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First you have to make the distinction between "hacked" and "unlocked". Many of us have "hacked" our iPhones to add third party applications, customize the interface, etc., but have not unlocked it to use with a non-ATT SIM card. It's the unlocking that really screws you. I've been reading all the forums on this to decide what to do about mine, and the vast majority of people who have hacked but not unlocked are able to apply the update with no problems; however it does restore your iPhone to factory state and you lose all your third party apps. The new firmware has not been cracked yet, so you can't as of yet reinstall them.

I have read isolated reports of people who have hacked/not unlocked phones being bricked and even nonhacked phones. In my reading it seems most of these folks had some sort of SIM issue prior to the update, e.g. replacing the SIM with a nonoriginal for some reason or another.

The unofficial apple weblog is reporting that despite warnings posted all over the apple store genius bar employees have been quietly swapping out bricked phones.

Except if you read the TUAW guide to re-locking that some people who tried to re-lock the phone found that it didn't work anymore. Some have gotten it to work again by re-unlocking, but eitherway the process seems to munge the IMEI.

Maybe, just maybe, and I know many people will have to take of the tinfoil hats to believe this, Apple actually has test units that they try out all these published hacks on. And maybe they discovered that if you used one of the SIM unlock methods it caused an issue that a baseband upgrade found in their new firmware upgrade will cause a problem. And maybe, just maybe, in order to avoid a flurry of bad press, they slipped this information out so that people who would be affected would have a chance to try to reverse what they have done first, or avoid the update until the hackers figure it out, so that there aren't stories all over the net this week about how Apple killed the iPhones that were hacked.

Yes, Apple has said that they don't want the iPhone SIM hacked, and they have to since they have exclusive deals with carriers. Heck since they seem to be getting a cut of service fees they probably really don't want you to do it, even though it will lead to more sales of units, especially if the fees work out to as much or more than the profit they make on the device itself. However in those same quotes of Jobs and Schiller saying that they don't want to see SIM unlocks, they also mention being interested in non-network local apps, and the possibility of doing something with them in the future.

While the jury's out on whether the bricking is intentional or not, it's clear that something in the update process is incompatible with the changes made by unlocking.

The solution is to reverse the changes before updating. There is a preliminary guide to doing this at:

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/09/24/how-to-relock-your-iphone-before-the-firmware-update/

Of course, this means that your phone is no longer unlocked.

The other option is to just not upgrade.

There are instructions on how to relock an iPhone here

It seems a bit involved

To the whiners about the price drop: I see no rational reason for you to be upset. You are early adopters and you evidently decided favorably to the value proposition of the iPhone. People who complain about a price-cut being a bad thing simply amaze me: they are pinning their own impatience, foolishness, or buyers remorse on someone else. If you feel cheated, take some personal responsibility and accept that if you did not like the price, you should not have made the purchase! When prices are lowered, it is almost always a good thing (there are exceptions for undercutting and subsidized goods, but I digress), and in this case, it is likely in response to market forces. That is how capitalism is meant to work. All of that is neglecting the fact that analyses of the manufacturing costs revealed huge margins for Apple almost immediately after the release (and reported on again, and again, and again). To the people who are complaining, you should make sure you understand caveat emptor before you plunk down over half a grand for a cell phone, especially since many—if not most—of you had all the facts available up-front. And in the interest of full disclosure, I do own an iPhone and made my purchase shortly after Apple subsidized my $200 early termination fee to Sprint. In closure, thank you for the price-cut, Steve!

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/07/27/create-iphone-ringt ones-from-itunes-previews/
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/itoner/

I don't have an iPhone for testing, etc

For early adopters: Apple Screwed You So Now What

The comments there are filled with people who think early adopters pissed off about this are whining, but seriously... COME ON NOW! I bought my 4Gb iPhone a month ago, and would not really consider myself an extreme early adopter. If the price went down $50 or went down this much six months from now, obviously I wouldn't have reason to complain at all, but $200 just 30 days after I bought it? Not cool at all. If it were less that 14 I could've returned mine today, paid a nominal restocking fee, and left the store with an 8Gb for less than I originally paid for my 4Gb. Seriously this sucks.

