“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,” Leander Kahney reports for Wired.
“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,” Kahney reports.
“‘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,” Kahney reports. “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.'”
Kahney reports, “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.'”
More details in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Another Irish Dude” for the heads up.]
For a “hack,” the iPhone sure worked well-enough at the outset, but – we must say – the current iPhone software does work even better with more stable apps and a snappier UI.
