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Sure, when Apple came out with iPhone during the summer, the gasps were audible. Every jumped on the bandwagon hailing it as yet another technological milestone for the company. Of course, there is always the fine print. Seems the only way you can get your own application on the thing is to hack it. I suppose the majority of folks are satisfied with the included iTunes, iPhoto, Safari and what not, but to me smart phones are just mini computers. Computers that I like to customize with my own stuff. There are tons of 3rd party developers out there just waiting to outfit this thing with all kind of useful programs. In fact they already have via hacks. So what happens when Apple’s firmware update comes out and wipes all these hacks away? Well, some people start to :

It’s understandable for Apple to wage a war on unlocking the iPhone, since the company shares revenue from fees with AT&T. But the truth is, if cellphone service was awesome, like it is on iTunes, there wouldn’t be a need to unlock the iPhone. Secondly, bricking these things is totally uncool, and apparently, malicious—according to some early code investigations by the independent iPhone Dev Team, Apple could have avoided this entirely.

I get that Apple might not have wanted to wage a long back-and-forth war with hackers, as the PSP developers are. And this kind of big blow is going to be a devastating and effective scare tactic, even if a fix comes a few days later. Unlike a Sony PSP, people can’t go a few days without their phones, without social or work hiccups. This is why I never unlocked my main iPhone, only testing these hacks on a spare 4GB test dummy. But I don’t want to be held hostage like this. Did I buy these phones or am I just renting them?

Perhaps there is some grey area in this whole mess?

Unfortunately, we suspect the truth isn’t quite such a juicy story for those looking to lay blame. We’ve seen just as many reports of legitimate, “factory fresh” users getting bricked iPhones as those who’ve just added apps, SIM unlocked their devices, or done both. In fact, besides a lot of hearsay and anger from the tech community, we’ve seen absolutely nothing which indicates to us that Apple is targeting users who’ve hacked their phones and is bricking them on update. In an informal and totally unscientific poll here on Engadget, the number of iPhone users who had never hacked their device but wound up bricked was very similar to the number of users who did hack and brick their device — and that’s even with polls showing far more voting users hacked their phones than not.

Without any correlation in bricking between hacked and unhacked iPhones, it’s easy to imagine the v1.1.1 update went out without proper QA testing, and is bricking a certain number of phones indiscriminately. For further detail, we asked iPhone hacker extraordinaire Erica Sadun, of our sister blog TUAW, to weigh in. She said iPhones upgrading to v1.1.1 appear to have a completely “random distribution of bricks”, implying the far simpler and likelier explanation is that the update was rushed to meet its release deadline. We know Apple promised the update would be out by September’s end, and considering how much iPhone software was changed with this update, it stands to reason that Apple worked until the 11th hour just trying to finish up and push it out the door — not testing it exhaustively for weeks before shipping to consumers.

Still, this is a dangerous trend for Apple to take with its consumer devices. They risk losing the harmonious relationship that they’ve so carefully cultivated with their users over the years by being the anti-Microsoft. There is no other smartphone on the market that doesn’t allow real 3rd party development. And short of a non-replacable battery, it’s not something you’d expect from an Apple device.

Look, we, your users, are smart, and we demand more from every company we buy from. And as a consumer electronics company, you have a responsibility to your customers to continuously provide more. You can’t put your Lego model in a kid’s hand and throw a fit out when they make something better than you did. Like it or not, 3rd party developers found a way into the iPhone, thus fulfilling the inherent expectation that the iPhone should be an extensible platform. Whether or not you choose to publicly acknowledge it, that expectation is there, period. Sure, you can try to see this one through, but from where we sit in the middle, an inordinate number of first adoptors, smartphone user that switched to the iPhone, people that comprise your core customer base are starting to see you as villainous and money grubbing.

So what is the direction here. Is Apple trending towards the Sony school of hack-nullifying firmware updates that reduce the machine to only a shell of what it could be and what the market dictates it should be? Or will they see the light and honor their consumers’ wishes before the adversarial relationship becomes too toxic? I suppose we’ll find out soon enough if/when the new Newton is announced.

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