I know /.'s not the best venue for me to vent my anger about this, but you know. Everybody else is off-topic, why can't I be once in a while?/p.

You know.....

There's lies.....
http://lifehacker.com/software/hack-attack/install -third+party-applications-on-your-iphone-295985.ph p

And then there's lies...
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/08/07/iphone-nes-fast-usa ble-totally-rewritten/

OK, getting really tired of seeing these iBleedingPhone articles now [1]. Since the overpriced hunk o' junk came out, it's been iPhone this and iPhone that ad nauseum. It's expensive, locks you into a single provider, proprietary, expensive to maintain clunky and only superficially superior (ooooh, shiny!). In short, all the things that /.ers usually rally against. Am I missing some point, or is Apple just darling du jour?

Odd disparity of interest there, Slashdot. I'm trying to understand, I really am, but I really can't see any moral or technical advantages of owning one of these things.

[1] Yes, I can ignore them. Nobody has a gun to my head. I wonder if AdBlock Plus can filter on "shiny gimmick for tossers with more money than sense" or will I then be branded a "thief" for not reading them? It's akin to The Goog being everyone's darling even though they have more information on folks than the NSA. The world's gone mad, I tell you!

"Riotous" demand? Do you really think that's going to happen?

Yes, once you remember that it is the UK we are talking about. Riotous demand does not mean quite the same as it does in the US.

You fool! There is nothing else worth talking about in the entire industry!

You might think people are obsessed.

From the Unofficial Apple Weblog:

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/07/10/jp-morgan-retracts- now-says-no-to-near-term-nano-iphone/

One of our colleagues in Asia, Kevin Chang, published a note discussing his expectations for a low-end, "Nano" version of the iPhone. We caution that the potential for a low-end, subsidized phone from Apple seems unlikely in the near term.

Buy the iPhone using prepaid. Activate. Cancel. [tauw.com]


Buy the iPhone. Connect it to iTunes. Sign up using 999-99-9999 as your social security number. After failing the credit check, select a GoPhone plan. After signing up for a GoPhone plan and being assigned a number and passcode, connect to the AT&T GoPhone funding page as prompted, enter your credit card or debit card information and you're good to go. DO NOT attempt to fund your iPhone over the phone with AT&T. DO NOT set up your iPhone prepaid account in advance with AT&T. [tuaw.com]

Buy the iPhone using prepaid. Activate. Cancel. [tauw.com]


Buy the iPhone. Connect it to iTunes. Sign up using 999-99-9999 as your social security number. After failing the credit check, select a GoPhone plan. After signing up for a GoPhone plan and being assigned a number and passcode, connect to the AT&T GoPhone funding page as prompted, enter your credit card or debit card information and you're good to go. DO NOT attempt to fund your iPhone over the phone with AT&T. DO NOT set up your iPhone prepaid account in advance with AT&T. [tuaw.com]

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/07/01/two-possible-fixes- for-iphone-activation-problems/

After waiting for activation since Friday night, I came across this article, followed fix #2, and had an activated iphone 1/2 hour later.

Info here: http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/0,1000000193,39284700,0 0.htm

There's also lots of info (much of it from Apple itself) saying flat-out that Apple will prolly have an 8-core rig pretty soon (relatively):

http://www.macintouch.com/reviews/macpro/
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/31484/135/
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/03/12/apple-store-error-r eveals-8-core-mac-pro/

HTH a bit... (and yeah, I'd kinda like to have one too)

/P

On the OS X side of things, when OS X was updated with core image a lot of people were talking about how someone would be able to swoop in and offer a front-end to all the built in image filters that were part of core image. (you can see a list of all the filters that are part of it here. You could open up Core Image Fun House (on the OS X install disc) and play around will all the filters, and easily imagine a company making an interface for that power, offering 60% of the power of photoshop for a fraction of the cost.

Cut a long story short, someone seems to be almost ready to finally do this, Pixelmator. Cheap, neat and looks like it's easy to use. Not a real photoshop competitor, but then again most people pirate photoshop for light photo retouching and occasional messing around. This looks like it could handle what a lot of casual photoshop users want without the insane price tag.

