[pyre]

> They can, of course, jailbreak.

Why do people insist that 'jail-breaking' is some sort of valid option?

* If Apple had their way even jail-breaking would be illegal.

* Jail-breaking is dependent on security holes in the operating system (i.e. the same way that you are jail-breaking your iPhone is the same way that blackhats could take it over)

* Jail-breaking breaks on most updates.

Why do people think that it is impossible for Apple to make some sort of button that says, "Yes. I want to enter 'tinker mode' my iPhone/iPad. I realize that this will void my software (maybe hardware?) support from Apple."

[EDIT]

> Just look at the Jailbroken iPhone ecosystem for an idea of what that would look like. It's great if you're a hacker, but it would have destroyed the platform.

That's a strawman. If the system was open, would all of those Apps on the AppStore right not just vanish? People wouldn't have bothered to develop for the iPhone at all? What about the people that didn't develop neat apps for the iPhone (that are impossible under the SDK) because the 'jail-broken' community is so small and not officially sanctioned? (Or just because of all of the issues with jail-breaking I mentioned above?)

[gfodor]

My point was Jailbreaking is a final, last ditch step that young aspiring software nerds will probably have if they want to spend their time dicking around with the low level guts of the pad. My bigger point was, they won't bother. Because the capabilities of the device make it so there's not really that much joy to be had in rooting the thing or tinkering with it the way we were "brought up" in the computing world.

If I am an aspiring young hacker I would probably spend more of my time writing apps for the app store or building apps on the web for my friends' iPhones. If I really want to learn about the guts of the thing, I can jailbreak or simply learn about the guts of non-iPad computers.

[smokey_the_bear]

Jailbreaking is particularly annoying to me as an app developer. My phone was jailbroken before I started writing apps, but I've had to keep it clean in order to get the necessary OS updates, and to have the same environment as most of users. But we have a fair number of users with jailbroken phones who like to use our app with external GPS devices on iPod touches, and it's really hard to support them.

[Volscio]

Paging Lessig...we're encouraging our children to either be less curious or to willingly break copyright laws.