of damage from the modification, it is a real case of corporate arrogance. My mind goes back to a few years back when some shareware writers included malicious routines to be executed if they detected a known pirated key being used to register the program. Lets face it, it was a bad idea then (all the user base legitimate and illegitimate lost complete faith in the product and the, albeit small, company went under.) Whilst this is a lot less serious (after all a program is not maliciously deleting your documents) and probably perfectly legally justified (under an illegal modification clause) it is still a brazen move likely to illicit some very real type of backlash. There is already a call for a class action suite against Apple, whether this gains any real traction or not remains to be seen. However, the worst affected in this is actually future buyers of iPhones. From my understanding and the reviews I have read, the pseudo-openness allowed by this modification gave the iPhone an enormous amount of added value – just like the homebrew scene on the PSP. Apple may end up having shot themselves in the foot unless they do something about these bricked iPhones and make headway in releasing some type of viable SDK.

I must say, I am glad I dont work in a store like Target & Best Buy or on the AT&T support lines at the moment.... On a different note, I finally got around to uploading a review of Half life 2 Episode 1 that I wrote a few months ago. This can be found here. I also wrote a brief review about the open source rewrite of the classic Transport Tycoon Delux.