They're working on it! http://www.tuaw.com/2007/05/29/apple-notebook-sale s-up-94-in-april/

Skim PDF reader is a free reader that allows annotations, highlighting and other markings in a PDF. Works well. http://www.tuaw.com/2007/04/02/skim-pdf-reader/

Check out apple's upcoming XAR file format (released for download at opendarwin, but the site is down). The format 1. keeps metadata about the files in a separate file, so you can know about the file without uncompressing it. and 2. compresses each file separately.

Mac market share is stable at about the 6% mark.

However, other sources indicate that Macs are selling quite well lately: http://www.tuaw.com/2007/03/05/9000-switchers-a-da y/

If Apple actually has the slightest interest in increasing market share beyond the current they have to offer what mainstream buyers want and are used to. A decent mid size tower at an affordable price.

Not long ago, you could get a PowerMac G5 with just one CPU for about $1500, so Apple seems to be convinced that the lack of an affordable mid tower won't hurt their sales.

On the other hand, offering four diffent desktop computers would make picking a Mac more confusing for "mainstream" consumers.

perhaps they are moving the company in the direction of devices and away from computer and don't care about computer market share.

I was asking myself the same question every one else is ("why use this instead of spotlight?") and while I'm not 100% convinced to move over to it, The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a good case for using it; if you're using Google homepage and Google Mail, it integrates with those (showing search results on the homepage and being able to download and search your Gmail).

It will play on 480i, you just need component video to do it.

From one of the folks accused of conspiring with Apple:

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/03/20/clarification-on-th e-macbook-wi-fi-hack-conspiracy/

"While I'm flattered at the possibility of Apple even talking to me, the truth of the matter is that the company pretty much ignores TUAW, and most other Apple-related blogs, entirely. Honestly: Fox and I never exchanged so much as a "mwahaha" over email, or any other form of correspondence for that matter. I've never been contacted by anyone from Apple regarding anything besides the fact that one of my older PowerBook's warranties was about to expire, and that AppleCare would be a great way to stay within their graces."

There is, for box.net at least.

linux:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-20 2761.html

windows:
http://techie-buzz.com/technology-buzz/mount-box.n et-account-in-windows-explorer.html

mac:
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/06/06/mount-a-box-net-acc ount-on-a-mac/

hey buddy,

you might want to check out this: http://www.tuaw.com/2006/12/14/shopping-at-itunes- japan-from-america/

You're hypothetical/philosophical point about them releasing an SDK 6 months after release is neither here nor there. It's not the existance of an SDK, it's a whole host of related complexities in the software of the phone. It's the flexibility of the system to accept additional applications, and a way to get them there, and having the security permissions to do so, and security enough to keep the phone side safe from potentially malicious 3rd parties.

Which happens today with the iPod and games, and will happen again with the iPhone being able to run apps that you buy from the ITMS online store and synch to your phone - something they have already stated they plan to do. It's no different selling Apple created apps than it is third party apps that are all distributed by the same store (already in place) onto a platform that is basically a slimmed down OS X (which can hold any number of applications) and of course run them securly just as Apple has security today around iPod games and music and video. Apple has actual, practical experience in wide scale distributon on each of the points you mentioned. In retrospect, does not the release of games for the iPod not look like a trial run for distributing applications over through the ITMS store for a larger platform?

  If they release an SDK for 3rd parties 6 months on, then the iPhone truly was secretly a smartphone from launch day. But for the moment the chance of that being the case seems slim.

Except that they have been talking about it ever since the keynote, so the word "chance" seems rather misplaced:

These are devices that need to work, and you can't do that if you load any software on them," he said. "That doesn't mean there's not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn't mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.

I mean, that's from Jobs. I don't think it can get much clearer they plan to distribute iPhone apps from the store.

I think that if Apple do eventually decide that 3rd party apps are a good idea, it'll be on a whole new generation of iPhone. They'll not deal with that complexity for the first generation. At that stage, Jobs will change his mind and tell people what a good idea smarthones are.

