Many iPhone "2G"/first gen. hardware contracts are more than the approximately (maybe it's exactly?) 18 months it takes for your contract to be upgrade-eligible. The issue here is more the people who bought the iPhone first gen very late in it's life cycle, or bought into the 3G at all (since it's only been available for about 11 months.)

Seems people just feel confused and betrayed by Apple, because those who purchased iPhone 3G phones (myself included) adopted early, and also were first gen. customers as well. Many of the people in my situation feel screwed that they have to pay an upgrade fee while new adopters get in on the iPhone 3G-S goodness for free while we've been loyal customers all along. That said, I realize it doesn't really work that way.

I understand how subsidies work, and I realized that the iPhone 3G was released approximately 1 year after the iPhone "2G"/first gen., but maybe if I knew the iPhone would be updated again after only a year, I might not have purchased the iPhone 3G. Nevertheless, the iPhone 3G does suit my needs completely and will continue to do so until approximately January 2010 when I can upgrade to the iPhone 3G-S, or at that point, I could also just wait and see if the iPhone 4th gen is coming down the line at the one-year mark just like this one. And if so, I'll evaluate then if it's worth the additional 5 month wait.

I'm smack in the middle of the Philly metro area, and apparently, AT&T isn't offering coverage enough to suit the features of this phone to me either. Or NYC metro. Or anywhere in America, for that matter, at least for a while. MMS and tethering have been around for years and years, but one won't be ready at launch, and the other was totally glanced over and for now appears delayed without mention of availability time-frame.

I've never seen the rules one should follow when releasing a device that might end up in millions of hands, but I'm sure they include the following:

1) Don't use an unstable hack to enable a feature that a very large percentage of potential users will be counting on.
2) Don't base a feature on a cat-and-mouse game. Especially with the likes of Apple, who are really good at that particular game.
3) Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup. Jobs was bragging about patents in the iPhone announcement keynote, for Christ sake.

All that switching from RISC/PPC to x86_xx should change is "endianness." I hear passing worries of Intel chip-level vulnerabilities, but to my (admittedly limited to hitting up Google just now) knowledge is that these never really end up in mainstream exploits. Maybe, because there are plenty of much more easily exploitable vulnerabilities already known.

Again, not a security researcher or a system arch. expert myself, but what I've heard from those researching OS X vs. Windows vulnerabilities, Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) would make it much harder to exploit vulnerabilities on the Apple end. This feature appears to be slated for the next point release ("Snow Leopard") of Mac OS X. Essentially, the exploiter must try much harder to "find" the code planted in the target box's memory, when the vulnerability was exploited, in order to execute it.

It's so that when things happen, like a worm infection for example, they don't have to have a custom anti virus solution to take care of it. They can just use off the shelf Norton AV to clean up infections. Why spend precious tax dollars on a custom system when off the shelf stuff works even better?

And to me, it makes perfect sense to connect them to the internet, so that they can receive all the virus def. updates and WIndows patches as fast as possible.

Not to start a flame war or a vocal-minority thing here, but am I alone in having virtually no issues at all with iPhone's ActiveSync capability? I've been using it for work email since day one and haven't had a single issue. What issues have you had?

Okay, both of those flaws you cite require user interaction. That doesn't constitute a "virus" or a "worm." That's a vulnerability. A vulnerability, I might add, never amounted to anything in the wild, and was patched quickly by Apple. Not an apologist, flaws are flaws are flaws. But they aren't viruses. The distinction is important.

That would be called a "flash," and it would be a "feature." :) I'd be perfectly fine with it.

I'm actually a big fan of this particular approach. I feel as though the real way to solve the malware problem as it exists today on all platforms is user education in best practices. Vista's UAC nag screen (because that's all it is) is useless. You are presented with a dialog that looks the same every time. The Leopard one you describe actually tells you "you've never run this before, it came from blahblah.com website," and most importantly, I think, "click this button right here to visit the website you got this program from and see for yourself "

I think on the whole, you end up with fewer yet more meaningful dialog messages in the Leopard user experience, usually leading to the user actually reading and heeding them.