Apple's Not 'Bricking' Hacked IPhones for Revenge

Many people seem to think Apple is deliberately "bricking" hacked iPhones with a software update as payback for users having the temerity to hack the devices.

Some observers blame the iPhone-bricking on Apple CEO Steve Jobs' perfectionism. Jobs can't stand users wrecking his perfectly crafted products with filthy, hacked software, or so the thinking goes.

Hacking the iPhone is "an assault on the integrity of (Jobs') artifact," writes pundit Nicholas Carr.

But, beautiful as it is, the iPhone isn't finished -- its OS is a hack, rushed out to meet Jobs' demanding product deadlines. Last week's update brought the iPhone closer to perfection, but it still isn't fully baked.

Citing perfectionism as one of Jobs' prime motivations goes back to 1984 and the first Mac, which shipped with no expansion slots -- a rarity in the early days of computers, and typically sold to hobbyists who actively wanted to expand their machines.

But it's a little-reported fact that Jobs and the Mac-development team nixed expansion slots to maintain the computer's stability. They wanted to sell the Mac to ordinary consumers, not bearded hackers, and expansion slots were a well-known cause of system freezes, lockups and reboots. The decision had nothing to do with preventing users from messing with the integrity of the artifact.

The same is true of the iPhone, according to Jobs. "You don't want your phone to be like a PC," Jobs told The New York Times in January. "The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn't work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers."

The iPhone bricking problem has been a PR disaster for Apple, making the company look punitive and obsessed with control. But Erica Sadun, a technical writer and blogger at TUAW.com who contributed to an iPhone unlocking application, said Apple's update wasn't designed to disable hacked devices. Just the opposite: Sadun thinks Apple worked hard not to brick iPhones -- even hacked ones.

"It wasn't intentional at all," she said. "If they wanted to brick hacked iPhones, they could have done a much better job of it."

Sadun said the software update disabled some hacked phones because it was a "troublesome update" -- it even caused problems with iPhones that hadn't been touched. "They messed up," she said.

The new iPhone software appears to be a ground-up rewrite, unrecognizable under the hood to the older version, which Sadun said was "very unfinished" and, in some places, "a complete hack."

The new iPhone software closely resembles the software on the iPod touch. But it's hard to know what it looks like in detail because it's very secure. "Everything is certified, everything is encrypted, everything requires a checksum," Sadun said. "Apple wants no one else on the platform. It's a pretty strong statement of that."

But Apple has said it is neutral about hacking. Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president of hardware product marketing, told PC Magazine that Apple wasn't hostile to hackers, but wouldn't support them either.

"Apple takes a neutral stance," wrote the magazine's Gearlog blog, paraphrasing Joswiak. "They're not going to stop anyone from writing apps, and they're not going to maliciously design software updates to break the native apps, but they're not going to care if their software updates accidentally break the native apps either. He very carefully left the door open to a further change in this policy, too, saying that Apple is always re-examining its perspective on these sorts of things."

At the launch of the iPhone in London a couple weeks ago, Jobs said Apple is playing a "cat-and-mouse game" with hackers. "People will try to break in, and it's our job to stop them breaking in," he said.

It seems possible that these comments were not aimed at hackers, but were made to comfort his new European partners, who are facing a thriving gray market for unlocked iPhones from the United States thanks to the weak dollar and easy-to-use unlocking apps.