Indeed, he thinks they are such a good idea he's starting with them. Any attempt to lawyer your way out of the iPhone being a smartphone through convoluted defintions that specifically attempt to exclude the iPhone alone are bound to unwind and just look rather silly in about six months.

Spoken like someone who gets their news from Slashdot, zealously uses and advocates Linux, and doesn't own a Mac.

Their OS releases are not 'updates', they bring significant new functionality while evolving an already great code base. They only APPEAR to be 'incremental' because of their versioning scheme, but each release packs in more upgrade than any corresponding major version upgrade of windows.

And you have to also bear in mind that Apple's target demographic doesn't give a crap about a few bucks here and there. They're not after YOU, they're not trying to capture the low end $500 dell market, or the "build your own and run Linux" market, nor are they trying to capture the "$3000 gaming rig j00 g0t pwned" market.

They're after the upper middle demographic who has money to burn and wants quality at any price. People who aren't going to feel nickeled and dimed over 30 bucks. People who are far more interested in getting reliable quality stuff than saving a few bucks.

I would not call myself a fanboy, I just really like my Mac. (But I'm not trying to have sex with it, like this guy.) It's my "I'm home from work, not the network admin anymore today, and just not going to have a fight with my computer tonight" machine. I bought it because I wanted something less aggravating than windows, at any price. This is exactly the same reason why I sleep on a Tempurpedic and drive a BMW... quality and reliability are more important to me than paying a little more.

People like me are Apple's target demographic, and we just don't think they're being at all unreasonable about their pricing for the quality of product that they put out. Especially compared to all the other total shit hardware and software out there.

You are (not surprisingly) expecting it to make sense. Of course it doesn't. This is Roughly Drafted. This is the place where we heard that Windows has 48% market share, because it seems, puzzlingly, not to be hardware. And where we tried to prove that despite SP 1-4 being free, they really cost more than the OSX upgrades which cost $100 each.

Its a funny mixture of MacSpam and MacFud. Goodness knows why he keeps doing it. It is probably doing more to undermine the credibility and reputation of Apple and Macs than any of its supposed enemies....

http://technovia.typepad.com/technovia/personal/in dex.html

http://www.tuaw.com/2006/08/15/fuzzy-tactics-arent -helping-the-mac-community/

apple has confirmed no 3rd party apps

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/01/10/apple-vps-confirm-n o-3rd-party-iphone-apps/

Here is someone who started a petition, by filing the lack of open-ness as as bug.

I'd happily rush out to buy one to replace my Treo, except for one major problem: You won't be able to install your own software on it.

It's quite a pity too, because it looks like it'd be a lot of fun to develop for. I imagine that the restriction may be due more to Cingular than Apple itself -- hopefully there's still some way that people could manage to persuade them to change this.

According to Gizmodo and Apple VP's:

The OS isn't going to be "OS X for real." It's more like a pseudo-OS X and, like the iPod, it will not have a public API and open development.

Unlike the Pocket PC which has open API's for development by third party people (like you and me ...)

A tanatalizing hint: When you saw the mention of it running MacOS X, the slide behind Steve mentioned all the technologies surrounding it, including things like Core Video. I don't think Steve would mention Core Video if it was not there for third-party developers to use. This is a huge change from the iPod, but remember that the iPod operating system was not made by Apple. Odds are that it didn't have the power to work well as an open system.

Nope, that was Core Animation. I guess we'll have to see what that actually means in this context (same API as on a Mac but with different performance maybe?).

Anyway, it's been made clear that the iPhone Will Not Allow User Installable Applications

This statement is inaccurate.

Please read the following article:

http://www.tuaw.com/2006/11/02/apple-drops-trusted -computing/

Every intel mac ships with a "trusted" computing module

Do you have a source for this? I looked around and I couldn't find anything definitive. I did find this site:
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/11/02/apple-drops-trusted -computing/ but it cites this site: http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter10/tpm/ as the source of this information.

However, after reading the the second site, it does not say that the TCPM is not included (it states the chip included) it simply says that Apple is not currently using the TCPMs capabilities.

I think though that Apple is including and will continue to include that chip, and I am willing to bet that it will be used at a later date. We'll be told something to the effect of "iMovie download store is open! You'll need the latest Intel based hardware to access this content" under the auspices of "compatibility" when in fact, it will be becuase their encryption scheme will require the TCPM.

It's a shame that the Mozilla people didn't implement things like this the correct way; create a well-defined interface for address books, spell checking, etc, and then supply a default implementation for platforms that don't support them. Even Windows has a system address book, and yet Mozilla insists on using its own.

...if the dead musicians also signed the petition to decrease their royalties?

Actually, it was something like Who's the idiot? http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/37397 http://www.tuaw.com/2006/05/01/get-a-mac/

Mac devs getting into the fun with some Halloween themes in their latest builds.

http://www.tuaw.com/2006/10/19/screenshots-from-th e-latest-leopard-build/

It looks like the next release of Apple's Safari browser will "phone home" to Google for its anti-phishing measures.

And yet there still exists web sites whose only purpose is to promote the latest kitten screensavers like it's 1996.

It's not nearly as bad as Jakob Neilsen's site.

I'm using a 1680x1050 monitor, and I personally have no problem with Tufte's website. If you've got a huge high-resolution monitor, you're pretty foolish to be browsing with your windows maximised. With the window open to about 2/3 the width of the screen, the content fits perfectly.

The absolute *worst* UI paradigm that has plagued the computing world for the past decade is the maximize button. Ever since multitasking was supported at the OS level, we've had the marvelous ability to work on more than one thing at a time. I don't spread every page of my newspaper out across the kitchen table when I read it. Why should I do the same for my web pages?

Apple was smart to have left it out of OS X, and Microsoft should have left it out of Win95, or killed it with XP. For the first week, it's annoying to drag the corners of the windows around, until you realize how much more productive you can be by having two pieces of work side-by-side. Heck, even for single-tasking, multiple windows are great. If I'm writing a research paper on Shakespeare, I can have a copy of Hamlet open right alongside the paper for quick reference and easy quotations.

Of course, those 14" 1600x1200 laptop screens *are* a problem, because they make text and images unbearably tiny. Apple's the first (mainstream) vendor to tackle this issue head-on, and the next version of OS X should be resolution-independent, which should open the door for smaller, higher-resolution screens that won't kill our eyesight.

Perhaps you missed the time when Steve Jobs threw a camera at a stage flunkie when things refused to work. Or when Quake 3 locked up during a demo on the keynote.

There are several more in this video.

I just got my MB last week and tried Parallels this weekend. I'll definitely be buying it before the price goes up on the 15th. (From $50 to $80.)

I couldn't get W2K installed* but XP went on fine, as did RedHat 7.1. Ubuntu goes on next, followed by SmackBook.

Slower than native (AFAIK, all of Parallels runs as one thread) but still fun and very useful for what I need it for.** Each OS picks up another address on your LAN (192.168.1.105, 106, 107, etc.) and it's a lot of fun to SSH to a virtual Linux box, make a page in ~/public_html/, and view it in Safari on the same box.

XP runs fine fullscreen (1280x800) and if you have your Mac set up to right-click with the trackpad, you don't need to do anything different in Windows--a quick one-two on the trackpad and I've got a contextual menu in XP. Scrolling also works. 'Command' maps to 'Windows key' just like when you use a Mac keyboard on a regular PC, so that also behaves as expected. Overall, it's great. Definitely fast enough to be useful--it's not like I'm on a 200 MHz machine all of a sudden or anything. Feels like any reasonably peppy Windows box.

* doubly funny because that's the OS they show in the screenshots in the documentation) because no matter what I tried, I couldn't get it to see the CD--it just keeps saying "No boot device available, press Enter to continue."

** handy way to have lots of OSs with me, do testing, troubleshooting, etc. And FreeCell. There's still nothing better than Windows' FreeCell.

...or try to fix it http://www.tuaw.com/2006/06/19/exploding-shuffle/